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“A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!“  -  A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

This week we began with a catch-up, having not done a show for a couple of weeks. And we touched on the important issue of what Santa was bringing us tech-heads. Gareth will be finding a Drobo under his tree. While I, having rescued what I could from my faulty Seagate drive, will be receiving a Time Capsule for being a good boy this year.

And on to our final stories of 2009…

Zune Twitter app censors rude words – Why, who knows. Maybe they’re trying to drum up some controversy for the Zune app store. Is there even a Zune app store yet? Or maybe Ballmer could only just bear to see his baby referred to as a….. F*^$@!g piece of s^%t.

Microsoft admits code theft – In a refreshing change from normal practice, M$ have admitted and apologised, for blatantly stealing the work of others, and passing it off as they’re own. If it wasn’t amazing enough that a few weeks ago, a Redmond exec admitted to copying Mac OS, when creating Windows. Truly, a Christmas miracle.

Android to burst iPhone’s bubble – It’s inevitable that Android will power the best smartphone ever. Google are using the monkeys, typewriters and Shakespeare principal. You get enough manufacturers making enough different handsets, running enough different versions of the OS, with enough different UI skins and enough different screen sizes. Eventually they’re bound to make the best smartphone.

Google dumps Gears for HTML5 – Wanted to write up that important blog post, while the muse has struck. Use Google Docs, so you can share everything between your different devices. But shock, horror, gasp the ‘cloud’ has deserted you in your hour of need. That’s where Gears came in, allowing to use all the Google office services and Gmail offline. But with the advent of HTML5, Gears has become defunct, it is on more, it is a dead service. Okay not quite yet, but you get the idea. HTML5 is seriously going to kick ass. Plus IE is incompatible, so it could kill that as well. It’s a win win.

TechCrunch and Fusion Garage clash over ‘bad’ JooJoo – The Crunchpad has been crunched. And what ever is happening between Mike Arrington and Chandra Rathakrishnan, you can be sure the legal shenanigans will drag on for quite some time. But the Crunchpad renamed JooJoo will be with us shortly. Then everyone can compare it to the best tablet that’s ‘never’ been made. The mythical, nay legendary Apple tablet.

VLC for the Mac might die – The excellent video utility software VideoLan Client, you can chuck practically any video format at it and it’ll run without a hiccup, might whither and die. The open source software is running out of active developers, to drive the project forward. If there are any developers out there, with the time to donate to this software, please help. We cannot let this useful and important software languish. If this software dies, what am I going to use to watch my collection of Xvid porn.