It seems that Richard is making a good recovery so far.

Jeremy Clarkson said that Richards has taken his first steps, and his family have said that Richard has moved into the general medical ward.

There has been a website setup to raise money for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance Charity, please pop along and donate.

Get well soon Hamster, let’s see you back on Top Gear for the first show of the new season.

Every now and again I like to mix some tunes. My current favorite mixing app is MixMeister (and has been for some time).

The guys behind MixMeister have released a BPM calculator for free. It’s not bad (it’s part of the full application).

Pop along to their website to download it.

News from the BBC/TopGear site has it that Richard is making a good recovery so far. So much so in fact, that he has been moved out of the intensive care unit.

The doctors havesai they are 'reasonably optimistic' about his final recovery, so with sme luck, we could see him back on our TV's in the not too distant future.

Get well soon Richard.

I heard the news this morning that pint sized star (and ladies favorite) Richard Hammond of Top Gear and Brainiac fame has been badly injured.

Richard was filming (for Top Gear) and was attempting a record breaking run in a jet powered car on an airfield in York. The car apparently lost control at near 300Mph (490kph) and veered off to the right and injured Richard badly.

Dave Ogan a former fire fighter, and one of the safety people there to help with the filming said "One of the parachutes had deployed but it went on to the grass and spun over and over before coming to a rest about 100 yards from us."

Richard was flown to the Leeds General Hospital, and his condition has apparently improved slightly overnight.

Both co-presenters on the BBC show (Jeremy Clarkson and James May)have been to visit Richard and his family, with them saying that Richard and his family were "the most important concerns we have".

"I would just like to say how heartened Richard will be when I tell him just how many motorists and truck drivers on my way here wound down their windows to say they were rooting for him. Both James and I are looking forward to getting our hamster back."

Richards family have asked for no more information to be released to the media, however if any major developments happen I am sure we will hear about them.

What will happen to this series of BBC's Top Gear, due to start in October is unknown at present, but it will not be the same without him. He is after all the only reason my wife actually lets me watch the show.

My best wishes go out to Richards family (Mindy his wife, Willow and Isabella his daughters).

We hope to see him powersliding again soon.

Other People's thoughts.

Dan (IsThereFood) - Fingers Crossed
GizModo - Please take this post down, it's not well written or needed at the moment
TopGear Official Website

If you would like to email your thoughts through to Richard and his family, please use this link

Images copyright BBC.

Microsoft have announced some of the HD-DVD details in Japan.

The drive will cost 19,800 yen (around £90/130 Euros or $170), and rumors of integration into the actual 360 have been slammed again, with Shane Kim (Microsoft Game Studios) saying there is "no plans to incorporate an HD-DVD drive inside the Xbox 360"

Other news has it that there will be a dashboard update that will include native support for 1080p on the device. This now kills Sony's claims to being the only one of the next Gen consoles supporting 'True HD'. Microsoft have stated they are not looking to develop for the resolution however.

I've been running the AKU 3.2 update on my MDA Pro for a few days now, and thought I would say how it's coming along.

My first impressions of it seemed to be correct, it feels faster and more stable, and it is.

All of the applications I have installed on it work fine, so far. The new IE is much better, not quite Opera, but getting there.

The ability to use MP3/WMA audio for notifications is a godsend, there so much smaller than the equivalent WAV files that you used to have to use.

Also, even if you are not thinking of going to AKU 3.2, then I highly recommend upgrading to radio stack 1.13. Not only is the Bluetooth now certainly more stable (not had any spurious disconnects from my Parrot 3300), but the UMTS network coverage is certainly better, I get the UMTS connection in places that it just never happened before.

On my drive home in the evening I noticed that the network is mostly T-Mobile UMTS UK, where it used to be T-Mobile UK (GPRS).

If you were thinking about the upgrade, I say do it. You won't be sorry.

I've been looking around for a plugin to do Flickr in Media Center for a while now. I've come accross one, and it's not bad!

Big Screen Photo's allows you to do just that, it uses the .Net  V3 (WinFX Beta) so you have to have that on the box, and will work on both MCE2005 and Vista.

Pop along and grab a copy if you use MCE and Flickr, you wont reget it.

 I've just found a new feature in Vista, the disk manager now allows you to resize partitions on the fly.

Just right click My Computer from the Start menu, then click manage. You will now get th popup for admin use, ok that.

Now click disk manager, then just right click a drive. You can now expand or shrink a drive.

I've taken the plunge, and put the latest and (possibly) greatest version of the firmware on my T-Mobile MDA Pro.

The AKU3.2 is not an official firmware release, more of a homebrew (AKU3.2 is not available from anyone but Microsoft at the moment).

However it seems stable and without a doubt quicker than the AKU2.2 release I had before.

To do the upgrade you need the following download, and then have a read through the readme.txt included.

I've also included the Radio 1.13 rom, and the startup splash screen changer in the RAR file.

If you have any issues, then leave a comment, or pop along to XDA-Developers.

Also if you have a MDA Vario2 (or HTC Wizard) then pop along to Dan's site, he's done the same on his one of them.

It seems that the 'crack' for the Windows Media Codec's Digital Rights Management has forced BSkyB to suspend the Sky By Broadband system.

FairUse4WM has been around in various forms for a while now, but the latest release has bypassed Microsoft's latest versions of DRM.

Microsoft rushed a fix out in an attempt to stop the problem, however a new version of FairUse4WM was released that has bypassed Microsoft's fix.

As it currently stands, you can strip DRM from individual files. However a memo that was sent from Microsoft has promised a solution shortly.

For more information on this subject, I recomend a look at the Doom9 Forums

Or download the latest version (1.2-Fix) from Here