BBC Magazine convinced 13-year-old Scott Campbell to trade in his iPod for a Walkman for a week and see what he thought. Scott thinks the iPod wins when it comes to sound quality, color, weight, and the shuffle feature. The Walkman, however, offers two headphone sockets, making it much easier to listen to music with a friend. My favorite part of the review is, "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that a Spanish woman who is thought to be the world's oldest blogger has died in Muxia, the northern coastal town where she was born on December 23, 1911. María Amelia López's posts, which chronicled her civil war memories, failing health, left-wing views, and cantankerous humor, attracted a global following and more than 500 readers have left tribute messages on her site after her family published a final post to announce her death. The blog began in 1995 as a gift from her grandson Daniel, with whom she lived, who had no idea what he was unleashing into cyberspace after he taught her to navigate the Internet after she pestered him to download biographies of poets and politicians. He later become her chief assistant, typing in her words as she dictated. 'Now so many people write to me that I can't hope to reply to them all, though I want to,' she explained. 'My grandson complains that he has to work as well, he can't spend all his time typing.' López said in an interview that the Internet had given her a new lease of life and in one of her last posts, published in February, she wrote; 'When I'm on the internet, I forget about my illness. The distraction is good for you — being able to communicate with people. It wakes up the brain, and gives you great strength.'" The Times adds, "Mrs Lopez became the world's oldest blogger on the death of 108-year-old Australian Oliver Riley in June 2008. The new holder of this unofficial title is unknown, although the actor Kirk Douglas, 92, who blogs regularly on his MySpace page, could be in the running. Twitter's oldest microblogger is the 104-year-old Briton Ivy Bean."

An anonymous reader writes "A new category of 3-D motion controller for gamers uses a novel type of micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) gyroscope to track hand motions with unparalleled accuracy. By detecting the natural motions made by remote control users — as opposed to the unnatural motions that gamers must learn to control today — the MEMS chip is sure to be incorporated in both game consoles and other consumer electronics like TV remote controls. Nintendo has already incorporated a similar MEMS gyro into its forthcoming MotionPlus controller for the Wii, but this newer type of gyroscopic motion sensor will enable even more intuitive and agile control."

hahiss writes "Apparently, NoScript has taken to adding its own whitelist updates to Adblock Plus — so that the ads on the NoScript page show up — without notifying users. (It is described on the NoScript addon page, however.) This was a part of the last update to NoScript. Wladimir Palant, the main developer of Adblock Plus, describes the situation in an informative blog post." Update — 5/02 at 12:30 GMT by SS: Reader spyrochaete notes that "InformAction, makers of the NoScript extension for Firefox, have removed the recently introduced AdBlock exceptions which unblocked the revenue-producing ads on the NoScript homepage with little or no warning to the user. According to the changelog, InformAction pushed out an update specifically addressing this controversial decision 'permanently and with no questions asked.'"