I previously wrote about the BBC Video Firewall which seemed a bit strong for R&D videos. Well, the lads at BBC R&D have put some of their videos up on their new web site. On their web site the videos are viewable outside of the UK. The same videos on their blog are not viewable outside the UK. Ah, platforms. The interesting ones are about the move to London from Kingswood - embedded below.

Dan Chung (The Guardian and DSLR News Shooter) has shot a video of the Zhongguancun gadget city in Beijing. He shot the video to test his new Canon 550D cameras. But it is of interest to a geek audience because it shows what China’s gadget/electronic markets are like. They’re huge multi-floored malls in which you can get everything you need to satisfy your inner geek.

Shanghai’s bizarre weather continues Shanghai Daily is predicting this winter will be the longest this century. I can believe it. It is currently cold, raining and thundering outside.

According to the China Daily an average of 2.1 billion SMS messages are sent per day in China. Imagine the infrastructure required to support such volume. The monitoring systems must be huge! Gotta go and delete some junk Chinese SMSs from my phone…

Nice cup of tea and a biscuit? There’s a standard for that. British Standard 6008 available from the BSI for a mere GBP 32 or for free on Scribd and from this Hacker News thread. But wait, British standards are not enough. It is also an International Standard - ISO 3103. It turns out ISO have a whole range of tea related standards. Good to see our taxes being put to good use.

Last night, at my local DVD store, I purchased a Blu-ray disc for RMB 80 (USD 12). The same disc on Amazon costs USD 17.50 (down from USD 35). It is safe to assume, just like every other title in the shop, it is a fake. When Blu-ray was introduced there was doubt as to its viability due to the rise of Internet delivery and competition from HD-DVD. But the appearance of fake discs means Blu-ray has arrived as a standard. It must be viable because there is a big enough market for pirates to be shipping discs. Therefore, I…