Music under water

GIZMO GALLERY

Like swimming or diving or synchronised swimming? How do you listen to music while under water? Try the MP120 MP3 player from Oregon Scientific which is designed to work under water for up to 30 minutes.

It can't take high pressure, however, so don't go deep-sea diving with it. Rubberised pads keep your ears dry. The MP 120 costs around $150 equivalent and has enough storage for four hours of MP3 tunes.

So that's eight synchronised swimming sessions! The USB 2.0 connectivity and 128 mb flash memory allows draw-and-drop transfers from any PC -based storage device.

Taking a shot at JFK

Any thoughts on the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy in November 22,1963 on the streets of Dallas, Texas? The event has sparked bestselling books, movies and conspiracies theories galore. Now you can emulate killer Lee Harvey Oswald in the new "educational" video game "JFK Reloaded" from Traffic Systems, Glasgow.

Just download the demo from www.jfkreloaded.com and try and shoot in the exact pattern and trajectory that Oswald did. If you can replicate exactly ,you stand to win $100,000. But you lose points for killing innocent bystanders or First Lady Jackie.

My thought is that, regardless of your opinions on the ethics of this game, you may as well get in the download quickly. There's almost bound to be legal trouble and an early non-bowdlerised copy could become an electronic collector's item.

A palmtop with Windows XP

OQO has just released a palmtop that runs Windows XP! The OQO model 01 has a 1-GHz Transmeta processor, 256 Mbytes RAM, an 800 x 480 colour display, a 20-Gbyte hard drive, and built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB 1.1, and FireWire.

So it runs real software such as MS Office, Photoshop and broadband. It doesn't possess as much power as a full laptop, and the keyboard is limiting, but it's not a PDA. The 5" inch LCD screen is as large as the machine and it accepts both keyboard and digital pen inputs. The qwerty keyboard has a navigational trackpoint, mouse buttons and a thumbwheel.

It has a docking cable to give it Ethernet and 3-D accelerated 1,280 x 1,024 video output and it's broadband-enabled. The battery life is just about three hours, however.