Having looked at what PC World had to offer (and the prices), I ended up settling for the new Apple Magic Mouse. At £56 it was pricey, but then Apple tends to have good build quality so hopefully it'll last a while, and I was impressed with the demonstration mouse in the shop.

Design-wise it looks very good - side-on it looks symmetrical, and if it weren't for the Apple logo at the bottom it would be possible to use it the wrong way up. It's also very flat, which takes getting used to. Despite the fact it takes two AA batteries (supplied), it's also quite light.

Scrolling is achieved by essentially stroking the mouse with your finger - there's no physical scroll wheel. You can also scroll left and right as well as up and down, as with the older Mighty Mouse - though as yet I haven't found much of a need for this.

The mouse connects via Bluetooth, and thankfully transmits its battery status to the computer so you know when to recharge it - this is a problem with cheaper wireless mice as there's nothing worse than playing World of Warcraft with 24 other people and having your mouse run out of battery in the middle of a raid. Especially if you don't have any others charged up.

Criticisms? I'm used to a mouse that fits in my hand better, and the right-click ability isn't as sensitive as I'd like, but this review is based on all of around 30 minutes use. I'll see how I feel after a week. And if it turns out to be rubbish then I can always take it back...

Christine was with me when I bought it (after I ummed and arred about it for a good half hour, due to the price). Her main comment was that it didn't come in pink.

Transperience was a museum that I was aware of when I was younger but I had never had chance to visit during the short time it was open. It was essentially an open-air museum of passenger transport, with some simulators as well as a working 1km tram line and a couple of trolleybuses. There was also an auditorium and some workshops were its preserved vehicles were maintained.

The museum was built on the site of Low Moor station, south of Bradford. The station used to be at the junction of the Caldervale Line, between Bradford and Manchester, with the Spen Valley Line which ran through Cleckheaton, Heckmondwyke and Liversedge. The station, and the whole Spen Valley Line, were closed in the 1960s, but the Caldervale Line thankfully remains (otherwise my regular trips to Blackpool would be far more difficult).

Despite being right next to junction 2 of the M606 and easy reach of the M62, and costing £11.5million to build, the park closed in 1997, having been open a little over 2 years. Unfortunately it couldn't attract enough visitors to be viable, and was £1million in the red by the time it was taken over by administrators. The land was mostly sold off to a private developer and is now an industrial estate. The route of the tram line now forms the first part of the Spen Valley Greenway, a footpatch and cycle route which follows the route of the Spen Valley Line. Some buildings, like the auditorium remain, but overgrown and derelict.

Interestingly, the site is likely to go full circle. Metro, the public body which manages passenger transport in West Yorkshire, has plans to re-open Low Moor station. Its location close to the M606 means it would make a good parkway station, and means that residents of Low Moor and towns in the Spen Valley won't have to travel into central Bradford or Leeds to catch the train. It's likely that the few remaining relics of Transperience will be tarmacked over by the new station's car park. The station is proposed for 2012, subject to planning permission and funding.

It's a shame that I never had chance to visit Transperience, as it seemed like an interesting museum that suffered from poor marketing and a lack of focus. Thankfully, museums such as the Crich Tramway Village have succeeded where Transperience failed.

It should be no secret by now that I like using Twitter. I've been a user for almost 3 years, sending my first tweet in late spring 2007. Twitter can be used quite well from the web but it's real power comes from its API and the multitudes of applications which can make use of it. Tweetie is one such application - it began as an iPhone application and made the move to OS X last year.

Considering there are so many Twitter clients out there, what made me choose Tweetie? Firstly, it has a free version, which is supported by a few ads in your Twitter timeline (these are obvious and less frequent than I expected) and an occasional nag screen asking you to upgrade. Paying $19.95 removes the ads and the nag screen but doesn't provide any extra features. It's also built natively for OS X, unlike a number of others which use Adobe AIR - while this does allow them to run easily on Windows, OS X and Linux, in my experience AIR apps are quite slow and memory-hungry. Adobe have promised improvements to AIR so this may change.

Tweetie also supports multiple Twitter accounts - useful if you have a personal account and an account for your business, for example - although I personally don't make use of this. The interface is very Mac-like, and it includes Growl notifications for new tweets which are useful if you want to be distracted whenever new tweets are received. It also has built-in search and you can view a Twitter user's feed in the app by clicking their userpic. Support for URL-shortening services and TwitPic/yFrog is built-in too.

Tweetie's use of animation makes it feel very smooth and slick, and it seems like the best-designed Twitter application I've used so far. It's light enough to run at all times, and can be run just as a dock or notification icon.

It's not perfect - it doesn't support the new Retweet mechanism yet (so when you retweet it still posts 'RT' in front of a new tweet by you) and doesn't show trending topics. There's also no geolocation features, although this is of limited use for a desktop client.

I recently switched to Tweetie after having used EchoFon for Firefox, which I now can't use due to bug 533535 in Firefox 3.6. But Tweetie offers much better features so I'm planning to stick with it. The Twitter client arena is very crowded but Tweetie sticks out as a very good application.

Despite having never been there before October last year, I'm now a regular visitor to The Fylde, which is the peninsula containing Blackpool and the surrounding towns of Cleveleys, Lytham St Annes, Poulton-le-Fylde and Fleetwood. It's a large, flat area and its proximity to the Irish Sea means it's usually quite windy. No co-incidence then that there are quite a few windmills across the peninsula.

This weekend I went to see a couple. The one pictured is at Mereside, which is a suburb of Blackpool and is one of the first things visitors to Blackpool see after leaving the M55. It looks nice but other than that it's not particularly interesting - you can't go in it and there is no information about its history there.

Marsh Mill is more interesting - a number of craft shops have opened around it and there is also a fabulous tearoom. Worth a detour if you're in the area.

As is usual when I notice something interesting while out and about, I texted Twitter. Obviously I was not the only one who found it interesting as my tweet was very quickly retweeted around various other Bradford Twitter users. This lead deadbloke to this picture as evidence. In all, I had 9 retweets and replies of my tweet, which is more than I normally get, many of which were by people I didn't know or follow. And this was all within an hour, on an otherwise mundane Thursday morning.

As for why the workmen were there; it's possibly part of plans to turn the site into a temporary park. It seems the start of work on the shopping centre is so far off that the developers are willing to hand part of it over to community groups for landscaping until more tenants sign up.

SeeSaw was originally a joint project between the BBC, Channel 4 and Five called Project Kangaroo, but was halted by the BBC Trust last year. Now operated by Arqiva, it carries programmes from the three partner channels, and in most cases provides whole series. The service is free but supported by advertising, at the start of programmes and also during ad breaks in the middle.

Some highlight include every episode of The Young Ones, the infamous paedophile episode of Brass Eye and the first three series of The IT Crowd. Picture quality varies with BBC productions having a range of bandwidth options but Channel 4 shows set to around 800 Kbps - not great but watchable.

I expect to use SeeSaw a lot as it looks like a great way to watch TV series that I missed when they were broadcast but don't want to fork out for on DVD or rent. There's a surprisingly large library of programmes, and though there are some notable omissions (I was hoping to be able to watch Black Books, for example) there's enough to ensure that I always have something to watch.

The interface in these test builds is the same as Firefox 3.6, but they use version 1.9.3 of the Gecko engine. This brings a variety of new features, as well performance boosts and greater security.

The biggest change is the introduction of 'Out of Process Plugins' - plugins like Flash and Quicktime now run in a separate process, rather than the main firefox.exe process. This greatly improves stability, as if the plugin encounters a critical error, it will only crash its host process and not the whole of Firefox. While it's possible that each extra process will require more memory, using more than one process for displaying content should lead to better performance on systems with more than one processor core, which includes most desktops sold over the past couple of years. Right now this feature is limited to Windows and Linux but it should be on Mac OS X by the time it's in a final build of Firefox.

There are also changes to JavaScript trace handling, history lookups and layout display which should boost performance. Mac builds now render text using Apple's Core Text API; consequently these test builds now require Leopard (10.5) or later.

More changes are due in later builds - JaegerMonkey is a project to speed up JavaScript handling where tracing cannot be used, and future builds will support Direct2D which will allow Firefox to make use of hardware acceleration on computers with a DirectX 10-compatible graphics card and Windows 7 (or Vista with Windows Platform Update). This is good news as Firefox has fallen behind other browsers in the performance stakes of late and is likely to lose some users as a result.

It's interesting due to the fact that Judge Brown shows a surprisingly thorough knowledge of photography. Without spoiling the outcome of the hearing, Brown notes that the cameras and lenses used by the 'professional' photographers in this instance are at the 'prosumer' level, and not too dissimilar to what I use as a hobbyist.

Myself and my friends are now at that age where marriage is on the cards (and just to quell any potential rumours: no, Christine and I are not planning to get married) and several of my friends are due to get married this year. While I have informally offered to lend a hand with photography, I do state my limits - while I have a couple of lenses, a reasonable SLR camera, a tripod and could borrow a larger flash if needed, I don't have the experience or high-end kit for truly professional pictures. But then I'm not going to charge a four-figure sum for doing the pictures either.

For this inaugural App of the Week post, I'm going to look at Squeeze, a file system compression tool for OS X. Normally it's a very reasonable USD $9.95, but right now you can get it for free at MacHeist.

Squeeze brings to OS X a feature that has been in Windows NT-based OSes for quite some time - file system compression. This allows you to compress certain files transparently - they will open and work like normal files, but are compressed and so take up less disk space than they would normally - as opposed to compressing them in archive formats like Zip and Rar. Both NTFS, the Windows file system, and HFS+ which is the Mac file system support this type of compression but OS X doesn't allow users to compress files like Windows does. Enter Squeeze.

Squeeze adds a preference pane and a small notification bar application which allows you to select folders to compress. The notification bar application quietly watches those folders ensures that any new files that you save also get compressed.

The space savings are, at best, modest - many files such as MP3 tracks and JPEG images are already compressed and so applying additional compression to them isn't going to make them much smaller. Also, while I haven't noticed it myself, if the system has to regularly access compressed files this may result in a slowdown due to the extra processor power required. It's therefore probably best that you stick to lightly-used files and not your System folder, for example.

It could do with one big new feature, which is to find seldom-used files and present them to the user as candidates to compress. The Disk Cleanup Wizard in Windows does this and it can claw back significant amounts of space from files which are not used very often, with little or no performance degradation. Also, Squeeze only runs on Snow Leopard - if you have an older version of OS X then Squeeze isn't for you.

At $9.95, this makes for a very good value way of getting extra disk space without needing to add an extra hard drive, or upgrade. It's a simple tool that does what it needs to do very well.

(Full disclosure: I got Squeeze for free as part of the MacHeist promotion)