The Red Ferret Journal

The ClimbStation is a computer controlled motorised climbing simulator, which provides custom flavoured climbing for all-comers. Not only does it offer various levels of difficulty (up to 12 levels), but the touchscreen interface also provides feedback on calories burned and toe-nails lost. Or something. The unit is priced from €29,900, which is probably cheaper than buying a mountain.

TV-Browser is a free web browser based Electric Program Guide (EPG) which comes with all the smarts you need to track and manage your television viewing from day to day and month to month. To say it’s chock full of features is an understatement, from reminders to favourites to ratings and multi-lingual support. The only slight problem is the interface which feels as if it was born back when 8–bit was the state of the art. You almost expect the thing to go beep every so often.

Anyhoo, design is a very subjective matter as we all know, and that aside, there’s no doubt that this is just about the best free EPG out there at the moment. It installs your local/national channels faultlessly, offers a lovely set of customisations and really comes across as very useful indeed. Oh and it supports plugins too as the icing on the cake. If you’re feeling the need to take more control of your PVR viewing experience, then this software is definitely something you should download.

This BoEye MID700 is a Chinese tablet which runs the Android operating system and features a front facing camera, a super sleek design and a rumoured price level of around $300.00. The company focuses on e-book readers (aka Kindle killers) so no guesses as to where they may be positioning this product. Interesting times, eh? [Thanks Patrick]

Science fiction moved a tad closer to our epidermis this month with the announcement that researchers are working on nano-scale electronics which can be embedded in the body using a silk screen carrier. The idea is for this Silicon-Silk patch to biodegrade over time, leaving behind the fully functioning electronics.

Professor Brian Litt, of the University of Pennsylvania where some of the research is being done, believes that the new technology could give rise to a slew of new applications in healthcare and beyond.  One example is to create tiny silicon-silk LED tattoos to display the body’s vital signs such as blood sugar levels. It may not compare with a tattoo of your mum riding a Harley, but hey it’s a start.

The newest YoGen Hand Powered Gadget Charger is a leap forward in draw-and-release charging.The latest release by Easy Energy this YoGen will charge any mobile gadget you’ve got.

Just pull and release the string. This drives the internal generator, charging anything from an MP3 player, camera, cell phone, PDA’s, Bluetooth headsets, even GPS units. The LED indicator shows when it’s charging via its mini-USB port. With no batteries needed, it’s great for camping, hunting, fishing, travel and emergencies. A must-have, this lightweight compact device retails for $39.95 and will be available November 15th.

Power is generated with the first pull / Charges devices with only a few minutes of pull/release time / Yogens� patented technology charges most mobile devices / Yogens� charge/time ratio is similar to standard AC wall chargers.

Tags: gadget, charger, yogen, gadget+charger

As if cubicles weren’t enough, the boffins at Clemson University have come up with a computer controlled robotic wall called the Animated Workplace Environment – or A.W.E. – which is designed to adjust to different configurations depending on need. It features motion sensing tech and so will react to the movement of the users (for example it will retract automatically if you stand up to leave the room) and at the moment offers 6 or 7 different shape settings.

Check out the video for an example of what this crazy idea can do. At this rate it won’t be long before we have instantly configurable homes that change according to our mood. Oh right, we’ve already got that haven’t we, come back student digs all is forgiven.

JPEG Lossless Rotator is a free program which lets you rotate your images without losing image quality. What, you mean you didn’t know that every time you rotate – or indeed edit – a JPG file it loses quality? Tsk!

Anyhoo, this software accomplishes its magic by doing some kind of ‘block’ transformation, whatever that means. It’s available in 24 different languages, comes with hotkey support (e.g. r for rotate right etc) and Windows Explorer integration for all your right mouse click enjoyment. Cool product for the toolbox. Oh, do remember to take a copy of the photo first, because the program overwrites the original.

This video of a Bottle Bank Arcade Machine is brilliant. Turn a bottle bank into an arcade machine with flashing lights and score tables and what happens? People recycle more bottles. Awesome, now why couldn’t we do this with all recycling banks? And it takes a VW viral site to give us the idea? Wow.

Prism from Mozilla Labs lets you convert any web application into a desktop accessible program, complete with its own icon and dedicated screen. Why would you want this? Well it makes it easier to access some types of web apps if you can use them in their own space, without having them displayed in a generic browser. Things like docs, control panels, accounting services, even web mail.

Google Chrome has this feature and I love it, I immediately made Gmail into a desktop app so I could fire up my inbox without having to run up a full web browser instance. Very cool. The Prism product is implemented as a Firefox addon, which is superb (you’ll find it under the Tools menu when it’s installed) and you can set the app to run minimised from the task bar, start automatically and display pop-up notifications. Excellent. A keeper.

The Sensium Digital Plaster is a wireless monitoring patch designed to provide a discreet wireless way to monitor a patient’s vital signs. The small plaster attaches to the body like an ordinary Band-Aid and delivers information on things like heart rate, temperature and perspiration for a period of several days after which it is thrown away.

To give it that true Sci-Fi feel, the technology can also interface wirelessly to smartphones and PDAs which means your doc can be sitting at home watching the latest House and still be in touch with all your vital bits and pieces as you struggle with the hospital food. Good to know eh? Watch out for some smart-alec sticking plasters in a drawer near you real soon.

Translate Client is a new freeware program which embeds Google Translate functionality into Windows applications like MS Word, Outlook Express, Firefox etc. There’s lots of software which work with browsers, but this is the first I’ve come across which promises to deliver translations from 50+ languages into any Windows app.

It’s very ambitious and clearly still suffers from a few glitches, but the overall principle seems to work as advertised. Once installed, you simply highlight the text you wish to convert, and poof, the program translates it. You can select the target languages manually or let it decide for itself, which seemed a little broken on my machine.

What I liked a lot though was the ability to highlight and click on text on a web page to get an instant in-line translation, very useful indeed for grabbing the meaning of small chunks of unintelligible prose. Overall it’s a nice idea, and something that I can see being very useful for things like translating email messages (you know, all those Italian messages from Uncle Alberto) and such. Worth a download.

QuickReader is a lovely looking new eBook reader with a difference, in that it comes with a cool speed reading function to help you scan pages faster and remember more information. It uses some kind of fancy speed reading tech to achieve this feat, and is totally customisable in just about every conceivable way. Speeds from 100 to 2000 word per minute (what’s that, War & Peace in 20 seconds?), colours, backgrounds, fonts, line spacing, the list goes on.

It ships with a selection of free classic books to practice on, including Black Beauty which always used to make me sniffle a bit when I were a lad. Dude, if you’re serious about your reading skillz, you’ll want to invest some time and energy into doing it right with this baby. Of course you’ll need an iPhone first. QuickReader Lite is free, and there’s a Pro version – on special offer at $4.99 – which is guaranteed to teach you to read faster than Superman’s toothbrush. Or something.