Another .net column has made its way online. This one’s about attention and the way that gadgets can remove you from the moment you’re filming, photographing or tweeting about.

Photos and videos are hyperlinks to memories, icons that your brain double-clicks to bring back the full experience – the sights, sounds, smells and sensations of a happy day or a crappy one.

Increasingly, though, we’re using gadgets to record the whole experience. That makes us passive observers, not active participants.

I thought I’d say something constructive in an op/ed for once, so I’ve written about Opera 10. It’s moved from alpha to beta, and it’s really rather good.

Internet Explorer 6, the gurning half-wit of the browser world, has nearly 17 per cent of the market. Opera, a truly great browser, has 0.72 per cent.

That’s lower than Netscape (0.74 per cent), which was shot and turned into glue months ago.

To say that Opera is better than Netscape or IE6 is like saying having sex with the love of your life is better than being boiled in oil while being stabbed with knives, or living in Doncaster.

Should ISPs advertise broadband services that don’t – can’t – deliver what the ads promise? Of course they shouldn’t.

If you aren’t unemployed or self-employed, BT is choking your connection at the very times you’re most likely to use it.

On the subject of iPlayer’s bandwidth demands BT says “We believe there is a real issue that content owners like the BBC need to address.”

Maybe there is, but there’s an issue BT needs to address right now. Its advertising specifically says you can use Option 1 for iPlayer, and you can’t.

Isn’t it? Yes.

This… is the same firm that decided to call its security suite Microsoft Wanker. Sure, it says OneCare when it’s written down, but go on. Read it aloud.

Moblin, the Intel-backed Linux for netbooks, looks pretty nifty. Which makes a change:

With most technology, looking into it is like shopping for a new and exciting car. We’ll happily spend days scanning brochures, reading reviews and coming up with increasingly imaginative and expensive configurations.

With Linux, though, it’s more like shopping for a new central heating boiler. You know it’s going to be worthwhile and you know it’s going to save you money, but it’s hard to summon up much enthusiasm. Oh look. It’s a boiler. Oh look. It’s another boiler. Oh look. It’s a slightly different boiler. Oh look. I’ve wasted my life.

Will humans of the future have extra ears? Probably not, but cyborg technology is still fascinating.

Sadly the “bionic arms race” owes much to a very real arms race. In 2005, the US military announced a multi-million dollar investment in prosthetic technology after a surge in the number of US soldiers losing limbs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Improvements in body armour technology mean that attacks that just a few years ago would be fatal are now survivable – but the armour doesn’t protect limbs.

Inevitably the military isn’t just interested in rehabilitating injured soldiers. It’s rather keen on enhancing soldiers’ effectiveness in battle, too, which is why it’s testing exoskeletons.

And Google Chrome 2 is out of beta. Time for another car comparison.

Firefox is a gadget-stuffed MPV, Chrome is a stripped-down sports car and IE8 is a Honda Legend: it’s built well enough, but it’s hopelessly outgunned by smarter and more stylish rivals.

It’s that man again. And by that man, I mean me.

We’re rushing into a world where everything depends on an internet connection, whether it’s your email, your online apps, your Xbox Live or your TV on demand.

Most of the time, that’s absolutely fine. Great, even. But it means that we’re more vulnerable to catastrophe and cock-ups than ever before.

Two of my things have hit the internet. First up, an op/ed on Google’s ever-increasing usefulness:

There’s no doubt that search engines are getting smarter, which is generally a good thing. However, they’re guilty of something called Mission Creep: that is, they’re doing more and more work. In the good old days search engines were facilitators, dumb actors that didn’t actually know anything but knew where you could find what you needed.

Now, they’re attempting to be oracles. Instead of showing you where to find the answer, they want to tell you the answer; instead of taking you to the right destination, they want to *be* the destination. That’s an important difference, and it’s bad news for webmasters.

Then, a feature I did for PC Plus about where the UK internet is heading:

…it looks rather like our creaking transport system: overloaded, prone to jams at the most inconvenient of times and under constant surveillance. Only Britain could take the idea of an information superhighway and try to turn it into the M6.