Gossip

Wireless railcam - on the road to Edinburgh. The iron road, that is ...

Here you can see a picture of someone travelling to Edinburgh by train. Unexciting? No! - because the passenger was captured live, by Our Sniffer, in London - from video footage sent from the train over WiFi.

Of course, this will get us into hot water. Our Hunky Mouse avoids - if he can - writing too much about other journalists. For a start, most of us are boring people, and (more to the point) journalists are notoriously feeble at taking what they dish out with such indifference. But here, we have to give credit to a rival. Not that he'll be grateful ...

The picture shown is taken from the Yahoo webcam of the unstoppable Rupert Goodwins.

When The Boss at NewsWireless discovered that there was a conference in rail WiFi in London, he did the obvious, boring thing: he wrote about the conference.

When Goodwins discovered the same phenomenon, he went straight to GNER and arranged to evaluate their service. With him on the Great North Eastern train, he took his laptop, and a webcam. And you could, if you knew about it, plug into his Yahoo Messenger service, and watch the countryside flash past, while his fellow passengers worked or dozed in front of the lens.

OK, calling it "video footage" exaggerates. One grotty pic per second was all the bandwidth he could get. But ten out of ten for flair and invention.

Alas! - the exploit didn't make it into his famous online diary.

So Sniffer takes great pleasure in gleefully revealing what Goodwins was up to on Friday, before the Great Man can reveal it himself ...