Hey there everyone, hope the week has been as kind to you guys as it’s been to us. It’s been kind of an interesting week in the news, though we’ve had a fairly slow day today, which is something that can happen on a Friday (especially in summertime).

For those of you who don’t read regularly, we tend to post one last light-hearted blog entry to get a bit of a smile on Friday afternoon. Y’know, in an attempt to cheer up everyone stuck in work for the next few hours. In that spirit, here’s something we really enjoyed that you guys might appreciate.

This has kind of been doing the rounds, but if you haven’t already seen it, it’s well worth a look. As a general rule “sand art” isn’t something we’d encountered before, but if there weren’t tears when we first saw it there were certainly a lot of, “No man, just some… grit… in my eye…” moments that were, honestly, just a touch embarrassing.

Next is just an image we stumbled on last night that’s particularly timely given the launch of Snow Leopard today. Apple’s next OS, could it be Cougar?

Credit on this one goes to Dschwen

Last thing for this week; this one goes out to all the people this week who were hoping for an announcement about when Diablo III might come out. A wait that, of course, ended in disappointment.

I genuinely laugh out loud every time I see it

Alright everyone, that’s it from us until Monday. I hope you guys have enjoyed the blog for this week. I’ll try and keep responding to any comments we get here or on the Twitter over the weekend when I can

Have a great weekend all!

Google’s translation service is on of its most maligned services (with engines designed specifically to take advantage of the ridiculous results of translations to and from languages), but it’s also fantastically useful. Now though, you can use Google’s translation service from within Google Docs itself.

Word comes via the Google Blog that the translation service added to Google Docs will support translation into 42 languages. Happily enough, it features the option to replace the original document with the translated text or to add the translated document to a new Google Doc, though with Google Doc’s fairly generous space there’s no real need to overwrite documents (in our experience at least).

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It’s starting to get a little hard to tell whether or not Apple’s moves to thwart Palm are part of its ongoing rivalry or just incidental to upgrades already in place. The latest news is that Apple’s latest OS X update removes functionally for Palm OS Sync.

Last month, Apple updated iTunes to version 8.1, apparently purposely removing the ability to sync Palm’s Pre smart phone with iTunes. Palm struck back, issuing an update to its mobile Web OS that re-enabled functionality (seemingly by disguising the device as an iPod). Apple responded by, once again, blocking the ability to sync with the Pre via iTunes update. Now though, there’s come a move that puts the ball firmly in Palm’s court.

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With all of the high profile absences from the iPhone and iPod Touch’s App Store starting to build up, you can imagine Apple might end up doing things it’s not entirely comfortable with, not least of which, approving Spotify for sale on the App Store.

For those of you who aren’t into Spotify, it’s a pretty compelling music streaming service that allows users to search a truly vast library, build playlists and then forward them to other Spotify users. The reason the App Store was expected to take issue with it is mostly because people have expressed the view that Spotify could well be the death of iTunes’ music sales. Why buy the music cow if you’re getting the music for free (with minimal advertising)?

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Microsoft has announced that it is to launch its upcoming office suitw, Microsoft Office 2010, with its own ‘Genuine Advantage’ package to ensure that the suite doesn’t see the same piracy as its predecessors.

It’s long been one of the stranger features of the Office landscape that there is a freely available and entirely usable alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite (in the form of OpenOffice.org) which hasn’t seen uptake as widespread as piracy of Microsoft’s Office. However, that could be set to change with the introduction of a Genuine Advantage feature to Office 2010. That said some of the statements in Microsoft’s press release about Office 2010 are actually quite funny, certainly we laughed aloud at some of the text, which includes,

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Good afternoon all, hopefully this week has been kind to you. If you’re not familiar with the Product Spotlight pieces we run every Thursday then this is just a space where we can recommend products that we think are worth your attention but that don’t get too much hype or recommendation. Often there are products our staff has bought and enjoyed or just things we think don’t get the attention they might deserve.

Click the image to see the product page for this display

This week, out spotlit product is a 23” Acer display. It’s marked down for the week by 7% to €139, which should be welcome news for anyone on the market for a new monitor (we had a long conversation about this on Twitter a few days ago) or even a spare monitor for a dual display setup.

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Analysts have long been saying that we’re overdue a price drop on Microsoft’s Xbox 360, but it looks like it took Sony’s announcement of the PlayStation 3 Slim to actually precipitate the change. The new, slimmer PS3 will hit the market at €300, which isn’t far off the current price of Microsoft’s console.

Now though, Microsoft has announced a price drop on the Xbox 360. Initially details were looking a little vague on just what the prices would be for those of us working with euro (as opposed to sterling) but it had seemed a fairly safe bet that we’ll see the same $1:€1 relationship we’ve seen established by Sony and Microsoft in the past. Now that we know that’s not the case, there’s some good news and some bad news.

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The first two netbooks set to incorporate Nvidia’s new Ion platform have been delayed so that they don’t launch just before Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 release, rendering them out of date as soon as they’re purchased.

Instead, The Inquirer is reporting that both Samsung and Lenovo have opted to delay the launch of their new, relatively high-performance netbooks until they can ship with Windows 7 installed. Of course, this has a knock on effect, not only for Nvidia, which must by now be painfully aware that there aren’t any netbooks on the markets using its much touted Ion board, but for customers who may end up footing the extra bill for Windows 7 installs.

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A Dutch judge has ordered the brains behind Mininova to remove all copyrighted torrents from the search engine or face a heft €5 million in fines.

With The Pirate Bay taking some serious hits in the last two months, the fact that this latest attack hits the less popular torrent search engine Mininova could be an indication of what’s to come later. The only real question now is whether or not this kind of anti-piracy policy will continue, hitting all of the major torrent searches or if it will stop with The Pirate Bay and Mininova.

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Mozilla’s browser efforts have gone from strength to strength with the releases of Firefox 3.0 and 3.5, but it seems as though the company has now divulged that one of the biggest reasons users didn’t update to version 3.0 when it was released was because of enhancements made to the location bar.

In a turn that’s just a little sad, “virtually everyone” who provided feedback to Firefox had tried Firefox 3 and bombed back to Firefox 2. It seems as though many users were a bit shocked by the suggestions that were thrown up by their browser when typing addresses after it had had a bit of a poke through their history and bookmarks. The Mozilla team played it very well on its blog, not citing anything untoward, but still getting the message across unequivocably,

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In a move that really does evince a kind of total disconnect from what’s going on in the outside world, a training website from the US Department of Defence has basically told all of its government staff that all music downloading is theft.

This is particularly worrying for anyone who’s been using iTunes to pay for and then download music, since the question of legal services for the distribution of music online seems to go completely unaddressed. Fortunately, the whole thing takes a running jump from a little out of touch to entirely ridiculous. The training page presents a “Knowledge check” for which users must answer multiple choice questions, the following is a particular favourite.

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When we did our Build Your Own article on getting together a decently specced gaming machine for under €1000 we got a lot of questions about how one would go about doing it for significantly less. Intrigued, I asked Shelton from RMA, who basically told me that you wouldn’t.

At least, you wouldn’t unless you were a very specific type of user. He didn’t mean cheap, he just meant the kind of person who doesn’t mind sitting down and working everything out so that they can eke every last drop of performance out of a machine they’ve bought for as little as possible – the kind of person who’s happy to overclock and damn the consequences.

He was kind enough to put together a build for just that kind of machine for us this week, we hope you guys like it. Keep in mind though that I was fairly hard on him budgetwise, so this isn’t by any means a machine we’d recommend you build unless you’re confident you know what you’re doing.

Without further ado, here’s the build itself for a gaming rig as cheap as possible (but no cheaper, to paraphrase Einstein):

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 2.8GHz

We have kind of an unexpected bonus on this one because, when I initially asked Shelton about this build on Friday, we weren’t sure about whether or not it’d be on offer this week, but since it is the price has been dropped by 17%, meaning you’re only paying €99 for your processor.

Click the image to see the Core 2 Duo product page

While this is just a 2.8GHz dual core on the face of things, Shelton tells me that if you manage it carefully you can reliably “coax 3.5GHz out of it”. Of course, we can’t possibly take responsibility for anything that happens your machine when you’ve packed it full of overclocked components, but if you’re still reading by now you probably already know that.

Naturally we’d advise that you use the money saved on the processor to pick up some extra cooling (see below), but that kind of goes without saying on a build like this.

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