In my quest to learn that the music from the T-Mobile photo-messaging ad is Röyksopp's "So Easy" (thank you Steve's Music) I also came across the MadPlayer which looks like it could be a lot of fun.  It's going to be a long time before the gadget fund has £250 again though. :(

A wishlist for my news Aggregator (currently Radio):

I want to be able to specify how long items stay in the aggregator on a per-feed basis.   At the moment you configure this once and every feed gets that setting.  Some feeds contain things that I know I have to think long and hard about, others contain ephemera that, if I don't comment straight away, I probably never will.  Allow me to make that decision and make the aggregator more effective.

Allow me to combine feeds together into channels.  Let me display & manage each channel independently.  Let me use topic metadata to combine feeds dynamically into channels.

Allow me to filter posts and prioritize posts using topic metadata.  Right now every feed and every post has equal priority, the only factor is "freshness".  Let me specify key metadata that shows what I think is most important (a scoring system maybe?)

Give me a quick 1-click means of deleting all the posts in a view

Behind bars at one of Britain's packed prisons. More and more people are being sent to jail. Birmingham Prison is in the frontline of the overcrowding crisis. But what damage is the crisis doing? And what's the view from inside the cells? [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

Disturbing story (check out the virtual tour of the 2-man cell).  What's more disturbing is that instead of asking whether prison is the right solution the debately question seems to be "where can we build more prisons?"

There seems to be little real debate (or willingness to debate) in this country about other approaches to tackling people who commit crimes.  My own view is that prison is an incredibly expensive way of achieving very little.

According to HM Prisons in the year from April 1998 to March 1999 the average cost of a prison place for one year was £22,649.  My guess is that this figure hasn't gone down in the last two and a half years.

So basically it costs the economy the equivalent of one persons job for every member of the prison population?  But worse than that, we can probably assume that some of the 73,000 in prison today would be earning something on the outside and contributing to the economy.  To whom does this make any sense at all?

It seems to me that a good idea before we get to 2010 (and an estimated imate population of 110,000) would be to take a good look at what the social aims of a justice system are and how best to achieve them.

What do you know about Germany?. UK schools children are only taught about Germany's Nazi past, says the new German ambassador. Test you knowledge of German history. [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

4 out of 10, not great.  But I'd like to think I could do that badly on English history too...

Euro arrest warrant under fire. The proposed European arrest warrant could see Britons sent for trial abroad for things which are not offences in the UK, opponents claim. [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

I've no problem, in principle, with the idea of a European arrest warrant provided that it goes hand in hand with significant legal reform and harmonization across the union and an emphasis on tackling the problems of identity theft.  This is of particular significance when you consider how the union is to expand to, potentially, include countries like Turkey.

I accidentally deleted the item where I got this, it probably wouldn't be too hard to find it again.  The summary is below but the details are not important, what is important is that the state of fear in the US is now beginning.  It will be impossible to establish beyond reasonable doubt the details of this or the incidents that are to come.

• An amateur photographer named Mike Maginnis was arrested on Tuesday in his home city of Denver - for simply taking pictures of buildings in an area where Vice President Cheney was residing.
• Maginnis, who says he always carried his camera wherever he went, snapped about 30 pictures of the hotel and the surrounding area - which included Denver police, Army rangers, and rooftop snipers.
• As he was putting his camera away, Maginnis found himself confronted by a Denver police officer who demanded that he hand over his film and camera.
• After being brought to the District 1 police station on Decatur Street, Maginnis was made to wait alone in an interrogation room.
• The agent told Maginnis that his "suspicious activities" made him a threat to national security, and that he would be charged as a terrorist under the USA-PATRIOT act.
• The Secret Service agent tried to make Maginnis admit that he was taking the photographs to analyze weaknesses in the Vice President's security entourage and "cause terror and mayhem."
• Rather than contacting a lawyer, he called the Denver Post and asked for the news desk.
• This was immediately overheard by the desk sergeant, who hung up the phone and placed Maginnis in a holding cell.
• He received no copy of an arrest report, and no receipt for his confiscated possessions.
• He was told that he would probably not get his camera back, as it was being held as evidence.
• Maginnis's lawyer contacted the Denver Police Department for an explanation of the day's events, but the police denied ever having Maginnis - or anyone matching his description - in custody.
• The new police powers introduced by the USA-PATRIOT act, in the name of fighting terrorism, have been frightening in their apparent potential for abuse.
• It suggests that a wide range of activities which might be considered "suspicious" could be suddenly labeled a prelude to terrorism, and be grounds for arrest.