Safe Talk is a new service in the UK that allows you to generate a temporary phone number to use for 7 days to give to people you don't trust/know.

It's simple – text CALL to 80876 and get a temporary number that diverts to your mobile phone for 7 days, and keep your own number safe – until you know if they're nuts or not!

Each number costs £1.50, and you can choose to either extend your usage of the number after seven days or cancel it.

Safe Talk [ Via: Gizmodo ]

Valve are selling head crab toys for $24.95. The perfect gift for your toddler.

I’d get one, but the shipping to England would probably cost twice as much.

Buy from Valve

I found a 30 second trailer for the Simpsons Movie, due out in Summer 2007. I can't imagine it would be anything other than great, but I'm sort of wondering what they're going to fill a 90 minute film with.

Download Video

The Mozilla foundation have closed the Firefox Flicks competition because some of the entries were apparently being spread in a ‘viral’ manner. The site was a place where anyone could create and upload a firefox commercial. The best one was supposed to be chosen by Mozilla to run on TV.

Video: Wheee!

Firefox Flicks

Google have released a web-based calendar similar to 30boxes. It allows users to build a calendar and make events visible to certain people. You can also import your events from Outlook or other sites which use open calendar formats. Like everything else at Google, it’s a beta, but it looks promising. I’m struggling to find motiviation to carry on with iZeit.

Google Calendar

A UK version of the Body Worlds exhibit is to open in the UK. The show proved popular in the US, claiming to show the general public what is normally reserved for doctors and medical professionals. Bodies are preserved using acetone to replace body fluids.

The sources of the bodies have been questioned in the past, and two had to be sent back because bullet holes were found in the back of their head. They were thought to be chinese prisoners who hadn't given their consent. Under chinese law however, it's perfectly legal to use the bodies of executed prisoners for medical research.

Bodyworlds

The instructions are pretty simple. All you do is add potting soil to the green sewer-pipe-shaped flower pot, and push the spores deep into it. Soak the soil with water using the dropper, add a squirt of the food solution, and then it's off to a dark location for a few weeks. Break out our NES to relive some classic Mario memories, then three weeks later, check on it and hopefull find your very own 1up mushroom.

I've ordered mine, I'll post pics when it comes.

Get yours now! [ThinkGeek]

Making a mythical creature real is not easy. But GeneDupe’s team of biologists and computer scientists reckon they are equal to the task. Their secret is a new field, which they call “virtual cell biology”

Armed with their virtual cell, GeneDupe’s scientists can customise the result so that it belongs to a particular species, by loading it with a virtual copy of that animal’s genome. Then, if the cell is also loaded with the right virtual molecules, it will behave like a fertilised egg, and start dividing and developing first into an embryo, and ultimately into an adult.

Because this “growth” is going on in a computer, it happens fast. Passing from egg to adult in one of GeneDupe’s enormous Mythmaker computers takes less than a minute. And it is here that Charles Darwin gets a look in. With such a short generation time, GeneDupe’s scientists can add a little evolution to their products.

Source [The Economist]

Now that Dell have aquired Alienware, they seem to be selling ridiculously over-specced and over-priced PCs. The XPS Renegade has four 512Mb GeForce 7900 graphics cards in SLi, two 10,000 WD Raptors in RAID 0 aswell as a 400GB drive. It also has a 4.26Ghz overclocked CPU. Pretty amazing, but for the price of $9930 USD, it should be.

Dell XPS Renegade

28th March 2006

According to The Inquirer, Dell has sold all of these. They probably didn’t make that many, but it’s suprising they sold any at $9930.

XGL is an X server which uses OpenGL for it's drawing operations, allowing you to create some pretty swish desktops. By the time Longhorn's finally released, most of the technology it offers will probably have been around under linux for a while, but I'd still like to see a DirectX version running on windows.

XGL wiki
Source [WhaleSalad]