Engadget.com reports that LG mobile has confirmed that a 12 megapixel phone will soon be produced. Sony Ericsson was the first to demonstrate they could put a 12 megapixel camera in a phone, but LG is the first provider to officially announce one is coming. Don’t get too excited, though, as LG’s UK head of marketing, Jeremy Newing, admitted, “it’s important that people realize when taking 12mp images, they’ll be using huge amounts of data, and it will be more difficult to do things like send such files”. Plus, as lifehacker.com has pointed out, megapixel size is not directly proportional to picture quality. While you’re waiting for over an hour for your phone to send that picture of a daisy to your mom, don’t expect the end result to look nearly as good as your DSL with less megapixel resolution but far superior optics and sensors.

Despite all the hype, at $360 the upcoming Kindle 2 is still going to inhabit a very small niche market. Of the 50% of Americans who read books at all very few are ready to make a digital switch. Just like the visceral pleasure we experience from holding a newspaper keeps them in print, a fair amount of the literary class enjoy perusing a bookstore, reading back flaps and skimming contents. But for those who are ready to adopt the digital model, the Kindle itself, or even Sony’s $300 Reader Digital Book, are not the only game in town. A more affordable option may be Indigo’s Shortcovers – a digital ebook app that will run on iPhone, BlackBery, and Android operating systems – devices that many potential Kindle buyers already own. Shortcovers lets users read the first chapter of a book without charge with the option of buying additional chapters individually or the entire book at rates comparable to Kindle and Sony. The difference between Shortcovers and other ebook readers already available on many mobile platforms is the relationship Indigo has with publishers. Shortcovers will initially offer over 50,000 titles, only a third of which are public domain titles. Indigo will also offer news and magazine articles – ala Kindle. Until prices drop dramatically – which may depend on advances in thin displays – the Shortcovers model may make more inroads in popularizing digital formats than Amazon and Sony can only dream of.

I like to think of myself as someone who is painfully aware of their own foibles and therefore restrains from pointing out others – at least as much as I can. But this is one story I just can’t resist. According to techcrunch.com, a woman broke her children’s Wii by repeatedly inserting different credit cards into the DVD drive slot. Why you may ask? Because she had been told to “put in her credit card when prompted”.

Almost ten years ago I moved to the D.C. area for the second time and finally broke down and purchased my first cell phone. Once I arrived in my new home, all my business contacts, friends, and family knew my new cell number and used it exclusively. It wasn’t until many years later that I signed up for a VOIP line for my home. Perhaps most of you haven’t been without a landline that long – but in late 2008 how many of you still have a physical line to a local telco? Click to visit a TechCrunch.com and answer their poll ‘Do you still have a landline?’ and see where you fit in with the rest of the tech crowd.

Peter Bright has posted an article on ars technica reporting that the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft will default to “standards mode”. Though not exactly fully W3C compliant, IE8 will be a huge leap from earlier versions of IE. This is good news to frustrated web developers who have struggled with developing web pages that work and display equally across the major browsers. IE has notoriously not been standards compliant in the past and Microsoft has tried to muscle they’re own “standards” into the development community. It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft continues down this path, or succumbs to the temptations of the past.

As reported by CNET News.com, Microsoft has released a list of programs which will not function with the upcoming, and long anticipated, service pack 1 for Vista. The list is mainly made up of security and antivirus products, but there are a few everyday apps that will surprise many. After all the headeaches with the Vista launch, Microsoft doesn’t need another flop with they’re “fix”. Read more about incompatible SP1 applications here.

Following a California court ruling, wikileaks.org’s domain registrar, Dynadot, was ordered to stop resolving the wikileaks domain name to the wikileaks.org website. Wikileaks was designed as an anonymous way whistle-blowers could post government and corporate documents without fear of retribution. Not unexpectedly, this didn’t go over well in the corporate world. The case that brought wikileaks down was brought by a Swiss banking group, Julius Baer,  after they discovered hundreds of internal documents detailing its offshore activities were posted on the site. Allegedly, these documents showed that the group was involved in money laundering and tax evasion. Wikileaks claims the order was unconstitutional and a form of censorship. You can read more about the wikileaks.org case here.

Technorati Tags: social network,steven spielberg,paranormal

According to techcrunch.com, Steven Spielberg is involved in building a new social network which will focus on the paranormal. According to insiders, the site will let users research and share ghostly and extraterrestrial stories. Expect a video component as well. Is this a good idea in the already crowded social media space? Normally we would say no, but perhaps Spielberg’s name is the ‘X’ factor that will draw visitors. Still, we doubt a crush of visitors will crash the servers when the site goes live.

If you still haven’t figured out what to give to the geek in your life, or satisfy your own inner nerd with a gift to yourself, here are two links for some great gift ideas that won’t break the bank. The first link is lifehacker.com’s Gift Guide 2007. Ranging from $10 to $100, these gifts cover what to get for the office ‘secret santa’ gift exchange, to that unexpected present your Java developer brother will never forget. If you want to narrow your search to tech gifts on the low end of the price scale, dvice.com has a great list of 12 geek gifts under $30. Make sure you check out both sites, your sure to find something – even if its for yourself.

Sometimes there are legitimate reasons you want to keep your surfing private which don’t involve nefarious activities or pornography. Maybe you’re shopping online while at your favorite coffee shop while surrounded by twenty-something cyberpunks’ with Linux laptops. Or perhaps you work with government or corporate information that must remain secure when transmitted over the Internet. Whatever the reason, you have a few choices. You can do a Google search for free anonymous proxies which are often ad supported and run outside the US. Personally, I find this solution sketchy. You’re trusting the web site to actually use strong encryption and not to snoop your network traffic themselves. Another option is to pay for an anonymous proxy service, such as the popular anonymizer.com. Anonymizer is a great service but it can cost over $100 per year. If you don’t want to pay for anonymous surfing your best bet is TOR (The Onion Router network). TOR is an open source project that connects you to free anonymous proxy servers through an encrypted connection. TOR is a respected and trusted source which won’t cost you a penny. Unfortunately, TOR isn’t the easiest software to configure and setup initially. But if running TOR sounds interesting, check out this article on lifehacker.com that links to an easy to follow video showing how to install and use TOR.