Everyone has a drawer in the kitchen that, for one reason or another, fills up with crap that has no place elsewhere in the home, or is broken, or entirely pointless. We can’t think of another gadget that is going to hit that drawer faster than the WikiReader, a device that appears to have been catapulted forward in time from 1996.

It’s a gadget that’s larger and fatter than a handset, and holds all of human knowledge inside it. Well fancy that. With a frighteningly modern touchscreen interface yet a display dating back the birth of the mobile phone, it allows you to browse through 3 million Wikipedia entries, so long as you don’t want to look up anything recent. Or see the accompanying images:

The problem is that here in 2009 it’s not a lot to ask that a device like this has wireless ability or some sort of online connectivity to allow new updates. You might as well publish Wikipedia as a book for all the use this is. So given that Wikipedia itself is revised tens of thousands of times a day to keep up with the planet, how the hell are you meant to update this thing? Don’t worry, the makers have a cunning, ye olde worlde plan:

“The fastest and easiest way to update your WikiReader is through our mail subscription. Updates come on a new memory card and cost $29 for two updates per year, plus taxes and shipping.”

Rejoice! Stephen Gately can live on for another six months before you’re any the wiser. Rubbish.

Not everyone has access to the empowering nature of the internet. If you’re one of them, then you’re unlikely to be reading this for starters. For you, life is still very much 1989. Argos is the place to buy items the rest of us find on eBay, you’re still buying your top shelf grumble from service stations on the A1. And you’ve never had the pleasure of the global font of knowledge that is Wikipedia. e

Until now. Artist Rob Matthews has re-created Wikipedia in paper form. Not all of it, obviously – that wouldn’t work at all – just Wikipedia’s featured articles. So even if you were to buy this (it’s not for sale) you’d still only have a sliver of the combined knowledge of humanity. And a broken back. Now go and buy a computer, it’s 2009 for God’s sake.

Sick of the dreary, unimaginative choice of CDs available in the shops (or what’s left of them)? We certainly are. But we’re most amused by the latest craze to hit the net – Wikipedia Names Your Band. If Zavvi’s racks had been full of the stuff that this little trick is throwing up, we probably wouldn’t be tearfully mourning them now. Here’s how it works…

Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random” and the title of the first article you get is the name of your band. Then go to “Random Quotations” and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your imaginary band’s album. Next, go to Flickr and click on “Explore the Last Seven Days” and the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Use a photo-editing program to combine those ingredients together and, hey-ho, you’re now a mysterious, enigmatic band with your first album ready to hit the shops.

As you can see from ours, we’ve generated the kind of CD that you’ll find in the bargain box at the HMV sale for about 40p, but here’s some of the best that have been submitted to BuzzFeed. They’re genius. Have a go yourself and send us the results – we’ll stick the best ones up on the site in a kind of Tony Hart gallery stylee.

Rock on kids.

According to Wikipedia administrators, six ISP’s in the UK are now routing Wikipedia traffic through transparent proxies after Wikipedia was added to the Internet Watch Foundation child-pornography blacklist.

The site was added to the blacklist due to an image of Scorpions’ original album cover for Virgin Killer which features a naked prepubescent girl. Thus far administrators have declined to remove the image due to Wikipedia policies and lack of clarity from the IWF regarding unacceptable content. Following is the excerpt from the image discussion:

Yes, normally we close such requests as Keep via WP:NOTCENSORED, but as I said originally, in this case that’s not the overriding reason. At the time of this IFD, we were (and still are, to an extent) unaware whether this was the only image that had been filtered by the IWF, and therefore whether removing it would cause WP to be removed from their blacklist. The issues of a number of other images were raised, which could be taken to be indecent (and possibly illegal in some jurisdictions).

Currently, if a user connects to Wikipedia through one of the six UK ISPs they will receive a blank page or 404 error on the Virgin Killer page. The major problem is that due to all ISP traffic routing through proxies, Wikipedia sees any of these users as belonging to the same IP. The inability to distinguish individual users means that the editing function is blocked for these users.

When attempting to edit an article anonymously we received the following error:

You are currently unable to edit pages on Wikipedia.

You can still read pages, but cannot edit, change, or create them.

Editing from 62.30.249.131 (your account, IP address, or IP address range) has been disabled by Lucasbfr for the following reason(s):

Anonymous editing from your Internet Provider is disabled, please log in.

Wikipedia has been added to an Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, the method they are using makes it impossible for us to differentiate between legitimate users and those abusing the site. As a result, we have been forced to block several IP addresses from editing Wikipedia.

As the error message notes, registered users are still able to edit as normal. The IP block only affects anonymous ad hoc edits.