The Internet has brought us many joys. It's rewritten the rules of business and pleasure. And pain. For it allows what may have seemed like bright ideas at the time ('let's use it to make sure our customers have the latest software', for example) to turn into a stinking pit of misery — usually, but by no means always, after marketing gets its fangs in.

Rail is a two-dimensional language along the lines of Befunge and PATH. It was invented by Jonathon Duerig in 2005.

Who'd have thought that a toilet-brush holder, of all things, would turn out to be an excellent WiFi antenna? The lesson is that you can achieve great results for little expense - and half an hour's work.

Free: It's the magic word for an ever-expanding wealth of downloadable software and online services. Free doesn't necessarily mean good, however, and hunting for freebies can mean sifting through a lot of junk. That's where we come in. We surfed, clicked, and installed to find sparkling free gems capable of planning your time, keeping you in touch, and tuning and securing your PC, not to mention glitzing up your desktop, helping you stay productive, and entertaining you with music, videos, photos, and games. We paid special attention to programs and services you may not have heard of before.

Urban astro-nerds, rejoice! The smog and lights of the city will obscure your view of the heavens no more. And your star photography will twinkle. Now you can go online to access high-quality scopes at dark-sky sites worldwide and order them to take photos for you — cheaply or for free, and at decent resolution. It may take some preparation, but even if the results aren't exactly Hubble-icious, there's something out-of-this-world about playing astronomer for a night.

One simple cut-out shape lets you build all sorts of different designer-looking lampshades! You can make dozens different geometric forms using various numbers of the cut-out shape made from paper or plastic. All the standard mathematical polyhedrons and such are possible.

Hooked together in a single cluster, the PS3 consoles provide his department with the same amount of computing power as a 400-node supercomputer.

A colleague of ours found this set of building blocks to help children learn English. One of the things that is so amazing about teaching English as a foreign language is that it forces you to rethink components of English you take for granted and experience the language in a completely new way. With that in mind, try to remember back…far back... to yourself at a more innocent time.

DRIVERS who can position their car in the middle of a parking space at a supermarket are sliding closer to extinction, conservationists have warned. Research teams have recorded a sharp decline in numbers over the last decade, despite strenuous efforts to educate the public about how easy it is to just put your fucking car in the middle of a parking space.