Welcome to Pixelated Geek’s Weekly Tech Wrap-up, a quick and humorous run through of some smaller stories from the world of consumer electronics and technology.

First batter up is the hideous looking OpenOffice Mouse. This beast features a full 18 buttons, 63 programmable profiles and even an analogue joystick! What more could you want from an instant carpel tunnel surgery inducing monstrosity? How about a soon to hit street price of $75 (£45)? Obviously not a fan of the Magic Mouse, a World of Warcraft-loving gamer decided his mouse didn’t have enough buttons and went ahead and set up a company to do it better. WarMouse is aiming this at the OpenOffice, MMO playing crowd and they might go potty over it, but I think I’ll stick to my trusty Logitech thanks.

This week Mozilla had a party to celebrate Firefox turning the big 5-nothing. Yes that’s right, the browser of choice for the web savvy, but Google hating, user really is five years old. The project which grew out of the death of the Mozilla suite (aka Netscape Navigator) celebrated its fifth birthday by being crowned the vulnerability king and not in a good way. A recent study found that Firefox suffered from 44% of the total vulnerabilities affecting today’s browsers. Safari, which includes Mobile Safari came in second and the normal culprit of the browser wars, Internet Explorer, came in at number three. The winner in all this happens to be the least used browser of the mainstream, Opera. Now I know there are Opera fanboys about and for good reason, it’s fast and reliable, but it goes to show there’s safety through minority.

Speaking of vulnerabilities, this week it’s emerged that there’s a new threat from the computer virus. Your normal everyday virus either wants to steal information from you, send out a load of spam or turn your computer into part of a botnet. Although that’s pretty inconvenient and could potentially be damaging to your finances or identity, it doesn’t come close to causing jail time for the infected.

A new type of virus has started to crop up which paedophiles use to essentially store their collections of kiddy porn on your computer. Now this is pretty disturbing just from the thought of kiddy porn being on your computer and some hideous person accessing it for their ‘needs’. But you might be shocked to know that it could even lead to you facing a conviction for paedophilia because who’s going to believe ‘a virus did it’ claim? It all comes down to the fact that the exams that courts do on your computer are costly and they don’t like paying for them meaning they’re often skipped. In essence unless you fork out a pretty penny for the exam you could be convicted straight up for having kiddy porn on your ‘puter. So next time you click on that .exe or browse that dodgy website with the ‘free stuff’ just think twice and always use protection.

NEC this week showed off its Tele Scouter glasses in Tokyo. The glasses work by projecting information directly on the wearers retina providing a HUD type overlay. If that wasn’t fantastic enough, NEC aims integrate this technology with real-time spoken language translation, which would give the wearer the ability to read translated text projected into their eye balls when someone speaks to them in a foreign language.

OK, I know that sounds a bit fishy, but we’re nowhere near April and it’s not inconceivable that with advances in voice recognition this kind of system could revolutionise the way we communicate in foreign countries. For the time being NEC said the Tele Scouter glasses could be implemented using facial recognition to give salesmen an overview of a particular clients recent purchases. NEC hopes to have the glasses tested and available in November 2010. I just hope they can build in a bit of Terminator style augmented reality for the ultimate wearable computer system. Forget Layar and the other phone based augmented reality apps, having info beamed into your eyes is definitely the way forward.

Rupert Murdoch, you know that old guy who’s been in Time magazine a couple of times and keeps ranting about things that he obviously doesn’t understand, hit the headlines this week for his ham-fisted abuse of Google. Murdock insists that Google is profiteering off of stolen News Corp content. What he seems to not understand is that yes, Google does make money from search, and perhaps search including News Corp articles, but when someone searches for something in his articles they end up going to that article on his website. Surely the fact that they can’t capitalise on that is their own problem? Murdoch even went as far as to say:

‘If they’re just search people…. They don’t suddenly become loyal readers’

Murdock wants to make all of News Corps online content paid for and make users access it directly. Well for one, I don’t see that actually working (would you pay for The Sun, a tabloid newspaper that you only read on the tube or at lunch, online?). And second of all, if you don’t want people to be able to search your articles, then why not block search engine spider access? It’s pretty simple, you just put a ‘don’t access this’ in the Robots.txt file on your domain and the search engine will ignore it.

Google itself responded to these accusations with a statement to the effect of ‘Whatever man’ telling Mr. Murdoch that all he needs to do is tell Google to not index his sites and just as easy as that they’d be removed. What I don’t think Murdock understands about all this is that without Google and other search engines leading users to the content, not many are actually going to find and read the content. OK, a few dedicated people might read it like a newspaper, browsing around it, but at the end of the day News Corp content for the most part is hardly unique. People will just go somewhere else rather than pay for the most part.

In other search news, Google has finished testing of its new back end search architecture, nicknamed Google Caffeinated, and will start rolling it out across its data centres in the near future. You won’t notice anything different about the Google search page, but you might about your searches. Polls have shown that generally people think their searches are better with Google Caffeinated over regular old Google. Will your searches will be better? I guess that will depend on your use of Google, but overall Google Caffeinated seems like a win for all. Whether you’ll notice however is debatable.

One of my favourite programs this week is going HD. The new series of Top Gear starts Sunday and is being broadcast in both SD and HD. For those in the UK with Virgin, Sky or FreeSat it’ll surely make the rampaging challenges and beautiful cars even more visceral. For those stuck with SD TV, you’ll probably be able to get it in HD on iPlayer, which shows quite a lot of programs these days in HD. After all almost all programs recorded for TV are currently shot in HD only to be converted later to SD with a lot of image processing.

Talking about TV, Channel 4 is running a 3D week next week in the UK with vintage 3D films and shows being shown in all their glory. Admittedly, the technology Channel 4 are using to broadcast in 3D isn’t the most up-to-date but free’s free right? Derren Brown will feature and there’s also a ‘greatest’ 3D moments from TV, film and music videos show. The highlight of the week, however, has to be the first ever broadcast of the Queen’s coronation in 3D, allowing viewers to step back in time and be in some small way, a part of it. Now I don’t know about you but I’m not that fussed about Derren Brown in 3D, but the royalist in me is pretty stoked about Queenie in 3D. Get on over to your nearest Sainsbury’s to get some funky glasses to watch C4’s 3D week, you might have to prise them out of the cold dead fingers of the customer services rep, but I’m sure it’s going to be worth it.

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