National Trust builds Mass Observation blog

As if blogging isn't already popular enough, heritage organisations including the National Trust and English Heritage are corralling anyone able to type to record a diary of their activities today, and upload it to the History Matters blog. The bodies have even commandeered celebs to motivate people to submit even the most mundane details in an attempt to create the 'the biggest blog ever'. Celebrity bloggers include everyone from professional writers such as Sebastian Faulks and Bill Bryson, to Bob Geldof. ...more

VIA unveils First IGP Chipset for AMD Athlon 64

Chip developer, VIA Technologies has released the VIA K8M800 chipset, which claims to be the world's first silicon to include an Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP) for the AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron processors. The company has included the new S3 Graphics UniChrome Pro to support high definition graphics and video with the aim of enabling a new generation of high performance gaming machines and workstations. The VIA K8M800 is based on the earlier K8T800 chipset. ...more

UPDATED: AMD to drop ATi brand

UPDATED: See AMD stays hand over ATi brand axe AMD has announced that it's going to drop the ATi brand name following its takeover of the Canadian graphics underdog. Gareth Cater from AMD told our sister publication Custom PC that 'the new company will be called AMD,' meaning that we could shortly be seeing AMD-branded Radeon graphics chips. We asked Richard Baker from AMD if this meant that the memorable Radeon name would also be biting the dust, but he replied that 'we haven't made any final decisions yet, but I'd personally be very surprised if we dropped any of those product names. ...more

Researchers make signing mobiles

Researchers are customising mobile phones to make them suitable for deaf people to chat using sign language. This is the goal of MobileASL, a video compression project at the University of Washington. By the use of video compression techniques, it has proved possible to send live pictures of users signing across relatively low-bandwidth mobile networks, reports the BBC. ...more

Norway points the way to TV on your phone

Norwegian TV is so good that people even want to watch it on their mobiles. Either that or our Nordic cousins are very tolerant of watching small-scale vide on their smartphones. These are the conclusions you may draw from the BBC report that Norwegian public broadcaster NRK is trialling the transmission of TV to mobiles. ...more