The only thing likely to make a Monday in February more depressing is reminding people that tomorrow is a Tuesday in February, so TechRadar is solemnly swearing that it will do its level best to pick you up (buttercup) with a One More Thing round-up of all the news that we desperately wanted to cover but couldn't find an appropriate image or an excuse to feed our bosses as to why we did.
We've already plucked a juicy morsel from Gabe Newell's chat with Penny Arcade, but aside from the thought of Valve making hardware, we were also thrilled to see his enthusiasm for wearable computers. Not least because it allowed us to repeat his use of the words '100 inch iPad' in our headline. [Penny-Arcade]
It appears that the US has been busy watching James Cameron movies. "The Avatar program will develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier's surrogate," explained the Pentagon. The real question is; will they be blue? [SlashGear]
Using tech to play war games leads us neatly on to, erm, using tech to play war games – with the new trailer for Mass Effect 3 garnering more views since its launch than a keyboard playing cat…
Now, we don't want to go too far down the road of asking if it's wise for Microsoft to be quoting Orwell; but they do just that in a blog explaining the company's new logo for Windows. Aside from that it does answer one burning question: "your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?" Answer: "Well there's this thing with the thing and progression of graphics and…look over there! It's a new interface!"
Now if we were to talk about checking in and leaderboards what would you think we were talking about? Nope, not that one...or that one; in fact it's Google that has apparently rolled out a leaderboard for its Latitude service. [Engadget]
We're all for interactivity, but do you really want to fill in a questionnaire that dictates how your next novel will end? Us neither, but that's the concept of "99 Reasons Why" by Caroline Smailes. We've got 99 reasons why not, if anyone's interested. [Ubergizmo]
Although it's straining the tech tag to its limit, we enjoyed the latest Ofcom broadcast bulletin greatly with a smorgasboard of Swedish swearwords, the reason why its okay for Matthew Wright to poke fun at a murdered Scot and then get angry when Twitter reacts and lots of NSFW language. However, our favourite bit this month is actually the careful footnote on what hackysack is and why topless women were playing it at 6pm on a Sunday.
We already loved Total Film's 50 greatest Star Wars scenes; but as an added bonus we think that the gif on the tumblr site may well have recorded Yoda's actual reaction to being used for an advertising campaign in the UK.
Heston Blumenthal has carved himself a niche as an experimental chef, which is presumably why he's been asked to make the first test tube burger. Of course when you think a little harder about this it probably occurs that what they actually want to do is show that lab-grown meat is normal food rather than hire someone who's famed for making snail porridge to show it off. [Gizmodo UK]
