TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

221,184 pixels doesn’t sound like much, but if you’re laying them down by hand, one at a time, then they soon add up. Which is why it took artist Joel Brochu eight months to reconstruct a photograph using multicolored cake sprinkles.

The image of a dog — based on an original photograph by Shingo Uchiyama — was put together by tweezing one sprinkle at a time onto a 4 x 1.5 foot board, where they are held in place by double-sided tape and glue.

As somebody who has to haul several empty bottles down to the recycling point every day, and then schlep another couple of full wine bottles back up the many stairs to my apartment, I love the idea of UK-based Martin Myerscough’s paper wine bottle.

The bottle consists of a paper outer and a foil-bladder inner, and works like those foil-lined boxes of wine that get harassed mothers through so many afternoons. It also weighs one tenth of the weight of a glass wine bottle — 55 grams vs. 500 grams.

Recycling bottles is fine, but it takes a lot of energy to do, not to mention the transport of full bottles to stores and empties to the recycling plant. Paper is not only greener, but lighter.

Myerscough has already managed to sell a paper milk carton into one of Britain’s biggest supermarket chains, ASDA, so it’s possible that this could actually take off.

The biggest problem might be you, the customer.

ATV Flash is now available for the new, puck-sized Apple TV. Now called aTV Flash (black) to distinguish it from the add-on for the old Apple TV, adds all kinds of extra functionality to your set-top box.

With aTV up and running, you will be able to play pretty much any movie file (MKV and AVI, plus MP4 and others), grab cover art and metadata automatically, stream media from computers or network-attached storage, and listen to your Last.FM stations.

The Tango Bar might look right at home underneath an iMac, and it might come from XtremeMac, a company with “Mac” in its name, but the 10-watt amplified speaker will work with any computer that has a USB port.

The speaker is powered by USB, and also works as a USB audio device, which means a single cable for everything. Inside there are six speakers, and at the side there’s a backlit volume knob that will annoy as it glows at night.

After serious launch missteps and all signs pointing to poor consumer adoption, Google TV has a tough road ahead — and now hardware partner Logitech isn’t making things any easier for Google’s smart TV software platform.

Logitech CEO Guerrino De Luca threw Google under the bus in a conference call with analysts and investors on Thursday, first reported by The Verge. De Luca cited the failed launch of Google TV as the primary reason why Logitech had disappointing Q1 financials; the company reported nearly $30 million in losses for the quarter.

Pico projectors for phones are old news. But Pico projectors built into iPhone cases are brand new, and way more practical than stringing cables from box to box.

The Pocket Projector case comes from Brookstone, and includes a 2100mAh battery and a 0.5-watt speaker, which is sure to blow the windows out on movie night. Your iPhone 4 (or 4S) slides into the case and engages the dock connector, and from there you can beam anything beamable to a fifty-inch rectangle on the wall.

Fifty inches is of course an optimistic number, and will require a very dark room.

IHome’s iP4 is a weird-looking thing. It comes over like a paper-craft version of a 1980s boombox, all sharp edges and flat planes. But this dark-gray sculpture is in fact a fully functioning portable amp and speakers for smartphones.

The iP4 should feel the part, two. It weighs in at 7.5 pounds (3.4 kilos) and takes on further ballast when you load it up with the required six d-cell batteries.

A class “D” amp powers a two four-inch carbon-composite woofers and a pair of dome tweeters, and the box even has a five-band equalizer, just like the old cassette-tape versions.

In a smartphone ecosystem dominated by Apple and Android-based products, Nokia and Microsoft are a lot like those two kids who are always picked last for kickball: They’re clearly in the line-up, but seen as bloated, out-classed choices nobody really wants.

Though Nokia remains the leader in global mobile phone sales, most of those handsets are lower-end “feature” phones, and the company’s market share dropped by close to a third of what it was in 2010.

I go to great and painstaking lengths to keep my chin covered with 1980s-style “designer stubble.” What’s designer stubble, you ask? Well, normal stubble is what is grown by overweight men in stained wife-beaters whilst they sit around the house drinking light beer and generally not having a job.

Designer stubble, on the other hand, is sported by debonair gents like myself.

Apple isn’t a company that adds features which aren’t universally supported. Thus the original iPhone lacked 3G back before 3G was widely deployed, and the iPhone 4S still lacks a 4G radio for the same reasons.

But one surprise feature, noticed by Russian bloggers, is support for GLONASS in the iPhone 4GS.