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After a number of release candidates, the final release of Firefox 1.5 has been made available.

If you’re still using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari or anything else, shame on you! This browser will change the way you surf the information superhighway!

From 1 January 2006, no more lead will be added to petrol in South Africa. For owners of older cars, this may come as a shock. Fear not, citizens! Check out NAAMSA’s website to satisfy yourself that most any car will still be usable with little or no modification. One up for the environment!

The Sandton City shopping centre is becoming a wireless hotspot. The hotspot covers the entire centre and offers high-speed Internet access at a low cost. More information here.

For us hotspot deprived South Africans, this is certainly a bonus! Now, about those parking costs…

After a series of horrific interpretations of my favourite superhero, I anticipated Batman Begins with trepidation. What could they possibly screw up this time? In the previous outings of Batman on the silver screen we got super villain by Aahhnold, music by Prince and Robin. Can’t get much worse than that!

Batman Begins is simply awesome! A Batman story as it should be told: detailed origin story, gadgets and batcave, bored playboy routine and believable villains. Direction by Christopher Nolan is spot-on and the lead character portrayed by Christian Bale absolutely believable. The audience is provided with Wayne’s motivation for revenge after seeing his parent’s gunned down as a child and his resulting self-exile to learn the workings of the criminal mind. One of the coolest villain in Batman’s rogue gallery is Rha’s Al Ghul (here also Henri Ducard), who is excellently played by Liam Neeson. The scarecrow makes an appearance too. More than likely to introduce Arkham Asylum for future sequels. And who can forgot Jim Gordon, who will eventually rise to become Gotham’s commissioner of police.

Though I don’t consider the inclusion of Katie Holmes’ character Rachel a problem, I wish Hollywood could just once leave out such diversions and focus on the core story.

So, to sum it up: the best bat flick to date, Michael Caine with some witty one-liners and the coolest batmobile you’ve ever seen!

I’m a sucker for magazines. I’m a sucker for gadgets. Combine the two and you have my cash. Regardless how often I tell myself that these publications exist because of my need for gadget info, I can’t stay away.

This year’s publication of the Men’s Health Buyer’s Guide has a slick new look. The obvious suspects appear: the Sony PSP, Canon EOS 350D and Nike Free. I miss the iPod nano and i-mate JASJAR, which indicates just how quickly print can be out of date. I would prefer some in-depth reviews and a more critical commentary on the products listed.

The guide should not to be used to make a final purchasing decision, but provides a number of interesting products that suit varying budgets.

Why not stay and browse from here (The Bitty Browser doesn’t seem to enjoy recursion)

A new site for the latest James Bond movie is available. Can’t get to it because of:

Hope this isn’t trying to install a rootkit to my non-existent hard disk Last time I looked, it was still there.

While it seems that the crazy increase in house prices is slowing down, indications are that the cost of undeveloped land is rising rapidly. According to an article on News24, land prices are now increasing at almost double the rate of house prices.

Are the Australians just being paranoid or is the impending bird flu panic justified? With comments such as a pandemic could kill millions of people worldwide and worst projections of mortality still show that 99.8% of people will come through any bird flu pandemic in a reasonable state, one has to wonder…

The mess Sony BMG has created for itself by adding DRM software to certain audio CD’s is far from over. PC owners are threatening to sue the company for damages.

The most amusing aspect is the fact that the copy protection scheme can be broken by applying a small piece of adhesive tape to the outside of the CD. According to Gartner: what makes the Sony BMG incident even more unfortunate is that the DRM technology can be defeated easily. Gartner has identified one simple technique: The user simply applies a fingernail-sized piece of opaque tape to the outer edge of the disc, rendering session 2 — which contains the self-loading DRM software — unreadable. The PC then treats the CD as an ordinary single-session music CD, and the commonly used CD “rip” programs continue to work as usual.