I mentioned before an offer that Orange was doing where you could get unlimited internet browsing for ?1 a day and now it seems hot on their tails T-Mobile has launched a similar offer giving you unlimited internet browsing for £1 a day.

This offer from T-Mobile only applies if you are using a Pay As You Go phone and doesn’t extend to their contract phones where they encourage you to take out their Web ‘n’ Walk plan as an add on to your existing contract.

I guess this is one instance where it pays to be on PAYG which is strange considering how all the mobile companies try really hard to sign us up on contracts.

I am going to try it out with my Sony UX180P although strictly speaking you aren’t supposed to do it.

Not so much a gadget but more a work of art and a great piece of engineering.

The Geochron Kilburg clock allows you to see what time it is anywhere in the world at a glance.

The clock features a moving map which shows areas of day and night making a complete cycle every 24 hours and gradually changes shape with the seasons.

I managed to pick this one up on Ebay at a considerable saving on the retail price (for a clock they are expensive) and it has been worth every penny. It now hangs on the wall above my desk so if ever I need to know if someone is likely to be awake across the world I can just glance up and see instantly what time it is.

It’s great for planning holidays as well locating where a country is without having to get the atlas out.

The Sony UX180P comes with 2 Built-in Cameras (front: 0.3M pixels and back: 1.3M pixels) which although handy is not much better than a modern mobile phone.

I personally wouldn’t use it in preference to a digital camera but it can be quite useful in situations where you’ve left behind the camera and you need to take a quick picture or video.

Below is a small video taken with the UX180P of our pet rabbit Bugs.

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This is a slightly blown up version of the original but does give an idea of what to expect. What surprised me was the amount of background noise picked up by the built in microphone. What you can hear on the film is the fan or maybe hard disk or a combination of the two. In the reality of using the UX180P you wouldn’t actually notice these sounds.

If a had to pick my favourite gadget of all time it would have to be the Apple Newton Messagepad.  For those of you that don’t know what a Newton Messagepad is it was at the time a state of the art PDA far ahead of anything else on the market.

My first Messagepad was the MP100 which I bought way back in 1994. I used this continuously until my next purchase which was a vastly improved MP130 which came with an all important backlight so I could now use it happily in the dark.

In 1996 they then brought out the MP2000 which I immediately purchased. This again was a vast improvement over the previous the model with a speed increase from 20MHz to a whopping 162MHz. Everything on it just worked so much better and it was fast. To this day I have never come across a PDA with handwriting technology that worked as well as this did. Bearing in mind it was launched 10 years ago you can see how way ahead of its time it really was.

Sadly Apple canned Newton in 1998.

I used my MP2000 which I later sent off to Apple to be upgraded to a MP2100 right up until the day it finally died only a couple of years ago. I’ve since bought a second-hand MP2100 off Ebay for nostalgias sake but confess since I lost all the info on the one that died I have never got round to using it.

So now at home I have my collection sitting in a drawer consisting of:

1 x MP100
1 x Dead MP2000
1 x MP2100
1 x Sharp branded MP
1 x eMate 300

I wonder if they will be worth anything in time to come?

For anyone who wants to know more of the ins and outs of the Messagepad there is a good page of information here.

A friend asked me about my my webcam and what I was using and how I got it onto the website. I bought a NCS-330W SOHO 802.11g Wireless Network Camera complete with external enclosure from Network-Camera.co.uk.

The camera is situated underneath the jetty by the lake outside of my house. Being wireless all I had to worry about was getting power to it which wasn’t a problem as I had some lights nearby where I could pick up a feed from.

Then all I had to do was turn it on, get a connection to the wireless router in the house and then make some configuration changes to the router to allow port forwarding to the camera and I was set. This was a pretty simple exercise and took about 10 minutes to complete following the instructions supplied with the camera.

The only other thing I had to do was to setup an account at DynDns which was free so that when my broadband provider changed my ip address the camera could still be found automatically.

The camera has a built in webserver which means I don’t need to have a pc on for it to work and it serves the video itself. Putting it on the website was simply a matter of adding a small piece of JavaScript code to the page and the camera took care of the rest.

There are a lot of other nifty things you can do with this camera and I’m using it in its most basic form but if you are interested in seeing what you can do then visit Network-Camera.co.uk and take a look.