So, boffins have decided to try and turn on the world's oldest computer. The Harwell Computer, created in 1951, will be restored at the UK's National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. Mind you, it is unlikely that people will be using it for real-world computing tasks now. The system worked using paper tapes and gas-filled tubes.

it's been a bit of a week for Google. That wailing and gnashing of teeth that you might have heard around the Internet this week was largely down to the search engine giant, which managed to bring down the web-based version of its free email service, Gmail, for one hour and 40 minutes on Tuesday. You wouldn't think that would be particularly problematic, but the online world was all abuzz with complaints.

Back when I was a young buck, and got excited by technology for the sake of technology, I used to get excited by ideas like this one. It's a dual screen laptop. Yes, you read that right - a laptop with two screens. The idea is that you can work or play with more comfort and convenience by doubling your screen real estate, no matter where you are.

It's rare that stories about technology turn to tragedy. Normally, when things go wrong with computers, someone loses their term paper thanks to a hard drive crash, or someone's contact list gets mysteriously eaten by an errant software bug. But something much more serious happened to a Canadian laptop user recently, when his laptop (the make wasn't specified) caught fire on his sofa. The 56 year-old Vancouver man was killed in the resulting fire. And as we have already mentioned in previous posts, iPhones and iPods also seem to be catching alight. What's the problem?

Could the Palm Pre blow the iPhone away in Canada? It's been a long time coming, but Palm's new phone is now shipping exclusively through Bell. Designed to mimic many features of the iPhone, it also has some of its own tricks up its sleeve. For example, its multi-tasking capabilities mean that it can run multiple programs at once without it slowing down as much. It also has a neat capability to easily aggregate inboxes from various sources, including social networking sites; not only can you pick up your Gmail and Exchange mail, but you can get your Facebook mail too.

I've always been against eBook readers. Take Amazon's Kindle, for example. On the face of it, it sounds great, right? You can wirelessly order books - often cheaper than their paperback price - and have them delivered to your device in seconds. You can annotate and bookmark them, just like a regular book, but you can store over a thousand titles in something slimmer than an edition of Cole's Notes. What could be better?