Wii bowling is a faithful recreation of the popular US sport of ten-pin bowling, and allows players to bowl in their own homes, using all of the same actions and movements that they would use in a bowling alley.

Wii’s interpretation of ten-pin bowling is very realistic in the sense that your own bowling style comes across in the game. For example, if when you play the real thing you find that your bowling style means your shots lilt from left to right, you’ll see that happen in the game. Some people will be able to bowl the ball straight and true, just as in real life.

One big advantage over the real game is that those who struggle to play bowling in a bowling alley due to conditions such as arthritis can play Wii Sports without any problems. Your fingers don’t come under the same sort of stress they would when holding a real bowling ball, so you can play Wii Sports bowling without any problems.

The problem with Wii bowling, and indeed with all of the Wii Sports games, is that by hyper extending your arm to go through the actions and without any of the resistance you would feel from holding a real ball, you can put your arm under some real strain. Of course, the more competitive you are, the more likely this is to happen.

However a new craze that started in Europe and has now made it to the States is the silent rave. That’s right, a rave where not a sound can be heard. The idea is that everyone who attends the rave brings their iPod or MP3 player, and dances along to their own music.

As weird as it sounds, it’s a concept that has really caught on. Last month a silent rave took place in New York’s union square, where more than a thousand ‘silent ravers’ showed up and raved the night away until 1 am, on the street, in full view of passers by.

Mr. Wesson is an exchange student from London, and he organised the New York silent rave:

It sounds sort of phony, but it really is a liberating experience. You wouldn’t just dance on the street on your own at any time, so the fact that you do it at this event, it’s just really fun.

One thing that always been the scourge of the raver however is the authorities. Gaining approval from the authorities for a silent rave is something that remains a grey area.

He said he didn’t get approval from police for the New York event because he hadn’t anticipated such a massive turnout, but police did show up anyway.

Police only turned up two hours into it, and as far as I know no arrests were made. People were just dancing. They weren’t doing anything wrong. The police stood by and some of them even started dancing themselves.

The audio books are downloadable from their website, and are completely free. The free MP3 books come in both fiction and non fiction titles, and are available from http://digitallibrary.centralpalibraries.org.

This means that the books can be listened to on computers, MP3 players or even burnt onto CDs.

The director of the Schlow Centre Region library, Betsy Allen, said:

We’re very excited about this service. We think this is a wonderfully modern and helpful service that people will embrace.

Members need to download the OverDrive Media Console program that allows them to access the audio books from the website, and they do also need to have a valid library card.

There are currently 200 titles available for download, including fiction titles in the thriller and romance genres.

It almost never happened though. The MP3 player was very nearly stopped in its tracks before it even got started, and it was the player’s versatility that almost proved its downfall.

California based company Diamond released the Rio PMP300 in 1998. It featured 32MB of storage and was the first MP3 player released in the United States that was manufactured by a company with a US office.

This is where it all so very nearly went wrong.

The Recording Industry Association of America saw the device as a direct threat to the whole music industry. They applied for a restraining order barring sale of the device in the US, claiming that it contravened the Home Recording Act from 1992, because owners of the device would be able to copy music from one format to another. Incredibly a US court granted a temporary order, blocking the sale of the Rio.

They did however retract the order after they had decided that Diamond could not be held responsible for the actions of consumers who bought their MP3 player.

Once this ruling had been made, the MP3 player market exploded in the US. Accompanied by the fact that people were going online very quickly in America, file sharing sites sprang up to feed the MP3 player owner’s market.

Music sharing on a grand scale was born.

Then came Apple, and in 2001 the iPod took the market on to the next level.

The report was published in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper. It claims that the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan is looking to introduce a tax system whereby MP3 player manufacturers would have to pay a fee, or royalty charge, to the music copyright holders to make up for the deemed loss of profits they would incur as a result of the digital download format.

Although no figures have been decided upon, it is expected that the tax may be as high as several hundred Japanese Yen per MP3 player. This cost would then of course be passed on to the customer.

Japan has taxed other digital recording devices in the past, with cassette players and mini-disc players carrying a tax of several percent since 1993.

The government in Japan attempted to extend the law to cover digital media devices in 2005, but failed.

The Music Business Group in the UK is attempting to do the same thing in the UK by persuading the British government. If Japan is successful, the MBG will gain encouragement for their proposals.

However Apple recently skipped on a few paces with the release of the iPhone, a touch pad iPod mixed with a mobile phone. The iPhone is more of a personal computer than an iPod, capable of browsing the web, sending emails, taking photos, making phone calls and yes, even playing digital music.

But will the iPhone spark an end to the common MP3 player? The type of technology that plays music, and only plays music?

Hailed by many, including ‘The Gadget Show’, and the best piece of technology of the year the iPhone was released to great praise and huge public demand, yet its saturation hasn’t quite reached the levels of the iPod. Nor in fact has it proved as popular as other mobile handsets such as the Sony Walkman range, or Nokia’s impressive N-95.

No, what is really holding the iPhone back, despite the hefty price tag of course, is the fact that the handset itself is tied in to O2, when a great many potential customers are already involved in contracts with other network providers such as Vodafone and Orange.

Remarkable piece of kit that the iPhone is, for it to truly be successful in the UK and to reach the kind of saturation levels that the iPod has enjoyed, it surely must be opened up to be cross network compatible.

However, not all of those websites are illegal, a great many offer you legitimate music for download, free of any rights complications and available for you to copy, listen to and share as you wish.

This past Monday, the Nine Inch Nails offered their latest album for download, in its entirety, completely free of charge from their official website NIN.com. The album is called ‘The Slip’ and features ten tracks. The download was accompanied on the website by a message from the Nine Inch Nails’ lead singer Trent Reznor:

Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years — this one’s on me.

The band plan to release a hard copy of the album in stores this Summer, in July.

Their manager, Jim Guerino, said in an interview with Billboard.com:

Reznor has been in a prolific phase and we didn’t want ‘business’ to get in the way of getting the art in the hands of the fans.

You can download the album free of charge from the Nine Inch Nails website, complete with a PDF of lyrics.

Melanie Shernofsky is a group fitness co-ordinator at the Mansfield Club in Montreal, Canada. She says that clients in their fitness centre rely heavily on MP3 players and the inspirational power of music to help them through a difficult routine.

Nine out of 10 people workout with an iPod or MP3 player.

Although it has to be acknowledged that MP3 players haven’t created the surge in fitness fanatics using music to help through routines. For the last few decades music has been used in roller rinks and aerobics classes, whether it be Buddy Holly, the Pointer Sisters or Amy Winehouse.

Music helps people concentrate on what they are doing and block out the physical pain of exercise.

Jim Gavin is a clinical psychologist of health at Concordia University:

Music takes us away from the physical discomfort and the process of exercise itself. Music tends to separate us from what we are physically doing and leads us further away from how we are feeling.

Psychologically people find it easier to work out to music as it makes the time fly by quicker and detracts from the monotony of the task in hand, though there is no data to suggest that listening to music can make you work out for longer.

The track is called ‘Shut Up and Let Me Go’ and features on the Salford based band’s debut album, entitled ‘We Started Nothing’; released on May 19th.

The Ting Tings are made up of two members, Jules De Martino and Katie White. They got together to form the Ting Tings in 2006 while they lived in Islington Mill, Salford, Manchester.

They are set to release their debut album, We Started Nothing, in May 2008.

Previous singles from the Ting Tings have failed to chart in the UK, but with the boost a TV commercial for Apple will give them, expect to hear a lot of the Salford band in the coming months.

The TV commercial will air in the UK and across 22 countries in Europe in the next few weeks, and is already being shown now in the USA.

Previously Apple has used bands such as Feist, CSS and Brendan Benson for adverts for their iPod.

So serious are the Australian police force that they are running advertisements in the shape of hard hitting poster campaigns, across New South Wales warning of the dangers of listening to your iPod while crossing the road.

They want music lovers to avoid changing tracks on their MP3 players while they are out on the street so that they pay more attention to the dangers of the traffic around them.

The posters show what appear to be dead bodies lying on the roads, marked in an outline with a white iPod cable in place of the typical white chalk outline.

The Chief Traffic Services Commander of New South Wales, John Hartley, claims that the increasing amount of MP3 players and iPods that are being sold and used across Australia means that people should be made more aware of the dangers of using them while out and about. The campaign aims to target motorists as well as pedestrians.

Strangely enough John Hartley didn’t reveal any road death stats that were attributed to MP3 players.