iPlayer and 4oD have changed our lives. Never before has it been possible for one person to watch 22 straight episodes of Deal or No Deal or an entire waking day's worth of Dragons Den with such ease and without fracturing a few laws. Legal or not, the Internet is changing the way we watch TV -- and for many of us, it's addictive.

So when we were told by our exalted colleague, ZDNet UK's own Rupert Goodwins, that there was an online service called Zattoo on which you can watch live TV, we were very excited indeed and wasted no time in installing the tiny client. And sure as eggs is eggs, we were able to watch live TV from the comfort of our own desk.  Click here for more

It's been all go for the BBC's iPlayer service this week. First ISPs once again got their knickers in a bandwidth-related twist over the service swallowing all of their network capacity, then Nintendo announced that the streaming service will be available through the Wii. This is a fantastically exciting piece of news, and is sure to severely upset some of the UK's more highly strung Internet providers.

With support for the Wii being added, it can surely only be a matter of time before the Xbox 360 and PS3 can access the content too. And it's about time, because we could really do with some free content on Xbox Live to keep us satisfied when our thumbs are throbbing from a Call of Duty 4 session that's gone on too long.  Click here for more

Here's one for you fact fans: in the 60s a man called Francis Grasso invented a DJing technique called 'beatmixing'. People were leaving the dancefloor in the gaps between songs, so Grasso kept people dancing by matching the beats of two records so there was no silence, with tracks flowing together in one long set. This technique transformed clubs and created the mystical culture of the DJ. Now, thanks to a bit of software called Traktor DJ Studio, any idiot with a PC can start along the path to being a superstar on the wheels of steel.

Traktor 3.3 is from music software experts Native Instruments, and all you need to get started is a computer with a recent soundcard. From there, you'll be presented with an interface that accesses your MP3 library, a pair of 'decks' which show the waveform of whichever song is loaded and a crossfader. Just browse your music library, drag a couple of files on to the decks, and off you go.  Click here for more

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 became available yesterday and the entire Interweb is talking about it. Some are saying SP1 improves Vista's general meh-diocrity, while others, including our brothers and sisters at CNET.com, are saying it's not all that.

We're inclined to agree with our Yank brethren. Microsoft's done a decent job with Vista SP1, but it could have done so much more. Don't give us that rubbish about it only being an incremental improvement -- Microsoft threw so much into XP SP2 that it was virtually a whole new operating system.

With that in mind, we've come up with a bunch of things we think should have been included with Vista SP1, and things that could help improve the Windows Vista user experience on the whole. Some of these things may happen with the advent of Vista SP2 -- just after 633 Pig Squadron takes off and Satan starts his own Mr Plow franchise. But we love to fantasise. Click here for more

A little more than one year after its release, Windows Vista receives its first service pack update. Microsoft says the pack will offer better compatibility with third-party hardware, increased reliability, tighter security and better performance.

Unlike the last Windows Service Pack release, Windows XP SP2 -- which offered users a new Windows Firewall, an improved Automatic Updates feature and a pop-up ad blocker for Internet Explorer -- Windows Vista SP1 is largely a code update, devoid of new eye candy and very light on 'must-have' features for home users.

Most of the features touted by Microsoft are for the Business, Enterprise or Ultimate editions of the operating system. Our advice: be patient, and don't download it right away. Wait until Windows Vista SP1 is offered to your PC via Microsoft's Automatic Updates service. Click here for more

It's up to your Web browser to make using the Internet easy and enjoyable -- it's arguably the most important piece of software you use. As the Internet becomes more integral to daily life, the browser you use is of great importance to software companies too. That's why every major browser developer is working on new versions of their product.

Fortunately, they've all released early versions of their work -- that's betas to you -- for us to poke around and play with, so we can suggest fixes and improvements that could be made before the final version is released to the general public.

The four browsers in question are Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla's open-source Firefox 3, Opera 9.5 and Apple's Safari 3 for Windows. All are free downloads and all try to offer something better than the competition. Click here for more

Do-it-yourself magazines such as MAKE and basement-brewed steampunk anachronisms might be at the forefront of home engineering projects, but 50-year-old Lego is still the name builders know best. And children, they like it too. Now you can play with it on your computer in the official freeware program Lego Digital Designer, which has just been updated with a new UI.

Aimed at users who just want to play around and those looking to plan before diving into intricate projects, the program (available for both Windows and Mac) is now more ambitious and easier to use, and gives you the chance to build whatever you can imagine out of pieces from three kinds of Lego. The dozen or so sets included are organised under their set number and the kind of set, so users can match up their themed Factory, Mindstorms and Creator sub-sets to their real-world counterparts. Click here for more

When you buy a CD you can generally rip it to your hard drive with minimal effort. Every now and then Sony tries to thwart you by either claiming you're a thief or rootkitting your PC. Even with copy-protected CDs it's possible to rip the music without much additional drama. The same has never been true of DVD. Although it's reasonably trivial to copy a DVD, it's not really possible to do it legally -- you need to break the CSS, and that's where the trouble starts.

So the announcement at Macworld that Fox and Apple are going to work together to provide an iTunes-compliant copy of the movie on the disc, alongside the regular movie, was an interesting one. And certainly an interesting development in the world of electronic distribution.  Click here for more

Did you know that popular video of your cat (or my cat) could be earning you and your moggy a tidy sum?

YouTube's Partner Program now allows any content producer to earn some cold hard cash for their creative efforts. The scheme is essentially a reward system for users who upload videos that draw significant traffic to Google's popular video-sharing site. But there are some criteria to meet before your masterpiece can start contributing to your next holiday. Click here for more

Choosing gifts for Jesus' birthday is a nightmare. Unless you're a sock-giving grandparent, you almost always end up choosing pointless presents that get binned or swapped in the January sales. We could start buying present before 6pm on Christmas Eve, we suppose, but where's the fun in that?

There's help at hand, thanks to that t'Internet. Gift Finder is a Web site that helps you decide which gifts to give, and which gifts people should give you. Log on, answer a few short questions by clicking one of 15 images per topic, and it calculates your 'true personality'. You get a one-paragraph summary describing what type of person you are, and a list of gifts that it thinks will suit you.  Click here for more