I was watching the Welsh television channel S4C the other night, and they mentioned the Karaoke Party website. I didn’t think much about it until yesterday when I went to have a look for myself.

Basically, it’s a website where you can sing along to the hits online. I’ve had a go singing some of the tunes that are available but without a microphone. I’m not brave enough to plug one in and get myself rated on the site, but it can be done!

It’s a pretty new site but they do have a really large library of song available. If they don’t have a song that you’d like to sing along to, you can request it and they’ll get it added. Karaoke Party is definitely one of the websites to keep an eye on in 2009, I think it’s going to be a big hit, especially if you’ve got a group of friends round and a couple of bottles of wine in the fridge.

There’s always an appeal to sing once you’ve had a couple of glasses to calm your nerves, but kids will love it too. Children seem to love singing for some reason and this is the perfect opportunity for them to have some fun.

When I was a child growing up, we never had any gadgets like this. The Tommy 20 is, obviously a tommy gun that’s based on the famous gun from the twenties, but without the real bullets, instead of the real bullets the Tommy 20 fires foam darts.

The magazine of the Tommy 20, as the name suggests, holds 20 of the foam bullets which is handy. Now any target you aim for has no hope of avoiding the barrage of foam that will be zooming towards them. Even better would be to get a group of your friends to buy a Tommy 20 each and have a twenties style shoot out between two teams.

I can see the Tommy 20 being a big hit with teenage boys and dads who are trying to hang on to their youth by fantasising about being gangsters. I do remember a film called Bugsy Malone many years ago who’s cast were all children. They had similar guns but instead of bullets or foam they fired splurge! That film featured a very young Jodie Foster if I remember correctly. Get it out and have a look for yourself - it’s a classic.

So what are you waiting for, get your hands on the Tommy 20, a gangster hat, a pair of gangster shoes and a long overcoat and get yourself out on the streets. There’s so much fun to be had with the Tommy 20!

This is a novel little gadget. The Micro Speaker Keychain does exactly what it says on the box; it’s a speaker and it fits on your keyring. The Micro Speaker Keychain plugs into your MP3 player’s headphone jack with the supplied cable and lets you share your music with your friends and buddies.

A great feature of the Micro Speaker Keychain is that it’s rechargeable via any USB socket so you don’t need to be worrying about buying batteries for it constantly. The good thing is that once it’s fully charged you can play your music through it for up to eight hours.

Indeed, any device with a 3.5″ headphone jack can make use of the Micro Speaker Keychain to play your music to others. So if your mobile has a socket the gadget will be of use to you too. I can see a problem with the Micro Speaker Keychain though. Many, if not all bus and train service providers don’t allow you to play loud music because it disrupts other passangers, so it might not be a good idea to use it in that situation.

The Micro Speaker Keychain is hardly going to break the bank either as it costs under £10 so if you really need yo listen to your tunes on the move, you should get this lovely little gadget.

A few days ago I noticed that some people don’t always get what Social Networking is all about. Especially on websites like Twitter and Facebook.

To me, the whole point of social networking is to enhance and expand your circle of friends, or at least that’s what I thought, but it seems that some people feel that these networks should be closed groups and only the closest friends should be on their lists.

Tagging photos of on Facebook is another thing, OK, I understand if you want privacy, but if you’ve tagged hundreds of pictures of yourself should you remove a rag that someone else has added?

What about adding people who you don’t really know, like secondary or tertiary friends or friends of friends. I’ve just cleared over 100 “friends” who I didn’t really know. So how do people expand their group of friends if people get annoyed if you add people?

It seems that more and more people are signing up to these networks because they’re the “in thing” with a lot of celebrities at the moment but don’t really understand the concept. That is a shame really because the potential for them to meet new friends is immense.

Apple unveiled their newest version of the Safari browser yesterday albeit a beta. There has been a huge buzz about it on Twitter so obviously I had to go and download it for myself. Safari 4 beta is available for both Mac and Windows computers, which is good news for me.

First impressions of this new browser are that it is shiny and polished with a host of new features, for instance Top Sites.  Top Sites displays a thumbnail of your most visited sites in a nicely 3D styled window for you to choose from with a single click. Apple have included Cover Flow in this new browser too, which for me is a welcome addition. It allows you to scroll through your bookmarks and history as you would on you iPhone or iPod touch.

There are other little improvements in this new beta version of Safari which I am yet to discover fully for myself, but I’m liking the browser already. There are obviously some flaws in the browser, it is after all a beta version but these are few and far between in my experience of using it. I have had the browser crash on me a couple of times but nothing more really.

Safari is becoming a serious contender to both Internet Explorer and FireFox and version 4 is closing the gap dramatically. I for one will keep it installed on my machine for the foreseeable future. You can download it from the Apple website now!

To be honest, I don’t know much about creating music from scratch. But I saw this nifty little gadget and thought about sharing it with you guys. So what is the Korg Kaossilator? Well, it is an exciting piece of kit to start with, but its main uses are to create music on the move.

The Korg Kaossilator, or to give it it’s full title, the Korg KAOSS KAOSSILATOR Dynamic Phrase Synthesizer, allows you to create music by simply tapping or sliding your finger across the Korg Kaossilator’s built in touch pad.

From what I have read anyone from a 5 year old to an 80 year old can use this gadget to create some fantastic music, and that’s a pretty big statement. We’ll have to wait and see about that won’t we. But, it does seem that the Korg Kaossilator is highly addictive. Once you start playing with it you’ll have trouble putting it down and doing anything else.

The Korg Kaossilator is battery operated which makes it even more desirable to people who really, really feel they need to be away from the home or studio to create their masterpiece. For those who don’t want to be out and about, it can also be plugged into a mains socket. It also has 2 phono outputs on the back so that you can hook it up to your amplifier or HiFi. Also included is a headphones socket, which is great for your neighbours.

The Korg Kaossilator is definitely a gadget to keep your eye on because there is a big buzz about it in the music industry at the moment. At a price that’s just shy of £140 you could be the next superstar DJ making it big.

Not a gadget today, but a piece of software that I thought some of you would find both interesting and useful. Jing is a screen capture tool that sits on your computer screen unobtrusively until you need to capture the whole screen or an area.

Not only does Jing capture still images (which it saves in .png format), but it also captures videos too. These video clips and images can be saved to your computer or uploaded directly to the screencast.com website.

There are two versions of Jing available also; a free version and a pro version. The pro version costs just under $15 which is about £7 in UK currency. The benefits of going pro are:

• Record full-motion video from your screen
• Share faster with smaller video files
• Upload straight to YouTube
• Strip Jing logos & links from your videos

Jing is also easy to use because of the simple controls. You’ll be up and capturing in minutes once the software is installed. So there you have it, if you need a piece of software that allows you to effortlessly capture still and moving images of your desktop then I’d recommend Jing to do the job for you. There’s nothing else like it for the PC.

Now here’s a device that every iPhone, iPod touch and iPod owner should seriously consider buying. The BluePack iPhone/iPod Back-up Battery is the perfect solution to your power needs on long trips or for when you’ve left your charging cable at home. The BluePack iPhone/iPod Back-up Battery can give up to 250 hours extra standby time, up to 3.5 hours talktime or up to 36 hours audio play back time.

That’s a pretty impressive bunch of figures if you ask me. The BluePack iPhone/iPod Back-up Battery has a rechargeable Li-ion polymer battery at its heart and is recharged by simply plugging the supplied USB cable into a spare USB port on your computer.

Connecting the BluePack iPhone/iPod Back-up Battery to your device is as simple as connecting an ordinary USB cable or charger up to it because the BluePack iPhone/iPod Back-up Battery has the same connector. What could be simpler?

Costing under £30, the BluePack iPhone/iPod Back-up Battery is a serious piece of kit that you can’t really do without if you’re an iPhone or iPod owner. You’ve just got to have one in your arsenal of gadgets. I’ll be getting one soon enough to add to my collection.

I can see the BluePack iPhone/iPod Back-up Battery becoming very popular indeed amongst the Apple fans out there.

I think that this will be my next big purchase now that I have a TV capable of displaying a high definition picture. Blu Ray is undoubtedly the next format that we will all have to convert to, although I can see DVD staying around for a long while yet.

I think that getting the Sony Blu Ray player will be a joy to use and obviously, watching films on it will be totally amazing. I am worried that if I get the Sony Blu Ray player that I’ll want a bigger television though. I doubt that it will happen any time soon though. When I move to live to Bolton, I’ll be living in a smallish room and the 22″ television I have now seems to be the ideal size.

The Sony Blu Ray player has a load of exciting features that come with it:

• 7.1 Channel HD audio bit stream out via HDMI
• 24p True Cinema
• BD-Live ready:BRAVIA Sync
• XrossMediaBar

Not only that, but the Sony Blu Ray Player comes with a wealth of connections:

• 1 x audio line-out
• 1 x component video output
• 1 x composite video output
• 1 x SPDIF output
• 1 x S-Video output
• 1 x Ethernet
• 1 x HDMI output

You have to admit that these are pretty darn good. Obviously the Sony Blu Ray player plays Blu Ray discs, but in addition to this it will play CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD and CD.

Sony seems to be at the forefront of exciting new developments when it comes to things like this and I’m extremely grateful to them. They changed the face of gaming for the better so let us hope that Blu Ray takes off as it should do.

There’s a lot of buzz on the internet and technology bogs about the new Amazon Kimble 2 wireless reader at the moment and I can see why. The Kimble 2 is smaller and lighter than its predecessor.

So why would people want to buy an Amazon Kimble device? Well, in my opinion, it’s a really good gadget and needs to be given time to grow and mature. Some people that I have spoken to think that the idea of the Kimble is “lame”, Now, I find that kind of comment a bit harsh seeing as the person saying it has never used a Kimble device.

To be honest, I haven’t used one either but I can see the potential in owning such a gadget. Being able to access up to 250,000 books whilst on the move is a really exciting idea to me. The books can be downloaded in about 60 seconds too.

The Amazon Kimble 2 could also see you buying your daily newspaper through it. This is something that has really excited me. New newspapers could become available to people; newspapers who are struggling at the moment to get themselves off the ground could cut out traditional printing costs and go completely digital. This is the way forward for a lot of papers. I know that it is a long way off before everyone has a Kimble, or a device similar to a Kimble, but the potential is there.

We will have to wait and see if the Amazon Kimble 2 will really take off won’t we. I really hope it does because I simply love the device and can’t wait to get my hands on one, certainly something to keep your eye on for a future purchase.