Only- Electronics

On this week’s podcast, our four part series on the US military’s efforts to build a better soldier. Also, Yahoo is taken to court in the United States for turning over information about bloggers in China. And we’ll hear about AbiWord, an open source project to develop software in one of Bolivia’s indigenous languages.

Laptop design has advanced a great deal over the past decade, but a few things still generally hold true: Batteries won’t last through a cross-country flight, and affordable laptops weigh too much.

MP3 files recorded directly with a voice recorder often require some editing. Many MP3s downloaded from the Internet need editing to trim unwanted sections. Both of these scenarios result in better quality audio when the MP3 is not re-compressed after editing. Enter mp3DirectCut, which provides an interface for directly editing MP3 files without first converting to a PCM audio format. mp3DirectCut speeds up the MP3 editing process in a number of areas, providing direct access to cut, copy, and remove sections of an MP3 in a non-destructive editor without ever needing to recompress. This saves time, disk space and eliminates the generational hit of decompressing and recompressing your MP3 files during editing. Note: If you install mp3DirectCut on Windows Vista you will need to run the installer as administrator. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]

On this week’s podcast, we’ll hear about how Malaysia is using sniffer dogs to root out DVD pirates. Also, Norway thinks long-terms about the disappearance of the world’s plant life. Then, a look at how all of America’s dirty cast-offs find their way to the developing world, via the internet. We’ll also hear about how Wikiscanner is causing a political ruckus in Australia, and just what goes into an out-of-body experience. Good fun.

When you’ve created a photo album, a slideshow or a movie, the natural impulse is to find an audience to applaud your effort. But who should that audience be: a few people peering over your shoulder, several spectators in front of the television or the two-dozen people you e-mail all the time?

A big, juicy tech podcast with two weeks of deliciousness for you. We have an update on the cyberspat between Estonia and Russia. And then we look at Lenovo’s bid to get low-cost PCs into rural China. We’ll also talk about new technologies to distribute flood warnings in Bangladesh, and about Ukraine’s #1 cybercriminal, Maxim Yastremsky. We’ll finish off with a report about a website called Alive in Baghdad, and then a multi-media romp through Rotterdam. What fun. Have a great weekend.

Some of my favorite radio stations don’t have DJs. But they do include some other features not found on FM: a button to pause playback, another to skip to the next song and, most important, a playlist I can customize.

Google has turned into a household verb, but that doesn’t make it the last word in Web search.

The inaugural podcast from our new studios in Boston features an update on the One Laptop Per Child project. Also, Microsoft tries”pay-as-you-go” Office software in South Africa. Then, a listener suggests we do a report on video games ratings systems worldwide — so, we do. We turn to Israel next for a report into how ultra-Orthodox Jews are using the internet. And we end with a look at the recent crackdown against bloggers in Malaysia. Have a great weekend.

We’ve all been spoiled rotten by the Global Positioning System.