"The game Star Wars fans have been waiting for has finally being announced for the Wii. Making full use of the Wiimote technology, 'Lightsaber Duels' will feature destructible environments with Clone Wars-era characters and plenty of laser swords. Though the Clone Wars were more filled with lightsabers than other times in Star Wars history, setting the scene in that era also sadly means no Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker."

Hahaha... this sounds awesome. Can't wait for the youtube videos.

"After a year in the making, the ABC tonight unveiled iView in Sydney. The internet site has six channels which allow people to watch a variety of ABC TV programs on demand. Among the channels are a children's channel, documentary, ABC shop, a news channel, arts and Catch-up where people can view popular shows from the last few weeks. The children's channel includes unique content not available on TV."

This is cool - could make PVRs useless if more other channels do it too (and if our internet quotas are fairer). Sucks that you can only download shows within a certain period though... and the fact that the shows on ABC that are worth watching are already available for download anyway :)

"Team SOAK (Smart Operational Agriculture Kit) from Australia have been announced as the winners of the 2008 Imagine Cup!!! This is simply an amazing achievement, SOAK members Long Zheng, David Burela, Ed Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya have all come together from different Universities across Australia to create and complete their fantastic project, SOAK ."

Awesome work guys!

"A group of Australian University students, including one of Australia’s most well-known technology bloggers, has progressed to the finals of the Microsoft-sponsored Imagine Cup software development competition in Paris. Students David Burela, Long Zheng, Edward Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya, collectively called Team SOAK, showcased a solution that helps farmers moderate the use of water on their crops."

Pretty cool... all the best guys!

"They are systematic symptoms of a deeper wrong which most people don't recognise: proprietary software. Microsoft's software is distributed under licenses that keep users divided and helpless. The users are divided because they are forbidden to share copies with anyone else. The users are helpless because they don't have the source code that programmers can read and change."

Surprisingly reasonable, but there still isn't an particularly viable alternative business model. Support puts the focus in the wrong place, as do services often. Why is software different anyway; do we expect Coke to provide their recipe publically? Maybe our economic system is the issue...

"It’s obvious that Australia’s Digital Education Revolution(s) has massive potential for changing the face of education as we’ve known it for the past 50 or so years. But it also has the potential to be the biggest, most-expensive flop ever undertaken by any education system in the world... The real problems are not technical problems at all - they are all social problems."

Our education system needs a serious revamp, and a technical wizardry just isn't going to be enough. The facilities, teachers, methodology, syllabus... everything.

P.S. anyone find it funny Rudd's holding up a laptop from last century?

"Tomorrow Telstra will start pushing out a software update to half a million customers that will allow users to point their phones at a barcode and be directed to a relevant Web page... Barcodes could allow users to automatically transfer information from business cards to their address books..."

Its taken a while, but this will only be successful if the service that resolves the barcode into content is common between the providers. Having a Telstra barcode, an Optus barcode etc. would seriously hamper the adoption.

"On Thursday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted to allow — in addition to more traditional top-level domains (TLDs), such as .com and .org — theoretically any TLD at all, as long as it is no longer than 64 characters long... "This has the potential for utter chaos," said John Mackenzie, of the law firm Pinsent Masons, on Friday... "All of a sudden, every brand will be forced to register their name at .shop, .buy and .london to stop anyone else getting it.""

Hmm... this could get messy. It effectively removes the guessability of domain names as well, on top of increased forgery attempts. We need new TLDs, but this may be going too far...

"Dash Express users are about to receive a software update and it’s a doozy... one of the key features included in this update is called MyRoute. Dash recognizes that users often know shortcuts that may not be recommended by the GPS unit. As such, the Dash Express can now record your route to your destination and save it as an available routing option along with the recommended Dash route and a third detour-route option."

Pretty neat. Be even better if you could somehow submit it and help enhance the routing engine. Nevertheless, it'll be years before we get something like this anyway :(