The era of video games being seen as something you do alone in your parent’s basement, bum on the couch surrounded by junk food, could soon be over, as the NHS has praised Nintendo’s Wii Fit Plus for health reasons.

A Department for Health spokesman told the Telegraph the government was not endorsing video games themselves, but liked the jumping around bits featured in the new version of Wii Fit.

“Active video games, where kids need to jump up and down or dance about as part of the game, are a great way to get kids moving,” he told the newspaper.

Nintendo and the DoH have linked up as part of the Change4Life, which has seen the health body previously partner with Pepsi and Cadbury, so take that as you will. Nintendo will kick in some cash to promote the obesity-fighting campaign, and get to use the logo on the game.

The game comes out this week for £19.99, and includes new features such as tailoring exercises to fight flab in specific areas, as well as new games.

Earlier this morning, I sat through another presentation about all the features in Windows 7 — it was under embargo, which is why this is going live at the end of the day, which is hilarious, given I’ve seen these presentations multiple times over the past few months.

While I was sitting there, trying not to be cynical (about the repetition, not the shiny, shiny new features) the journalist sitting next to me, none other than MicroMart’s lovely Simon Brew, made a fairly good point.

You shouldn’t notice an OS. It’s like a dining room table — very useful in many ways, but its main role is to unobtrusively allow other things to happen, like eating dinner or playing board games. The only time you think about a table is if it’s got a wobbly leg or has a sticky top or it’s on fire, or something else is noticeably wrong with it.

Indeed the analogy certainly works for Vista. My sister didn’t know what an operating system was until Vista came along. She’d never had to think about them before. But along came Vista, and she learned through pure hatred before rolling back to XP, but hey, at least she learned something.

Sticking with the tabletop analogy, Vista was missing a leg, had a messy top, and there was some guy sitting at it with a shotgun yelling at you every time you tried to do anything.

So it’s a nice analogy, but hardly one Microsoft (or Apple or Google or Linux) would use in their advertising: “Windows 7 — the dining room table of operating systems… now with less wobble!”

Rather surprisingly, Microsoft does agree with the assessment (if not possibly the imagery).

Ashley Highfield, UK managing director, said Microsoft wanted to “make it almost invisible, so I can ignore it” and get on with whatever needs doing.

And Highfield isn’t some crazy, forward thinking Microsoftian who’s about to lose his job, either. His view was echoed by corporate VP of Windows Experience, Julie Larson Green. “Windows isn’t supposed to be the thing you interact with all the time.”

Huh. So all those wizzy features are all there to be not noticed, eh? That might explain why the demos were about Windows Live and Internet Explorer 8 then. To be fair, there were demos showing off how easy it is to set up a home group, but that hardly films well for the broadcasters, does it?

So now that we’re done marveling at how cool touchscreen is and all the other lovely features, can we please go back to ignoring the OS?

My completely professional crush on Sir Tim Berners-Lee has some fresh fuel.

Sir Tim was asked by the New York Times if there’s anything he regrets about inventing the web. Being a humble sort of person, yeah, he does have some regrets. Slashes. He regrets putting two slashes after the ‘http’ bit in web addresses.

He’s sorry about all the extra trees that have died because of those two unnecessary lines, and he’s sorry we’ve all had to hit our keyboards with a pair of extra strokes.

The man invented the internet. He’s saved us so much time — and wasted it too, but we can hardly blame Sir Tim for Facebook and LOLcats — and saved us so much printing. And he’s sorry about the slashes? That’s just lovely.

It’s easy to imagine him being irritated by those two extra slashes. There’s always some regret that makes you kick yourself everytime you’re reminded of it, and if he’s online half as much as the rest of us, he’s going to get a lot of reminders.

But it’s okay, Tim. Really, don’t worry about it. We forgive you.

Earlier this week, a weird and frightening story showed up in the Guardian.

Basically, the paper reported that it wasn’t being allowed to report on something that happened in parliament after threats from someone’s lawyer — all very vague — despite the fact that anything that happens in parliament is usually safe for journalists to cover without fear of legal repercussion.

The only clue we all had was that the Guardian had been told to shut up by a law firm called Carter Ruck, which surprisingly isn’t rhyming slang.

Some clever journalists found a reference to Carter Ruck in parliamentary records.

That September record features an MP asking how the government intends to protect whistleblowers and journalists in cases such as one involving Carter Ruck and its client Trafigura in regards to dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast.

Until Trafigura settled the case, the Guardian and other media had been blocked by Carter Ruck from reporting it. The horrifying details of the toxic dumping, and the people it killed, are here.

So now, though there’s currently no solid evidence of it (edit: the paper has now confirmed it), people are wondering if the Guardian’s blocked story has to do with Trafigura. But they’re not wondering quietly. They’ve made it a trending topic on Twitter, you see. And that’s something we can all report.

This is just bad news. The Large Hadron Collider over at Cern in Geneva has been criticised by some as having the power to end the world. And now we’ve got an al-Qaeda dude working in the building?

According to the BBC, the arrested Algerian “was working for an outside institute and had no contact with anything that could have been used for terrorism.”

Still, could we maybe keep those with terrorist tendencies away from the big machine that is looking to recreate the explosion that created the world? Just saying.

To be honest, I don’t know if you should step up and preorder an Amazon Kindle, not least because I haven’t got a clue who you are. I do know who I am (most days, anyway) and when I arrived at work this morning and flipped on the old news machine, I admit I got all excited and instinctively thought “I want one”. (To be fair, and completely off topic, I have the same reaction every time I see a pony or a pint of beer or a free seat on the tube, so it’s a frequent occurrence.)

The point is, the UK finally gets the Kindle. All these years without it, and our dreams have finally been answered! Time to place that preorder…

Or, not. To start, it’s all American — and even if you’re a fan of the New World, that does mean it’ll cost extra in shipping and duties, come with the wrong type of plug, and — as our sister title PC Pro noted — feature an overuse of the letter ‘z’ in the e-books.

Even if you can overcome such horrors, there’s also the question of whether or not there’s a better option out there.

PC Pro’s resident e-reader expert Stuart Turton — hey, we all have to be good at something — gets misty eyed describing the Sony Reader Touch, and with its clever touch screen it does look rather lovely.

But the £250 price tag puts it at the high end of the range. That said, the low end of the range kicks in at about £180 for less shiny versions - still rather costly for what you get, given the low tech version (as in, books) still seem to work pretty well.

And, while the Kindle has a sweet spot on price, especially with the included wireless, the books are rather pricey, and lining up to a closed off e-book system seems silly when Google’s trying to digitise the heck out of everything.

So, what to do? Buy a Kindle? Buy a Sony Touch Reader? Go down to the local charity shop and get something made out of dead trees?

For the time being, I’ll be opting for the latter, but I’m looking forward to someone — be it Amazon, Sony or some other gadget maker — changing my mind, and soon.

Some company named Internet Eyes is using members of the public to monitor CCTV cameras. Sign up, watch some live CCTV feeds, and if you see anything bad happening, report it to win a prize!

There are some very, very serious privacy issues here. The images picked up by CCTV cameras falls under the Data Protection Act, so making it readily available online can’t possibly be okay.

In fact, it’s not.

According to the Information Commissioner’s Office:

Disclosure of images from the CCTV system must also be controlled and consistent with the purpose for which the system was established. For example, if the system is established to help prevent and detect crime it will be appropriate to disclose images to law enforcement agencies where a crime needs to be investigated, but it would not be appropriate to disclose images of identifiable individuals to the media for entertainment purposes or place them on the internet.

I thought I’d just bold that last bit, because it’s exactly what Internet Eyes is doing. Not that the ICO has any real power to stop them, but come on.

More frightening than this massive privacy breach, however, is that Internet Eyes believes anyone will want to play this “game.”

Don’t get me wrong, I get pretty bored sometimes, but if I’ve got decent enough internet access to be watch video, I can think of about a billion other things I’d rather be doing. Like watching porn. No wait, that’s gross. I mean, Hulu. No wait, that’s not legal here. I mean, um, YouTube. Or BBC’s iPlayer. Hell, looking at pictures of grammatically incorrect kittens is more entertaining than staring at CCTV feeds, which is why they normally pay people to do it. If you find this fun, there’s likely a fulfilling job in security at your local council that’s perfect for you.

If stalking random people over CCTV cameras is the most interesting thing you can think to do online, you don’t deserve internet access.