The Red Ferret Journal

I have had a love/hate relationship with my Wacom graphics tablet for years. I prefer to use it for everyday computing over a mouse, but since there isn’t enough room on a desk to use the tablet and a keyboard comfortably I’m forever switching between the two.

When I first spotted the U Board a few weeks ago, the picture that hit me between the eyes was the one with the Wacom tablet sitting on it. This might be the answer I was looking for. After I blogged it I contacted GeekStuff4U, the purveyors of all gadgets Japanese, to see if they were going to stock them. After a bit of to-and-fro they sold me one, and so far it’s been great.

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The Deben Ferret Finder is probably one of the most important pieces of equipment ever made in our industrialised society. The ability to locate your Ferret is, of course, incredibly important in so many crucial ways. For example when it’s not possible to rely on…what?…not that kind of ferret? Animal? Small and furry? Hunter? Wow! £169.00.

 The upgraded Ferret Finder 3 kit features a low profile transmitting collar and a receiver with a ‘search’ and ‘locate’ LED display and varying pitch sounder. The 10 LED display indicates distance from the ferret and a varying pitch sounder increases in pitch, as the receiver approaches the collar. A range of 16 feet coupled with improved extra sensitive close-up accuracy means the new Ferret Finder 3 is more flexible than ever. In search mode the working range is up to 16ft (5m) and in the locate mode the working range is reduced to 8ft (2.5m) for ultra-accurate, ‘close-in’ location.

Ever Green Bathroom Tissue takes sustainability seriously. They’re the first to eliminate traditional plastic wrap with their soft 100% recycled toilet tissue. And they take green a step further.

All their packaging – pallets, store displays and the box itself – is 100% recyclable too. Their cool looking 12-roll box is designed after a fridge-pack of soda, complete with a side panel for easy roll removal. There’s even a place to store empty roll cores. When the box is empty, crunch and toss into recycling. From beginning to end, nothing’s landfilled. Now that is something we greenies can celebrate.

Available online at Greenlinepaper and LetsGoGreen, this great bathroom tissue is comparably priced.

Is this the start of the tissue industry “walking the talk” instead of the sort-of-almosts we’ve seen so far? Wouldn’t it be loverly!

Tags: ever+green+bathroom+tissue, eco+bathroom+tissue, eco+toilet+paper

The good folk at Violet, purveyors of the Nabaztag Rabbit, are launching a new product on Monday. The Mir:ror system is a consumer oriented RFID system (reader and tokens) which lets anyone connect up ordinary objects to a computer controlled network via their PC, the Violet central server system and a newly designed RFID chip in the form of stick-on labels called Ztamp:z.

The idea is you buy packs of these Ztamp:z, attach them to whatever you want – e.g. keys, books, umbrellas etc - register them with the central server and from that moment on the objects are connected to your personal Mir:ror network. What does that mean? Well, once they’re registered, you can set the system up to activate applications whenever the Mir:ror RFID reader sees a Ztamp:z token. Wave your umbrella at the reader and get a weather report read to you from your computer, show it a particular photo and start up a Skype call to that person. You get the idea.

Suddenly everything gets to be interactive as long as they’ve got a Ztamp:z stuck to them. It’s a very ambitious project and one that fits well with the company’s history with the Nabaztag (which is also Mir:ror enabled). I spent some time with company founder Rafi Haladjian a while back and he demonstrated a prototype to me.

The Mir:ror reader is a plain flat disk shaped thing, which attaches to the USB port of your Mac or PC computer. And that’s it. Once installed it sits there waiting for you to wave a Ztamp:z over it, just like you would a travel card like Oyster. In fact the system recognises an Oyster card because it is built to standard RFID ISO standards (ISO 14443 A&B), which opens up whole areas of possibilities for the future.

Rafi explained to me that there are currently two scenarios the company is introducing. In the first, consumers buy their own Ztamp:z and stick them on objects to make them network aware. In the second, companies buy a license to attach Ztamp:z at their factories and sell the products already RFID enabled. The first example of this latter commercial collaboration is a deal with Ladybird in Europe to deliver children’s fairy tale books which will trigger an audio reading of the book when you wave it over a Mir:ror.

The company seems less sure as to what type of generic consumer applications the new technology will inspire, but from my conversation it’s clear that they’re hoping that the open APIs, Javascript widgets and other software developer incentives will encourage a vibrant and creative community of new uses for the system. The Rabbit certainly proved that customisation of this type of product is possible, so it remains to be seen whether the Mir:ror will replicate that success.

Some applications Rafi mentioned in passing included postcards which triggered a Flickr type slideshow when received and waved over the reader (perfect for non-techie parents perhaps?), and recipe books and travel guides which unlocked premium content when triggered. The system also allows for complex, multiple application launches, so it’s conceivable that a Ztamp:z could be used to trigger quite sophisticated actions when used, with full multimedia delivery done remotely. “We’re bringing the past into the future, by allowing every object to be addressable by the Web”, Rafi explained to me.

Of course, and especially in the current economic climate, price is bound to play an important part in the equation, and it is here that the company is hoping to grab economies of scale as the product ramps up. The starter pack will include one Mir:ror reader, 3 blank Ztamp:s and 2 Nano:ztags (tiny RFID enabled rabbits) for £37.00 ($59.00) and a pack of 12 Ztamp:s will be available for around £15.00. It’s certainly not disposable level cheap, so it’s going to be interesting to see whether this innovative and quite brave concept takes off, and if so what applications people come up with to spur adoption.

 Mir:ror by Violet is the first consummer home RFID-reader * It connects to the PC (Windows or Mac) via USB and launches all kinds of multimedia applications when detecting an object equipped with an RFID-tag. Intuitive and easy-to-use with completely customizable functionalities, this reader reveals the life, power and memory of any of our everyday objects. It is hence possible to associate any kind of multimedia content or interactive application to any kind of objects, to make a brick sing a song, to store one’s personal photos on a pen, to make a phone call by showing a portrait…Everyday objects are now becoming interactive, connected, content-rich with ever increasing remotely controlled services. And the icing on the cake: these once inert now living and communicative objects just speak up within their contextual use.

So I’ve been playing around with a Brennan JB7 Micro Jukebox for a few days, and I’m torn, really torn. A good chunk of me enjoys the simplicity and ease of use of this rip and play micro Hi-Fi system, while the other bit is quietly wondering whether there’s a market for it out in the big, bad iPod dominated music world? Does this do anything that a dock enabled MP3 player won’t? Does it matter that it’s not portable? How useful is it to have a fast rip and play device on your shelf? Let’s find out…

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It’s taken them 10 years but Nokia boffins have finally perfected a ‘touch feedback’ touchscreen. Don’t be fooled by simple vibrational imitations folks, this is the real McCoy – you press a key on the screen, and it clicks under your finger with exactly the same sort of fingertip feedback as if you’d pressed a conventional keyboard key. Roope Takala, Senior Program Manager at Nokia’s research labs gave me a demo of the technology in Finland the other day on a hacked N770 Internet tablet. 

“The basic technology is not that difficult,” he explained, “We inserted two small piezo sensor pads under the screen and engineered in a 0.1mm movement in the screen itself. What’s taken the time has been fine tuning the movement and response to mimic exactly the sensation of pressing a real key.”

The problem in perfecting the tech – codenamed Haptikos, meaning ‘to touch’ – lies in how our fingers experience a key press. We actually feel two movements, in and out, and these movements and the associated audio have to be perfectly attuned to the speed and responsiveness of a real keyboard. In use, the touch feedback on the demo device was near on perfect. Each press of a key returned a clunky click and tactile snap on the touchscreen, which made typing feel incredibly responsive and very usable on the smooth screen surface. In fact it was hard to remember that you were using a touchscreen keyboard.

“Funnily enough, although you think you’re typing faster than normal because of the feedback, in actual fact you’re not,” said Takala, “There’s just some sort of mental satisfaction that comes from typing with a tactile response.”

The new Haptikos technology will apparently be shipped with the upcoming Nokia S60 Touch phone that has been shown off at recent demos, and the team is busy working on the next challenge, which is to provide exact tactile replicas for scrolling and draw/paint programs. The problem is that while we expect and need ultra fast responses for keyboard use, navigation and things like drag scrolling require a different, slower response map, which is another hurdle for the engineers to overcome.

“What’s nice is that people who are new to handheld devices don’t even notice this technology at first,” says Takala with a smile. “But they really miss it if you take it away from them once they’ve experienced it. It’s kind of addictive.”

One thing I can say is that this is the first technology I’ve seen and played with which could genuinely revolutionise the use of handheld devices in general. The ability to touch type at reasonable speeds on a touchscreen is something which every phone, PDA and handheld computer manufacturer would give their right arm for, and it looks as though the technology is about to reach the marketplace with a bang. I can’t wait.

The Deluxe Corner Lounge. $6.34. Here we have a sneak peak at the Ferret in full-on investigative action at the height of his busy period. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it, eh? And we may yet post a wish-list sometime soon.

The VoIP 500DP DECT Phone. Look ma, it’s an Internet phone, and a wireless DECT home phone. All in one rather ugly looking combo. But who cares, it’s brill and £96.91. Two Ethernet ports, SIP compatible, 8MB SDRAM, echo cancellation, PSTN, Caller ID, speakerphone and SMS send/receive. Yowsers!

Pocketster-iPod. Take one iPod. Add a Pocket PC. Throw in Pockester Pro software and bingo, become a walking jukebox. From the ‘how weird is that?’ school of rock, in an Eastern Standard Tribe kind of way. €14.95 for the Pro software.

 Pocketster Pro (the advanced version of Pocketster) takes the idea a step further and adds an iPod Module. The module enables you to publish your iPod playlists and have anyone in the area listen to previews or download tracks wirelessly from those playlists.

Love Lewisham? Hate Graffiti? Government sponsored mobile phone vigilantes. Charles Bronson. Grave. Spinning. 

  Imaging the following scenario. As you are walking down your street, you notice some graffiti that you’d like removed. You have already registered and downloaded the free application to your mobile phone. So what can you do?

• Take a picture of the offending graffiti, enter some details and send it to us. It’s simple!
• We review all images sent to us a decide what to do. If you have asked us to keep you up to date by text messages we will send you messages to keep you informed of our progress (at no cost to yourself)
• We will resolve the problem and take a picture of the clean wall after the graffiti has been removed.
• At any time you can visit this web site on your phone or your computer to see all the images that have been sent to us and the progress we have made.

The Firefly eMail Bar. You love convergence don’t you? Go on admit it. Well here’s a doozy. A combo email enabled (send/receive) flash memory drive in capacities from 16MB to 1GB. With…wait for it…an inbuilt LED flashlight (separate battery power). Yep, straight up, now you can download your email, print it off, and read it in your tent in the dark. Now how clever’s that?

•  E-mail send/receive function
• “Watchdog” security system
• Protect cap to let user never worry lost the cap
• Varied flash memory size : 16MB, 32MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, 512MB and 1GB.
•  Flashlight function of LED

Operation BlueSleuth. Got Bluetooth phone? Wanna play?

 SpyLegend.com, the Online Reality Game that pits you against your real-life friends, has launched Operation: BlueSleuth. This mission, designed for you and two other agents also equipped with Bluetooth devices, consists of carrying out covert operations in a suburban environment. Objectives include successfully transferring a passcode between two agents and transmitting the details of a false identity to a fellow agent. During this mission, a counter-spy will be deployed to attempt to sabotage the assignment.