What won't you find in Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online MMO? Lines like "No one tosses a dwarf!" But while Turbine trades cheap laughs for careful adherence to canon, their online rendition of Middle-earth is also radically different from the books because of all the world-building author J.R.R. Tolkien didn't do.

The more programs you have installed on your PC, the harder it becomes to find the one you want. That's why I can't live without Launchy, a simple but incredibly useful application launcher that saves me having to sift through the dozens of programs in my Start menu.

Launchy is keyboard-driven. You invoke it by pressing Alt-Space (or a hotkey combination of your choice), then type the first few letters of the program you want. For example, to launch Google Picasa, I merely type "pic" and then press Enter. For iTunes, I type "itu." Excel is "ex." You get the idea. Usually you can find what you're after with just two or three letters, though occasionally you may have to type a few more.

You see an interesting girl at the bar. Before you approach her, you take a quick snapshot of her with your phone, and -- within seconds -- get automatically connected to her Facebook page to find out her favorite song, or to see if she's even single.

It may sound like something out of a movie, but this sort of online-offline integration is now a reality. A company from the Netherlands has come up with a way to let you wear functioning social Web links on your clothes, and you can take their idea and do it for free. Sound crazy? Keep reading.

What won't you find in Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online MMO? Lines like "No one tosses a dwarf!" But while Turbine trades cheap laughs for careful adherence to canon, their online rendition of Middle-earth is also radically different from the books because of all the world-building author J.R.R. Tolkien didn't do.

Sometimes people use technology such as artificial limbs to regain capabilities that they have lost. San Francisco artist Tanya Vlach lost her left eye in a 2005 car accident. Since then she has used a prosthetic eye, but now she wants something more.

Vlach issued a challenge to engineers to create a small Webcam that can fit into her prosthetic eye. As Vlach puts it: "There have been all sorts of cyborgs in science fiction for a long time, and I'm sort of a sci-fi geek. With the advancement of technology, I thought, 'Why not?'"

Despite Adobe's progress working on a version of Flash for the iPhone, it has become evident that the application would violate Apple's strict Terms of Service. Unless Apple lessens its grasp on the iPhone and lets a little open-source diplomacy through, Flash would never survive the App Store gauntlet.

After days of anticipation and complaints from cranky bloggers about the App Store approval process, Google's voice search for iPhone is out! The verdict? Pretty good, but not perfect. Unfortunately, for reprobates like myself who own a cPhone (c for crap) instead of the iPhone we can only look on in envy at the iPhone elect, so let's see what they're saying.

The most general criticism is that while Google's voice technology is some of the best most critics have ever used, it's not perfect. John Markoff at The New York Times says it works about 95 percent of the time, but had trouble with exotic or unusual names. He also said that it works best when speaking the way you type i.e. don't worry about speaking in full sentences. Voice search seems to be pretty fast too, according to iPhone Atlas Google's app was much faster for complex phrases than the keyboard, nothing surprising there I suppose.

Netbooks--super-small notebooks designed primarily for Web surfing, e-mail, and light applications--are all the rage these days. But as portable as they are, they depend primarily on Wi-Fi for wireless Internet access--and Wi-Fi hotspots aren't as ubiquitous as cell phone networks.

The iPhone does many things well. But this probably isn't one of them.

An alleged female poster on the Apple Support site is reporting that she found a "raunchy picture" on her husband's iPhone, and that the photo had been sent via Yahoo email to another woman. Her husband admitted taking the picture-we can't describe the contents here-but claims that he never sent it to anyone.

Comcast high-speed Internet customers in parts of Oregon and Southwest Washington will have a much-faster option starting in December. The cable provider is rolling out its Extreme 50 service, which has download speeds of up to 50 megabits per second.

Called “wideband” by Comcast, but officially known as DOCSIS 3.0, the high-speed service seems like a bandwidth hog’s dream. That is, until you realize that Comcast’s 250GB monthly download cap remains in place. Keep to the cap, however, and the benefits are obvious. Extreme 50 customers should be able to download a high-def movie (6 GB) in about 16 minutes, Comcast says.

Yahoo Chief Executive and co-founder Jerry Yang announced Monday that he will resign from his position as soon as the company appoints a replacement for him. After a tumultuous year at the forefront of one of Web's prolific companies, Yang will return to his previous role directing Yahoo's global strategy. But the question is where will troubled Internet company go now?

Yahoo has repeatedly denied during recent weeks that Yang, 40, was about to be replaced. But following a Yahoo board meeting on Monday, Yang's fellow directors agreed to accept his resignation from the chief executive job.

Let me start by saying that I'm generally a disaster at anything involving hand-eye coordination. I'm terrible at mini-golf, much less even able to try the real thing. So imagine my surprise when I landed a putt on my first try using an iPhone as the club--and a PC as the putting green.