You can’t miss them, those bright white lines that denote Audi’s new lighting scheme. Every single car in Audi’s lineup now features them. From the single strip in the A6, to the bracket shaped ones on the Q7. Those bright LED strips now define Audi’s image as much as the yellow “corona rings” defined BMW’s for a decade. With the new Audi A8, unveiled today, Audi takes another leap – a full cluster of LED’s for lighting. No conventional bulbs in the housings at all. No xenon or HID units either – it’s all LED for daytime running lights, turn indicators, low beams and high beams. Fantastic! Soon light housings will be merely thin strips where the beams come out from.

Rogers customers just got a new service – watching TV shows over the Internet. Called Rogers On Demand, current Rogers subscribers get access to certain channels and content online with limited ads. Unfortunately, anything worth watching is probably not on the site right now, unless there’s lots of people wanting to watch old episodes of the West Wing. It doesn’t make up for the fact that Hulu is blocked from Canadian residents, but it’s a start. As the service gets more popular I hope the content improves.

This may have been there for a while, but I just noticed it. The Toronto Star has a recipe archive and it looks to go back all the way to about 2006. It allows you to search by main ingredient, meal, cuisine, etc. It’s quite good. I find that Star recipes are usually very straightforward and well tested.

Gizmodo just published a buying guide for DSLR’s. They recommended four different cameras in four different price points. They were brand-agnostic, picking the best camera regardless of whether you were in the Nikon Camp or Canon Camp (sorry Olympus and Sony).

I agree with all their picks, the Nikon D3000, Canon T1i, Nikon D90 and Canon 7D do beat out their peers in their respective price points.

Yesterday Car and Driver published the annual “10Best” Car list. In it was the BMW 3-series, which has been on the list for 19 years and the ever-present Honda Accord which appeared 24 times.

• 2010 Audi S4
• 2010 BMW 3 Series / M3
• 2010 Cadillac CTS / CTS-V
• 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid
• 2010 Honda Accord
• 2010 Honda Fit
• 2010 Mazda Miata MX-5
• 2010 Mazda3 / MazdaSpeed3
• 2010 Porsche Boxster / Cayman
• 2010 Volkswagen GTI

The latest LCBO email came out today and they listed the following highlights. As always, the full list of each week are on the LCBO website. The Cotes du Rehone-Villages looks like a wine that I would like.

• Garcés Silva Amayna Barrel Fermented Sauvignon Blanc 2007, Leyda Valley, Chile $29.00 WS 91
• Rudi Pichler Smaragd Terrassen Grüner Veltliner 2007, Wachau, Austria $39.00 WS 92
• Domaine Marcel Deiss Beblenheim Pinot Gris 2005, Alsace, France $39.00 RP 90
• Kurtz Family Vineyards Boundary Row Shiraz 2006, Barossa, Australia $27.00 RP 91
• Domaine Les Aphillanthes Cuvée 3 Cépages Côtes du Rhône-Villages 2006, Rhône, France $25.00 RP 91
• Petrolo Torrione 2006, Tuscany, Italy $39.00 WS 92
• Heras Cordon Reserva 2004, Rioja, Spain $35.00 RP 92

The new Rogers My Account app shows your voice and wireless usage – even for prepaid accounts! Fido has their own version of the app.

Unlike the third party app that is available, you do not have to enter your rogers.com website username and password. This app identifies you by using the wireless signal of your iPhone. However, it cannot detect your account when going over WiFi.

The app even allows you to make a payment with a credit card. Big bonus for adding this functionality.

I’m a big fan of thin notebooks and more and more laptops are using the Intel CULV platform for new, thin form factors. Acer has their timeline series. HP has their Envy line, and now Asus has the UL line.

The UL30Vt is an update to the UL30 introduced earlier. This one keeps the same form factor but adds a dedicated nVidia graphics card that can be switched on or off to conserve battery life. Like the HP Envy, this notebook apes many of the MacBook’s styling – chicklet keyboard, brushed aluminum, thin and smooth surfaces.

• Intel SU7300 Core 2 Duo Processor 1.3GHz
• 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 2 slots, 8GB Max
• 500GB SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)
• NVidia G210M Graphics with 512MB DDR3 + Intel GMA 4500MHD (Switchable VGA)
• 13.3-Inch Widescreen HD LED LCD Display; Wi-Fi 802.11 bgn; Bluetooth; 0.3M Webcam

I upgraded all my computers to Windows 7 this week. My recommendation is to do a clean install and put on the 64-bit version (you should receive discs for both 32 and 64-bit versions). A clean install means that your existing installing is not upgraded, and the disc is erased before installing. Back up all your files before doing a clean install. A clean install ensures that legacy applications, spyware, settings and configuration are gone and Windows 7 can perform at it’s best.

If you bought an upgrade version of Windows 7, you can still do a clean install.  At the end of installation when you enter your license key, Windows 7 will most likely not accept it. This is because the install is expecting a previous installation of Windows in order to use an “upgrade” type of license. The good news is that there are two workarounds. All are documented on SuperSite for Windows, but I’ll summarize the basic techniques here. For full instructions check out his detailed sites. Microsoft has gone on record that these are legal means of installing, given that you satisfy the license requirements (read: you own a previous version of XP or Vista).

1) Modify the registry key, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/MediaBootInstall, to “0″. Reboot and run the command “slmgr /rearm” from an Administrator command prompt.

2) Complete a clean install of Windows 7, skip the license step, and then do another clean install of Windows 7. The second install will accept an upgrade license key.