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iPod Nano - the new furry dice?

Gadgets galore

Tech Digest Tech Digest for the Register

Certified gadget obsessives Tech Digest and Shiny Shiny scour Gizmoville for the oddest digital goodies, Bayraider keeps tabs on the best and worst of eBay and Propellerhead answers your PC queries.

iPod car clip

Move over fuzzy dice; not content to have the music player market - the iPod now wants to dominate the windshield. The CarClip is a clear, acrylic iPod holder designed to dangle your iPod Mini or Nano from your rearview mirror - presumably making it easier for you to choose your music while you're meant to be driving. iPod video, colour, gen three and four owners don't despair - your holders are in the design stage; soon enough everyone can have their iPods at driver's eye-level, and music on their mind instead of their eyes on the road. Info here.

Entire life on eBay

Selling all your possessions on eBay isn't new. A bloke called John D Freyer did it a couple of years ago so that he could get a book out of it. Now a Construction Management student calling himself 'e-viis' is doing the same, but for much less punchable reasons - he wants to raise some tuition fees.

All e-viis' worldly goods are up for sale, including a PC with 19in CRT monitor, router and printer, Creative Zen 20GB MP3 player, Pioneer VSX-D814 multi-channel receiver, Goodmans TVC201T 21" TV and video, "three expensive watches", a Specialized RockHopper mountain bike and lots more fantastically expensive things, possibly including his Vauxhall Nova if the price is right. (Blimey mate, are you sure Mummy and Daddy can't swing some tuition fees after all that?) Modestly he opened the bids at 99p, but it quickly went up to £500 and there are still a few days left. Auction is here.

GPS with MP3

Evesham Bluemedia has come up with a simple, but blindingly obvious addition to the humble in-car navigation system - MP3 support. It takes SD memory cards so you can listen to your favourite tunes, or not quite as advisable this, review your latest JPEG images, while ahem, driving. The BM6380 has all the goods you would expect from a decent GPS system. It comes with the latest selection of navteq 2D and 3D maps which are displayed on a 320 x 240 touchscreen. There's also address/postcode programming and alerts for six types of speed camera designed to keep you 'safe' when you're booting it like a Premiership footy player across the countryside. Oh, and there's also a pedestrian mode to make it more useful sans car. The Evesham Bluemedia BM6380 will be available from November for £300 and you can chose to up date its memory every few weeks to keep you ahead of those speed cameras and road changes for an extra annual £30 subscription.

PC tip of the day from Propellerhead - create your own icons in Windows

Are you tired of all those boring little icons on your desktop? Then do something about it! You can easily create your own custom icons in Windows using ordinary picture files or graphics created using the Paint program. You could have the pictures of the family or pets representing your programs (no jokes about using a photo of the mother in law to represent the word processor please...) or design your own from scratch. The image can be any size - Windows will automatically adjust the size and shape - but it must be in the Bitmap (extension .bmp) format. Most paint and graphics program have a 'Save As' facility that will convert picture files from other file types into .bmp format. Once that's done open Windows Explorer, find the picture file and click once into the name field to highlight it, then wait a second and click again to insert a cursor so it can be renamed. Change the file extension from .bmp to .ico, and hit return. Now go to the Desktop and right-click on the icon you want to change and select Properties. On the Shortcut tab you should see a 'Change Icon' button, (you can't normally change the icon on Windows applications) click it and use the Browse button to find your icon picture file, press OK and it's done.

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