…the Ferret is a bit busy at the moment, so there will be no news for a while. Check back in 2 weeks when it should be business as usual. Toodle pip!

From the ‘well would you believe that?’ dept. It appears that after having sat at the dog end of the video card market for a long time, Canadian outfit Matrox may be about to come up with a sensational – read super fast – video graphics card. The new product, code named Parhelia is just a rumour at the moment, but if the rumour pans out it could set the cat among the feathered creatures and cause the mighty Nvidia…

Just what do you give the man who has everything? Why what else but a beautiful and unique pair of Lighthearted Leprechaun shoes. Only $7.85. [via MajorGeeks]

You thought that you’d escaped didn’t you? You thought that your Tamagotchi was safely tucked away in the bottom of your bedroom drawer, never to be seen or heard from again. Well think on. Now you can log on to this Web site and learn how to get hold of your very own Wireless Pet. Yes an SMS or WAP cat or dog to care for and love all of your own. And all for only 10p a message.

Why not start an impassioned argument the next time you’re at a civilised dinner party by supportively quoting chunks of Bjorn Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg is a statistician and former member of Greenpeace, who has done an in-depth study of the stats and facts behind the environmental lobbying which is a daily part of the world’s media focus. I haven’t read it yet, but simply looking at the opposition to it is enlightening enough. Note: he claims that…

Every wondered where they went? You know, those one hit wonders who stormed up the pop music charts and then disappeared never to be heard of again? Maybe you can find out here.

The folks at PaceBlade have announced the PaceBook. They claim that it’s the first notebook which can convert into a tablet PC, and here’s the photos to prove it. Personally I’m not convinced that anyone is going to want to cart around a dual type machine just for this limited chameleon type functionality, but then what do I know? [via Twomobile.com]

So the Gnutella network looks as though it is undergoing an exponential growth pattern, up from around 100,000 hosts a month or so back, to around 300,000 today. Of course most of this is due to the influx of Morpheus users from FastTrak, but it is interesting to note that the system seems to be coping with the strain. In other words you can still find and download stuff in reasonable time frames. It remains to be seen whether the…

Next month Sony will quietly start broadcasting – or should that be narrowcasting – games, movies and other programming across its PlaystationBB channel in Japan. Whilst this is geared towards Playstation 2 users, the company is also starting up a general PC service through its CyberGene.com subsidiary, which may also eventually supply content to 3G PDAs and cell phones. All of this softly softly activity strikes me as being a good practice ground for the eventual epic struggle over the…

Market research company Navian is predicting that over 31 million Bluetooth modules will be shipped in products in 2002. Nearly three quarters will go inside mobile phone handsets and headphones, with Ericsson being the main player in the market. We can expect that the remaining 25% or so will come from laptop products and small devices such as the Toshiba Bluetooth SD card which was released recently in the UK.

According to a recent Nikkei report, Ya-Qin Zhang the managing director of Microsoft Research in Asia is predicting that within 5 years the main computer input method will use voice and handwriting recognition technology. To that end his laboratory is currently working on a speech recognition/synthetic technology called Mulan, and a handwriting input technology called TrueInk, some of which is already incorporated into Windows XP. From the horses mouth?

This is quite definitely the funniest car review I have ever read. [via Metafilter] … and this is the target.

For all those ‘stars in their eyes’ types, who dream of getting a record contract and becoming a Star! This royalty calculator should help dispel a few myths about exactly how much money you won’t make.

Yesterday a big hitting consortium of Japanese manufacturers – including Canon, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Sanyo, Sharp and JVC – sat down together and agreed to set up the iVDR Consortium. This ‘Information Versatile Disk for Removable’ usage group – great name guys! – is tasked with laying out the specification for the next generation of ‘lightweight, compact, removable hard disk drives compatible with a wide range of applications from AV to PC devices’. The idea is to create a standard interface,…

Looks like the mobile phone wars are starting to heat up in earnest, with the announcement of the new Sony Ericsson P800 handset. This handset – which is due out nearer the end of the year – is a direct competitor to Nokia’s upcoming 7650 phone, with a few similarities and a few differences. The P800 will have 16MB of user available RAM compared to 2MB for the Nokia, will sport a slightly bigger colour screen than the Nokia (208×320…