There’s nothing better to kick off a new year with some great hardware freebies from Microsoft Australia.

In collaboration with several tech sites including this one, they are running a promotion to give away 2 (two) Microsoft Touch wireless mouse. And because I’m so nice and generous, they’re also throwing in an extra Microsoft LifeCam Studio HD webcam as a bonus. Both of which are state-of-the-art peripherals from Microsoft Hardware.

To win, play the embedded “Chornobot” game below to solve puzzles in record time. The three highest scores on this site’s leaderboard by the end of January 31, 2012 will win. The first and second prize being the Touch Mouse and third prize, the LifeCam Studio. Although everyone is invited to play, only players with Australian mailing addresses are eligible to win.

With 28 levels to complete, some of which are quite complex, I’m sure there’s a challenge even for the Starcraft players among us.

Update: The only way you can submit a high-score is to lose all your lives. Don’t worry though, your progress is always saved and you can replay any of the levels at any time.

Update 2 (2/02): Thanks to everyone who participated. Will get in touch with the winners soon to claim their prize.

Cut the Rope candy! Come to think of it, how cool would it be if there was a leaderboard and the top X number of players got these.

Om nom nom nom.

Just in case the Tweet Choir left a bad taste in your mouth, here’s a quick refresher on something during the Microsoft CES 2012 keynote that actually mattered: the Windows 8 demo by Tami Reller, Chief Marketing Officer of the Windows division.

Although the 10-minute long demo does not reveal any breaking new features or functionality, there’s a number of subtle and interesting changes in this unidentified build of Windows 8 compared to the Developer Preview released four months ago. Here are some of the ones I spotted.

• It looks like custom accent colors are finally enabled with the teal-colored background. Like Windows Phone, the accent color is used throughout the OS including but not limited to just the panoramic wallpaper.
• Start tile for the first-party Camera app (unfortunately not demoed).
• Lockscreen showcased additional icons for messaging and calendar (apps stripped from the Developer Preview).
• Additional button in the bottom/right corner when using the mouse on the Start screen, activates semantic zoom.
• The music app is officially listed as the “Microsoft Music App” in the Start menu search. As one Twitterer quips, “There’s no stopping Microsoft’s creative-naming train.“
• Placeholders in the Windows Store might be hinting at the third-party apps that will be available for the beta in February: Evernote, Cut the Rope, eBay, Pixel Lab, Toy Soldiers, Pinball FX 2, PiratesLoveDaisies, Wordament, Never Mind the Bullets, Air Craft, Animoto, Picstream, Inkpad, Notespace, Notify Me, Invensys SimSci-Esscor, Carmen Sandiego 4, BarMax ($999 fake app), The Telegraph, AccuWeather, Conde Nast collection, iCookBook, Stocks, Piano, Grantophone, Kobo and USA Today.
• In Metro Internet Explorer, the page icon has been changed into a spanner settings icon.
• The virtual keyboard had its CTRL and special-characters buttons swapped (from CTRL/123 to 123/CTRL). The smiley button also has vertical lines around it.
• The desktop’s taskbar had a gray opaque treatment making it blend in much better with the new dark and flat Start-button

If anyone else wants to put on their Sherlock cap too, here’s a gallery of the screencaps I was able to extract from the webcast.

Oh how I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the planning meeting for Microsoft’s CES 2012 keynote. How did this idea ever make it past the sanity check of several layers of management?

What about rehearsal? Did no one think “Gee, this is a bit odd. Maybe we should cut this one out?”

Since it’s a fact the internet was invented to share pictures and videos of cats, it’s no surprise there’s a big cat following at a Microsoft. Wrapping my series of interesting projects organized by Microsoft employees to raise money for its 2011 charity giving campaign is none other than a cat calendar.

Coordinated by Karen Easterbrook of Microsoft Research, Kristi Minietta, Susan Bunch and Alex Sutton, the cat calendar is now in its fourth year – which is like 35 cat years. During last October, they received over 1,000 cat photo submissions cats by Microsoft employees which had to be spread across two editions.

The fact the calendar started from an idea on a cat-oriented mailing list is indicative of the enthusiasm from the cat community at Microsoft. Karen jokes “somehow, for four years, we have pulled this off, and had way too much fun doing it.”

Although no doubts they do it partly for the awwweee, they also support a great local cause – raising funds for the “Forget Me Not” animal shelter of Ferry County in Washington State (where Microsoft Redmond is located) which they have been supporting for several years.

Even with the calendar still selling, they are projecting to raise over $45,000 for the shelter this year with the Microsoft donation matching scheme. Their money has already helped secure dog kernels, help control feral cat colonies and support low-cost neutering for the community. It really sounds like a win-win-win relationship for the Microsofties, shelter and cats.

Between all the interesting charity projects I’ve written about this year – photobook, music album and auction, the cat calendar definitely scores highly on the cute scale.

A rare glimpse into Microsoft’s infamous and confidential global employee intranet portal “msweb” reveals a recent Metro-inspired facelift, thanks to the proud work of a design company responsible for the redesign project.

Design studio “If/Then” who posted the mockups to their portfolio reveals they were tasked to create a fresh new look for the internal website presumably sometime between 2010 and 2011 according to the placeholder content showcased. The designers described the Metro visual style as a strong influence in their work.

While most of the placeholder content is naturally out of date, the mockups do provide a sneak peek at the type of content that is shared including but not limited to “StudioCasts” which seems to be an internal video streaming and archives service and “Inside Track”, an internal news publication.

With a monthly pageview count of 5.2 million hits, I’m sure Microsoft’s 90,000 global employees will come to appreciate this redesign which at least looks rather appealing and should function just as well. At least according to the designers the feedback has been pretty positive.

Click through to the If/Then website for a couple more screenshots.