Part 3 I'm pleased to say that what with the relatively warm 2011 and our conservation efforts we had the lowest consumption of electricity and gas at home of any year yet, a bit over 1,500kWh ('units') of electricity and under 4,000kWh of gas. (A typical UK household is nearer 3,300kWh 'leccy and 18,000kWh gas.) With our solar PV exports we were just carbon-negative for power by my calculations.…

Product round-up You know that really annoying person who is videoing the gig with their camera phone to stick on Facebook when they get home? That's me. These days my TV is HD and my games console is HD, so it only makes sense that my phone – the device I use the most, day in and day out – should be HD too. Luckily, HD on smartphones is becoming more commonplace and so rather than judge these handsets on their mobile merits, this round-up focuses on their HD video camera performance.…

If all goes according to plan, Facebook founder, chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's share of the profit in his company's upcoming initial public offering will result in him facing a tax bill of around $1.5bn for 2012.…

British and American children who are less intelligent are more likely to grow up to be conservative and/or bigots, according to new research published in Physiological Science.…

Steven Appleton, the long-time CEO at memory chip maker Micron Technology, died this morning in a crash of an experimental plane in the company's hometown of Boise, Idaho. He was 51 years-old and one of the youngest CEOs and chairman in the Fortune 500.…

One advocacy group has published a survey it says proves that US small-business owners aren't unduly concerned with government regulations. Another group says that the first group's opinion poll is tainted by bogosity.…

Open ... and Shut No sooner did Facebook file its S-1 in preparation for an IPO than speculation kicked into high gear on how Facebook could possibly sustain its $75bn to $100bn valuation. After all, despite its hugely impressive revenue and profit numbers, key components of its revenue model – like advertising revenue – are decelerating. So should we expect Facebook to impose a paywall on some or all of its users, as MyLife.com chief executive Jeff Tinsley suggests it could?…

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty, signed by most European countries last week, may not be a done deal after all, as governments across the continent face a storm of protest.…

The US economy added 243,000 net new jobs in January and the unemployment rate has ticked down two-tenths of a point, according to statistics released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.…

A German court has suspended the injunction that required Apple to remove its iPhone 4 and 3Gs, and iPad Wi-Fi + 3G from its online store in that country.…

Half of all Fortune 500 companies still contain computers infected with the DNSChanger Trojan, weeks after a FBI-led takedown operations targeting the botnet's command-and-control infrastructure.…

A Taiwanese gamer sat dead in a chair at an Internet cafe for up to nine hours before fellow players noticed the poor guy had popped his clogs.…

A Wisconsin woman has been charged over claims she tried to sell $1m worth of Facebook shares that she didn't own.…

In the cut-throat tablet market, a Taiwanese company has found one way to make its product stand out: paying an actor to dress up as Steve Jobs and make tasteless jokes about how he's dead.…

Members of Anonymous have released an intercept of a conference call between investigators at the FBI and Scotland Yard during which operations against hacktivist group were discussed.…

IBM's SAN Volume Controller has done the benchmark business, again, and passed the half million SPC-1 IOPS mark using Storwize V7000 storage.…

The story earlier this week on the deportation from the US of A of two Brits who ill-advisedly tweeted they were off to "destroy America" left a few readers pretty shaken up at the way the Department of Homeland Security handles potential terrorist threats.…

One Taiwanese manufacturer took aim at traditional light switches this week and unveiled a lamp that can be turned on and off with the shot of a gun-shaped remote.…

Sysadmin blog I remember the first time I saw these automated supermarket tills. They intrigued me. Yet I was also afraid of the things. I was afraid that despite all of my knowledge and training I wouldn't be able to figure it out and I would end up looking like a fool. I avoided them for three years; the basis of this avoidance nothing more than irrational fear of that which I might not understand.…

Netbooks are so yesterday's technology. Shipments of the small, not-so-cheap computers plunged during 2011 by 25 per cent, figures from market watcher Canalys show.…

The bit-twiddlers took over IBM's server business a year and a half ago, and it appears that they are starting to think about systems as if they were code, as if they could do dot releases in a nearly steady stream and keep their revenues from spiking up and crashing down all the time.…

Sony has gone surf-tastic, announcing a partnership with Aussie outdoors outfitter Billabong, which sees its Xperia Active handset branded with the extreme-sports logo and pitched towards the cool-dude generation.…

Game Group has been given a reprieve by its lenders, but the retailer may have to sell its overseas stores to secure it.…

Apple has removed the iPhone 4 and 3Gs from its stores in Germany, almost certainly in response to Motorola's December action rather than today's patent win.…

BT is talking up plans to bring its ultra-fast fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) broadband network to more of its customers in early 2013.…

Apple's FileVault disk encryption can be circumvented in less than an hour, according to a computer forensics firm.…

Exclusive Nokia is said to be hastening the demise of its legacy Symbian platform, cancelling the development of all but one new Symbian-based device. Although Nokia Belle updates will continue to ship to existing customers, only one new model – a successor to the N8 high-end camera phone – will reach the market, the Register understands.…

Scientists in Manchester appear to have solved a problem with graphene that has plagued the super-material's fans since it was sliced into being in 2004.…

BT reported this morning that its sales had fallen 5 per cent for the three months ended 31 December, however earnings and cash generation remained steady, the company added.…

On demand On January 25th, Regcast presenter Jon Collins was joined by Freeform Dynamics’ Martha Bennett, Jason Frost from Blueprint, and Will Thompson from Microsoft for our very first live event of 2012.…

A European Union watchdog has written to Google boss Larry Page asking him to explain how personal data will be safeguarded when the search giant puts its revised privacy policy into effect on 1 March.…

iPad owners are happier with their tablets than folk with other fondleslabs are with theirs, recent research reveals.…

Researchers at the Ruhr-University Bochum have managed to extract the secret encryption algorithmns used by satellite phones, and discovered that it's a lot less secure than one might hope.…

Review Toshiba is a bit of a wild card when it comes to TVs. While some of its screens are genuinely exciting, others are merely bargain bin fillers. Buying a cheaper Tosh is a classic case of caveat emptor.…

RIM is offering a free PlayBook tablet to developers who submit an Android application to RIM's App World before Valentine's Day, though the T&Cs have yet to be revealed.…

TV tuner maker Hauppauge has introduced a mobile gadget that streams Freeview content to you phone, tablet or computer over its own wireless network.…

Apple has poached Microsoft's top product marketing bod in the UK to front up its app store in Europe.…

The Samsung Galaxy S II Plus, the smartphone the South Korean giant is said to be unveiling at this month's Mobile World Congress (MWC) show in place of the Galaxy S III, will be a skinny white boy.…

Windows 8 and Microsoft's next major phone operating system will merge, if reports are correct.…

A previously unseen Asus tablet has surfaced on the web prompting speculation that the Taiwanese company is working on the successor to the Eee Pad Transformer Prime.…

There are now over 100 million .com domain names on the internet.…

So far, the UK space agency hasn't gone in for any of that headline-grabbing stuff like landing people on the Moon or launching Martian probes that get stranded in orbit before plummeting back to Earth – it leaves that sort of stuff to NASA and Roscosmos.…

Fujitsu has outed a non-descript 7in Android tablet that it'll be pitching at big business when the gadget goes on sale later this month.…

Quotw This was the week when Facebook finally filed for its IPO.…

After popular demand NASA's Suomi NPP satellite has beamed down another "Blue Marble" vision of the Earth in high definition.…

History may record Scott McNealy as a straight-dealing leader of a major Silicon Valley tech company.…

UK hybrid TV service BT Vision plans to be the first customer to discard Microsoft's Mediaroom software, almost imminently, after at least a year-long effort to put in completely new software building blocks to rejuvenate the service.…

Review The Orange San Francisco was the smartphone bargain of 2011. For £99 you got a solid little handset with a 3.5in 480 x 800 screen, Android 2.1 and a 3.2Mp camera. The fact it was falling-off-a-wet-log easy to root and change ROMs – even I managed it – was the icing on the cake.…

The UK Supreme Court judges have retired to consider their verdict in Julian Assange’s last shot at escaping extradition to Sweden, with a final verdict possible within weeks.…

SpaceX has confirmed the successful test of its SuperDraco rocket engine, which will form the backbone of safety and landing systems for its Dragon spacecraft.…