The Red Ferret Journal

The XO2 Electric Scooter does what folks have dreamed about since we first saw the Jetsons cartoons – it folds in on itself.

Called the first “Urban Transformer” scooter, the XO2 is a series of lightweight, electrically-powered scooters with a low saddle, large backrest and are easy to use. Manufactured by French company XOR Motors, it folds into a quarter cubic meter luggage cart in seconds, small enough to drag onto a train or upstairs to the office for a recharge. Speaking of recharging, it’s a snap – just plug it into any outlet and the onboard charger does the rest. Come back in 2 hours and you’ll have 80 to 100% power.

Each of the three different XO2 models can travel at 70km (45 miles) per charge while the sportiest XO2 125 Urban has a top speed of 105km/h. They can carry two people, are equipped with hydraulic brakes, halogen headlights, a removable and swappable battery and a 3 year warranty that also covers the batteries. [Via Designboom]

XO2 is the first URBAN TRANSFORMER scooter – With its clean (electric) and powerful propulsion, its light weight, its blistering accelerations, its large flat deck, its low centre of gravity, its lowered saddle, its tight turning radius, its exceptional ease of use, the XO2 scooter is ideal for city commuting.

Tags: gadget, xo2+urban+transformer, xo2+electric+scooter, folding+electric+scooter

Hid.im turns your .torrent files into a ‘regular PNG image’. Why? So people can find and use your file but it’s hidden away from search engines and stuff. It’s a cool idea although there’s a file size limit of 250 KB currently, so you’re not going to be sharing anything multimedia that’s for sure. There’s also a Firefox extension to make the conversion process easy peasy. Fully open source and worth a look.

Don’t like the color of your eyes? Change them with NewColorIris, an intraocular implant that lets you change your eyes to blue, green or brown permanently.

Created for patients dealing with congenital iris defects and other eye problems as well as folks who want a change of pace (and natural-looking color), the website says this eliminates “the limitations, risks and annoyances of contact lenses.”

NewColorIris is a diaphragm that covers the iris and takes only a few minutes to implant by a patented and supposedly painless surgery under topical anesthesia. Sounds interesting but given the old saying “such is the price of beauty”, this one may be a little too high for me.

NewColorIris is a diaphragm that covers or dresses the natural iris. It is implanted in few minutes by a patented painless ambulatory surgery under topical anesthesia.
Its safeness is based on a revolutionary new design along with the most modern biocompatible materials that are used on current cataract surgeries.

Tags: gadget, new+color+iris, plastic+surgery, eye+color+replacement, newcoloriris

Maggwire is an online link list of glossy mainstream magazine articles presented for our reading pleasure in a trendy social networked way. Surprisingly it works. The format is easy to browse (a la Digg.com) and the idea that the system learns from your reading habits which articles to push up the page, might just make the whole thing quite valuable.

It’s all very wisdom of the crowds, with voting, sharing and discussion of course, but overall the combination of simple interface and popular content all categorised nicely for easy consumption should entice a growing visitor base. Definitely one to add to the list of worthy bookmarks.

Files24 is a new twist on an old tale. A BitTorrent search engine which aims to make the whole file search much more consumer friendly and less geek. How? By placing lots of colourful icons all over the place, adding artwork cover graphics alongside file names and otherwise giving the whole P2P room a bit of a spring clean. It’s interesting because this is probably the future of legitimate home entertainment in one way or another, even if this version is a little limited in scope.

Free TV Hub offers over 1400 channels of movies, programs, music and webcam all in glorious scratchy, grainy, jerky, fuzzy ND (naff definition). But, and it’s a big but, it’s got content coming out of its earholes. Blockbuster movies – man, you haven’t lived till you’ve seen Lord of the Rings in FuzzyVision ™ – as well as top shows, all streamed from various offshore sources by the looks of it. Grab it now before the lawyers do.

The content on the FreeTVHub Website, except third party videostreams, including without limitation, the text, software, scripts, graphics, photos, sounds, interactive features and the like (”Content”) and the trademarks, service marks and logos contained therein (”Marks”), are owned by FreeTVHub, subject to copyright and other intellectual property rights under Canadian and foreign laws and international conventions.

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While dead men may tell no tales, there’s now a way for them to send emails. Dead Man’s Switch is a free service where you can compose meaningful messages to be sent out should you shuffle off the mortal coil leaving important unfinished business, like who gets your collection of monitor pets. Although, if it was that important, you probably should have written a proper will.

All you do is compose your emails, then wait. The service will email you 30 days after you visit the site and if you don’t respond, will send reminders up until 60 days of absence at which point they send out all your queued messages. They’re working on a way to customise the nag intervals so that if you take an internet vacation for more than 60 days people won’t [have another reason to] think that you’re dead. I wonder if it will hold up in court?

You write a few e-mails, and choose the recipients. These emails are encrypted with military-grade algorithms, so you can be sure that no-one except the intended recipient will ever read them. Your switch will email you every so often, asking you to show that you are fine by clicking a link. If something were to… happen… to you, your switch would then send the emails you wrote to the recipients you specified. Sort of an “electronic will”, one could say. 30 days after your last visit to the site, an email gets sent to you urging you to log back in to verify you are okay. A second email gets sent two weeks after that, and the third email is a week after that. If you haven’t logged in in the following week (for a total of sixty estranged days), your emails get sent and we cry a single bitter tear for this tragic loss.

Tags: freeware, future+dated+email, deadmans+switch

Rebel EFI is a new software program which lets you rapidly and easily install the very shiny Apple Mac OS X operating system onto your Intel based PC. The tool costs $49.99 and has probably already caused untold damage to the arteries of various Apple execs around the world. There’s a free trial download available on the site. It’s just not Apple’s week is it?

TweetMyPC is a free program which lets you control your Windows computer using Twitter. That’s right, all you need to do is install the software on the target PC, set up a special Twitter account for the machine (disabling public access via the Protect My Tweets setting of course!) and log in on the PC.

From then on you will be able to shutdown or restart your computer, grab a file from your hard disk (via your email account) or even take a screenshot just by sending a tweet. You can even create your own custom commands (switch on my security cam, for instance). There’s also a Mac version too, called…ahem…TweetMyMac. Clever eh? .NET required for the PC version.

Goodness knows how I loathe Windows Vista, but even so I’m just not sure I want to risk upgrading to Windows 7 right now. At least until the bugs surface and are squashed. Too dodgy, right?

This neat BBC article helps, but still leaves some questions open. I’ve now downloaded the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor to try and help my decision, but would you trust something that came from a company that thought Vista was a reasonable product? No, nor me. Sigh.

The Digital Harinezumi is a faux Super 8 digital video camera shaped like a 110 film canister. At its heart is a 2 Megapixel CMOS sensor that will capture both 1600×1200 stills and VGA quality movies and record them onto a microSD card.

Because it’s emulating Super 8 the camera has built-in filters which produce the same saturated, vignetted effect of Super 8 and it even has the same juddering motion produced by the film gate. For real authenticity the LCD viewfinder is disabled so you have to frame your photo/videography by eye with the idea being to create wonderful and happy mistakes. The ISO is also limited to the range 100-800. None of this 102400 ISO, high definition video rubbish. Ahh, for the simple life, but alas not the cheap life, US$169.99 from AudioCubes.

Sometimes we want to indulge ourselves in a dreamy fiction. Dreams are a different representation of our daily happenings; likewise, we want to mix our reality this dreamy effect through the Digital Harinezumi. The Digital Harinezumi represents the reality that we want for us.

Tags: gadget, retro, digital+harinezumi, digital+super8

The AXbo Sleep Phase Alarm Clock is Sweden’s Austria’s answer to a grenade launcher being fired outside your bedroom door in the morning. The idea is to use your natural waking pattern to help you arise more refreshed and alert, rather than startle you half to death in order to roust your derriere out of the sheets. €179.00.