Azeroth’s Dark Portal opens tonight at midnight. My cynical expectations are: World of Warcraft fans will eagerly hammer the servers as soon as registration opens, causing crashes and irate geeks to complain to the forums that they can’t log in, causing the forums to crash.

Meanwhile, the uber-geeks will be down HMV on Oxford Street, all garbed up to the eyeballs in Mage gear made out of tin foil and dressing gowns, to get their complimentary in-game baby Murloc pet. Well worth getting your arse kicked on the way home for, I think.

Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III: An interesting read for Star Wars fans. “If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels…” (via Kottke)

The Microsoft Zune 2006-2006: Penny Arcade on the Zune and the announcement of the iPhone: “I can hardly look at it now, it’s like holding a dead squirrel. On its 4:3 screen – the exact ratio of obsolescence – I can see destroyed futures.”

A fantastic video for “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time” by Jarvis Cocker.

The UK buys a hell of a lot of crap games, according to Voodoo Extreme in their list of top 10 purchases of 2006.

Britain plans first Moon mission: To send an orbiting spacecraft which fires instruments into the lunar surface.

Cisco sues Apple over iPhone name: I wondered how long it’d take for this to happen. One day, it appears.

Take a look at this wonderful Wii DEATH T-shirt. Proof that video games really can be dangerous for your health! (via Wonderland)

Classic FM are currently offering a free 14 day trial of their music download service where you can download up to 35 MP3s for nothing.

Steve Jobs has announced the development of the Apple iPhone in his Keynote speech at Macworld 2007, which incorporates:

• 4 or 8Gb widescreen video iPod
• Quad-band + EDGE mobile phone (no 3G)
• 2 megapixel camera
• 3.5 inch 480×320 160dpi touch screen
• 802.11b/g wifi + Bluetooth

Now, I’m not particularly interested in this Apple phone as it’s won’t be released for months — if at all — in the US alone, has a sub-standard 2 megapixel camera, is locked to one network provider and has no 3G capability (this will have to be included for the European version) and too little storage space to replace my iPod as an MP3 player (quite how 4Gb is enough for a movie player I don’t know). I am, however, interested to see the new interface incorporated into a future generation iPod — one with a decent-sized hard drive storage space. I’ll also be interested to hear if any games are being developed for it; the touch screen would work wonders for many games — something the Nintendo DS has already proved.

Also announced/confirmed were Apple TV, a set-top box for streaming stuff from iTunes to your TV, the AirPort Extreme wifi base station, movies from Paramount for iTunes, some deals with Yahoo! and some other crap like a couple of new TV commercials.

More details of the keynote speech at Engadget and MacRumours.

Update: A couple of interesting comparison articles here. Kottke mocks up an iPhone out of card and compares it to other, familiar, devices for size and TNL compare some current phone specs to Apple’s offering. They use an odd choice of Nokia phone for comparison purposes, though; wouldn’t an N80 have been more appropriate?

Update 2: The curse of Apple first-generation hardware. Kottke has a run down on all the recent feedback on the interweb over the iPhone.