Zen Monthly Newsletter

From Apple's launch of the screenless iPod Shuffle in January (with video in October) to Sony's release of the uninstaller that only made things worse in December - the New Year starts here, with the Technology Guardian's quick review and fond goodbye to 2005, that was the year that was.

A fast-forward MacLook through 2006 from Mystic Malone.

2005 saw the UK's first 'we're not going to take it anymore' successful claim for damages against a spam e-mail company. Businessman, Nigel Roberts, who administers domain names for the Channel Islands, took action against Scotland-based Media Logistics UK after one too many junk e-mails landed on top of the pile in his inbox. Under new European laws, companies can be sued for sending unwanted e-mails. Following County Court action, Media Logistics had to hand over £300 to Mr Roberts for spam that promoted a contract car firm and a fax broadcasting business. Mr Roberts said he had limited his claim to a maximum of £300 in order to qualify to file it as a small claim. He said: "This may be a tiny victory, but perhaps now spammers will begin to realise that people don't have to put up with their e-mail inboxes being filled with unwanted junk."

In 2006, the most powerful computer in the home is likely to be the games console in the living room, rather than the PC in the bedroom, says the BBC's Technology Editor. A new generation of games machines offers computing prowess to rival and exceed top end PCs. Microsoft's Xbox 360 leads the new wave, soon to be followed by Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) and Nintendo's Revolution, both expected this year. The consoles from the three rivals go beyond running games with extra clarity and realism, offering the ability to play music, watch video and more. The PS3 will introduce Sony's new high definition DVD format, Blu-ray, and the Revolution features a 'natural' one-hand remote control that combines elements borrowed from the instinctive action concept of touch-screen technology and the drag and drop capacity of the mouse pointer.

Ambitious plans to connect not just phones and TVs but kettles and fridges to the Net will come to fruition this year, writes the Guardian's Kieren McCarthy. The Internet is undergoing a vast upgrade that will transform the way it works and the way we interact with it.

During 2005, Zen Internet won national PC Pro awards for industrial strength broadband provision to manufacturing business (February) and, for the second year running, claimed the overall number one spot for "Best Broadband ISP". Searching the magazine's archive for the story, we found one PC Pro features writer, Tim Woodward, had wondered about setting up as an ISP himself. The result was a two-part feature on how to become your own ISP - with virtually no capital outlay or technical expertise. "The process of becoming an ISP is nowhere near as complicated or as costly as you might think", wrote Tim, and his story was begun months after the April 1st edition had gone to press.

"In the harshest place on Earth, love finds a way," says Morgan Freeman in his voiceover to March of the Penguins, a nature film that the American religious right has turned into a lesson on human family values and the errors of the theory of evolution. In the National Geographic documentary, set in the Antarctic and over a year in the making, emperor penguin activities are seen as evidence of the workings of God, and as examples of parental duty, and the birds have become heroes of anti-Darwinian intelligent design enthusiasts. As happened with Mel Gibson's 'Passion of Christ', churches have block-booked cinemas and run workshops after screenings of the film. But the documentary's unsung heroes were behind the cameras, working against 150mph winds in temperatures that drop to minus 101°C, and who know that penguin relationships don't last; after their chicks are big enough to swim on their own, the parents split up and abandon them.

At about the same time as Icelandic policewoman Unnur Birna Vilhjalmsdottir was crowned Miss World 2005 at a pre-Christmas ceremony in China, another event saw virtual Asian beauty "Mi" christened Miss Digital World 2005 in cyberspace. Created by Japanese designer Ichi Yoshimoto, Mi saw off strong challenges from 14 international finalists following catwalk appearances in futuristic silver bondage gear and kick-fighting sequences in showreel videos. Other contestants looked so realistic that the only hints of digital existence were a certain stiffness in body movements and the absence of blinking as the results were announced.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, started a daily blog recently, catching up, as it were, with the 23 million diarists already taking advantage of his contribution to Internet technology to unburden themselves online. Even Samuel Pepys, who started his diary in 1660, began making daily Web appearances (three years ago this month) before Sir Tim. The award-winning Pepys site has inspired other bookish bloggers to publish online diaries with classic literary themes. Bram Stoker's Dracula got the daily blog treatment in 2005, and diaries of writers including Franz Kafka and Henry David Thoreau have been similarly re-published. You can even follow James Joyce's Ulysses at the measured pace of one page a day.

Wikipedia, the open source online encyclopedia "that anyone can edit", took a few knocks in 2005 following confessions of self-promoting re-writes by a podcasting pioneer and complaints from the Prime Minister of Norway that his biography entry had been hacked by political vandals. Under the spotlight, Wikipedia was criticised for being unreliable and inaccurate. But a blind test review by a panel of experts comparing Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica found little to choose between them, uncovering the same number of serious errors in both.

Online shopping sites enjoyed bumper Christmas sales last month with Amazon UK reporting records broken every day in the run-up to the festive holiday. The busiest day for online splurges was December 12 when shoppers ordered 3.6 million items - 41 every second. Empty wallets and maxed-out cards will take time to recover after Boxing Day Sales at brick and mortar stores wrung out the last of the national spending spree, but a gentle re-introduction to the art and maintenance of online shopping that will entertain reluctant buyers in the meantime is Etsy - a new craft sellers' directory site with an unusual set of options for visitors, based on palettes of colour.

Radical craftperson Lisa Anne Auerbach ("Stop making scarves. Start making trouble") is knitting for victory in the USA, leading the fight for justice - mostly against the Bush regime - with her site, Steal This Sweater, which encourages 'knit-ins' that "put the struggle in the faces of the elite at their places of power". Politicians notice girls in sweaters and, before they know it, find themselves reading gritty anti-war messages stitched by the knitting machine that Lisa has linked to her computer and its store of radical patterns.

Justice fighter Jennifer Granick, who was Cisco whistleblower Michael Lynn's attorney when he outed dangerous router vulnerabilities, turns to bigger game in her latest blog, naming President Bush a lawbreaker in the throes of America's illegal wiretap scandal. When Jennifer's legal opinion was aired in Wired News, citizens who backed the president's claim to be above the law "in a war situation" complained to the magazine that she should "go back to Afghanistan". The story of the Cisco case, which reads like a potential movie plot, but which Michael Lynn cannot write about for legal reasons, can still be found in the archives of Jennifer Granick's blog, 'The Shout'.

2006 will be an interesting year for Google watchers as the no-evil giant slips under the covers with new partner AOL, nails its colours to the Wi-Fi mast in California and Europe, and watches the hills to the north where Microsoft scouts are seeking high ground suitable for war. Some ideas for the future when the future looked like more fun can be seen in the Google Labs 2005 beta toy cupboard (http://labs.google.com/).

When it comes to digitising books, two stories are unfolding: one is about open source and the other is about Google. Partners rallying round the open source initiative to digitise all the world's books and make them universally available include the Smithsonian Institute, Hewlett-Packard, MSN and Yahoo! Google faces lawsuits from publishers and authors who claim it is violating their copyrights and overstepping the boundaries of fair use laws. Google says its book scanning is an opt-out programme, meaning that publishers must actively tell the search company not to scan their books to stay out of the company's Web index. The Open Library - the open source initiative - scans books that are in the public domain or seeks permission from copyright holders. Then it allows anyone to print out their own 'real book' copies from its searchable online archive. It's all part of the dream-in-progress work of Brewster Kahle, known as the librarian of the Internet, and creator of the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine. Presently uploading and preserving offline media including public domain films, audio archives, and the work of volunteers at Project Gutenberg, who have been keyboarding public domain texts since the 70s, he is also busy storing high-resolution snapshots of books, page by page. The results are good enough to reproduce even the texture of the printed paper as the pages turn on a computer screen. The project's advanced scanner produces 16 megapixel pages and costs five pence every time an overhead camera, controlled by the scanner's software, shoots the books as they are held open in a V shape cradle. The software also creates plain text copies, but it is the images that are collated and used to create the digitally preserved books for home printing. Yahoo! and MSN Search are hoping to use the archive to answer Internet search engine queries. Funding from Yahoo! has covered 18,000 books and Microsoft is paying for another 150,000 titles. Kahle thinks Amazon's "search inside the book" and even Google Print might yet move his way and contribute to his ultimate aim - nothing less, he says, than to provide "universal access to all human knowledge... one page at a time."

Edinburgh-based Academic Books Auction.com is a classy eBay style catalogue of bargain books for university, college and school students, with collectables, rare editions, and general reading books for anyone - as well as braille books and children’s books.

Over 6 million people in the UK - that's more than one in ten of the population - are busy finding out more about their ancestors. If you are just starting to research your family's history, the seven step guide at familyrecords.gov.uk will help you on your way. It's one of the dozens of resources highlighted by the online Archives Awareness Campaign, promoting local and national archives, large and small, public and private, that will open their doors throughout the year to celebrate the wealth of archive material across the UK.

FreePatentsOnline provides fast access to millions of patents and patent applications. Patenting your next brilliant idea may be easier than you think if some of the nuttier notions selected for the Crazy Patents page of the site are anything to go by. There's a device for licking stamps, a pillow with retractable umbrella, and protective underwear with malodorous flatus filter. These are all *granted* patents.

Still crazy after all these years - a museum of marvellous illustrations and designs from patent applications originated in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s - and EphemeraNow, seriously dedicated to the colourful commercial art of mid-century America.

Do your visitors gasp with frustration when the 'click here for more' pages on your sales site switch from HTML to a wadge of unwieldy PDFs to provide detailed product information? After you've gone to so much trouble to get your content together, why not make a resolution to go the extra few steps needed to make your PDFs easily accessible and reader-friendly?

"A thousand search engines in one" may be overstating the case for this still-developing metasearcher but, gosh, it does seem to dig out the results. The deliberately simple front end menu allows you to target up to five groups of specialised engines - from Business and Shopping to News and Video - or 25 general search engines or 20 directories. Results are grouped by resource, so that you can choose which set of returns to see played out in a second browser window.