The RepRap is a printer of three-dimensional objects. It’s like the desktop printer you might have at home, but instead of printing on paper, the RepRap makes hard copy in three dimensions out of plastic from models designed on a computer. It’s an extremely powerful technology that could give people the ability to create virtually anything.

The RepRap needs to get much faster before it can even begin to realise its potential, but it is still early days for a device - even though it has been dreamt of since the dawn of the enlightenment - and Bowyer is not done yet. Soon, he…

The new version of Firefox feels much faster. The notorious memory leaks of flavors of 2.0 are plugged. The developers claim 3.0’s Javascript performance is 9.3 times faster than IE7’s and 2.7 times faster than its predecessor. They also claim 15,000 improvements to the old version - most of those are under the hood…

What sets Firefox apart is that it's open source, which means that anyone can code for it. This is best expressed in the gazillions of plugins, or add-ons as they're known in the Mozilla world, written by individuals to extend the…

IBM’s latest supercomputer crunches numbers at enormous speeds–and will soon be put to use for nuclear warfare.

Speaking yesterday, the US secretary of energy, Samuel Bodma, called Roadrunner an “enormous accomplishment”, adding: “Roadrunner will not only play a key role in maintaining the US nuclear deterrent, it will also contribute to…

Could Zeppelin's airships soon be gracing our skies again? A new generation of environmentally friendly 'hybrid airships' could be just about to take off

“They were for a very limited number of wealthy passengers and mainly as an alternative to luxury passenger shipping services to a very few destinations,” says Douglas Botting, author of Dr Eckener's Dream Machine, a biography of the…

Easily create your own ringtones for any Bluetooth enabled phone (this is pretty much a standard feature with modern phones). Requires only a few free programs and a Bluetooth USB adapter which can be purchased on eBay for around $5. Takes no time at all once you learn how to do it correctly. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

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Many scientists now believe the Earth can be altered to tackle global warming. But are these geoengineers being overly optimistic? Danny Bradbury investigates

Peter Flynn has oceanographic ideas of his own. The professor of mechanical engineering at Canada's University of Alberta cites worries about the Gulf Stream, which cycles warm water from the south Atlantic to the north, and sends cooler water…

Simple guerrilla filmmaking tutorial on how to design your own barn doors for a cheap but very effective lighting fixture. A great addition to any low-budget filmmaker’s lighting kit.

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Google is more vulnerable to competitors than people think.

So why is Google popular and is it dislodge-able? It all comes down to that frightful word “brand”. But Google is unprecedented because it built up its brand without any paid advertising. We did it for them. It became a verb in…

As more stores and record labels abandon digital rights management, Apple may have an alternative plan for subscription services

This is a common problem for users installing the BBC's iPlayer software, for example, which also uses Microsoft DRM. The fix, described in detail on the iPlayer support pages, involves deleting all the files in the hidden DRM folder within…

The problem arose when Yahoo decided as an anti-spamming measure to stop any emails going through the servers, which it runs for its partner BT, that did not have a matching BT/Yahoo address in the From: field

To combat this, Yahoo tried to filter out messages whose From: did not match the user name - but that caught thousands of BT users who use their own domain. BT/Yahoo intended that anyone doing so should just add that domain to an…

Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you're entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. So how do you protect yourself? By hiding your data.

So your best defence is to clean up your laptop. A customs agent can't read what you don't have. You don't need five years' worth of email and client data. You don't need your old love letters and those photos (you know the…

Real-time micro-blogging is gaining in popularity. If you're wondering what's the point, here's our guide

Twitter.com obviously. You don't need to sign up; you can watch the flow of messages from a particular user at their username (eg Guardian Technology's, which is at twitter.com/guardiantech). However, Twitter only becomes useful…

Thousands of discarded computers from western Europe and the US arrive in the ports of west Africa every day, ending up in massive toxic dumps where children burn and pull them apart to extract metals for cash.
“Ghana is increasingly becoming a dumping ground for waste from Europe and the US,” according to Mike Anane…

Six years ago the EU produced the waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) directive, which introduced new curbs and restrictions on the movement of e-waste. The directive, which came into effect in Britain in January last…

Tethered appliances’ are stifling the innovation that led to the rise of the world wide web, argues academic and author Jonathan Zittrain

The Future Of The Internet And How To Stop It is a densely-argued, sometimes overstated book, but in the lecture theatre at New York university, where he's also a visiting professor, Zittrain becomes a different person. “He is, bar…