TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Green is the new black — and bamboo is the new titanium. After years of churning out glossy, metal-finish, high-polish products, electronics companies are taking their design cues from nature — and trying to pick up the sheen of eco-friendliness — by wrapping their products in bamboo veneers.

Bamboo has become the "it" material for many gadget designers.

Barcelona — We like the look of the new W995 from Sony Ericsson. Or we would, if there were no danger of it falling into the hands of teenagers who would use its loud but still rather tinny stereo speakers to pump their evil noise into our otherwise peaceful days.

The new Walkman phone is, apart from this rather startling lapse, a pretty neat looking device, both inside and out. Aside from the usual (camera, phone) it incorporates Omniphone, an all-you-can-eat music download service which Sony Ericsson has re-branded as Media Go. For the first six months of your contract, you can download any song in the catalog (I had the Swedish demo guy search for Roxette.

Unix weenies everywhere will be partying like it’s 1234567890 this Friday.

That’s because, at precisely 3:31:30 p.m. Pacific time on February 13, 2009, the 10-digit "epoch time" clock used by most Unix computers will display all ten decimal digits in sequence. (That’s 6:31:30 Eastern, or 23:31:30 UTC.)

Unlike time systems intended for humans, Unix time simply counts the number of seconds since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.

This may come as a surprise to all you butter and chemically derived margarine spreading Anglos, but here in the healthy center of Europe, spilled oil is a problem. Not the slick, seabird killin’ kind, either — I’m talking about olive oil, the cornerstone of the "Mediterranean diet", the mixture of wine, meat and fried foods which keeps us enviably smooth skinned and skinny.

The problem is with the aceitera, the spouted bottle with which we drizzle the miracle elixir onto every mouthful.

I recently discovered (and became addicted to) the web site FMYLife.com, where people anonymously submit a miserable/horrible incident of their day, signed "FML."  I had a hearty laugh out of the submission above, which alludes to a news story we covered last week about a 9-year-old iPhone developer.

After inventing the Rubik’s Cube, professor Erno Rubik has devised a new puzzle to frustrate and delight us. And this time it’s spherical.

Dubbed the Rubik’s 360, the puzzle consists of six colored balls contained in three transparent plastic spheres. The objective is to move the balls from the inner sphere into their matching colored slots in the outer sphere.

"I feel that the 360 is one of the most innovative and exciting puzzles we’ve developed since the Cube — adopting elements of my original design, challenging the solver to use skill, dexterity and logic," Rubik said in a statement.

With the iPod Classic now offering a "mere" 120GB of storage, media junkies have little choice but to take just a subset of their collections with them, or buy two iPod. Or, of course, get a life and forget about having all their music, all the time.

But those sad-sacks can now load up on a ridiculous 240GB of music and movies – that’s enough music to last them until they next get laid – on Rapid Repair’s modded iPod 5G. The repair company is retrofitting the 5G model with the MK2431GAH 240GB drive from Toshiba, currently the largest 1.8" single platter drive available.

This is the Sharky, a shark-fin tea infuser. Pure novelty, we love it nonetheless, combining as it does the awesomeness of a shark and the Englishness of a "nice cup of tea" into something altogether better and badder.

This macabre synergy changes the way I think about my national brew. Who before ever saw the reddish brown stains dropping cloudy tendrils through hot water and thought "blood"? Not you, and not me.

It’s becoming common knowledge you can hack a netbook to run Mac OS X. But just how does it compete with a real Mac? Tech blog AppleDifferent ran in-depth benchmarks and found an MSI Wind Hackintosh performs on par with a 4-year-old iBook G4.

Well, sort of. The hacked Wind was generally speedier in real-world tasks: It booted up OS X and launched programs faster.

Flexible displays that can be rolled up and stuck into the back pocket of your Levis were one the most exciting technology breakthroughs we saw last year.

As the idea marches towards reality, funding for it is on the rise. The U.S. Army bankrolled much of the initial research on the technology in 2004. Now it is pouring in another $50 million to support the Arizona State University’s Flexible Display Center, which has been doing a lot of research in the area.