Yes of course! As if a bicycle wasn’t enough of a challenge as it is, now they’ve come up with a Swingbike. It’s a bike which swings, see?

As promised a long time ago, the Ferret has now dropped the conventional copyright notice and moved to a Creative Commons license. Go, Prof go!

This Oddcast text to speech demo is fun. It also offers jokey French, German and Spanish accents which don’t work quite as well. [via madville] The company’s [V] Host news service demo is even cooler, especially when you click on the English flag and get this pukka Brit bloke. Arf arf! Click on the ‘learn more’ link in the V Host banner at the top of the page.

The Ford Mustang Mystichrome features colour shifting paint that changes between ‘a bright, metallic topaz that transitions to cobalt blue, then to royal purple, and finally into a deep onyx black.’ The vehicle also sports colour shifting leather trim which mimics the exterior colours. Now is it just me or does this seem like every traffic cop’s worst nightmare? “Control, we’re currently chasing a blue Mustang registration XYZ995, sorry cancel that, black, no purple…no sorry topaz coloured Mustang. Aw ferget…

Today is obviously toy day. The Magic Cabin site is an online store chock full of quaint goodies which provide an antidote to the mechanistic stuff slopping off the shelves at Toys ‘R Us. And they actually ship internationally.

Hey, why go to all the bother of buying one of them thar fancy iPod gizmos, when for around $300.00 all in you can gather up the components from the PJRC store and build yer own? Makes sense to me!

The $9,995.00 VersaLaser system can ‘transform images or drawings on your computer screen into real items made out of an amazing variety of materials� wood, plastic, fabric, paper, glass, leather, stone, ceramic, rubber� and it�s as easy to use as your printer.’ [via slashdot] Cool or what? In related news, toybuilders.com is a company that appears to be making a living out of crafting custom built toys and articles to your own design using an array of these kinds of…

Seiko-Epson has developed a teeny robot called Monsieur II-P which has wheels and can travel at 150mm/sec. It also has integrated Bluetooth. It looks like it could offer a lot of playground and executive desk fun, although the company says that it has no schedule to produce them commercially as yet. [via mobilemag]

The David Blane Style Street Magic site, purports to reveal a lot of the secrets behind his magic tricks. I’m more fascinated by TheTrickery.com, which offers a really cool selection of magic props with which to amaze and befool your friends, neighbours and work colleagues. As long as you’re dextrous enough of course. Also check out the great videos section.

Oooh look ma, Google without any of the flim flam. Perfect for those who want their results links plain and unadorned.

The Love Calculator calculates the probability of a successful relationship between two people based on their name. There is also a downloadable standalone program available. Er…don’t take it too seriously will you?

So Microsoft announces a $2.79 billion profit for the last quarter. Last quarter? Whew! That’s $24,000 a second (I just made that up, but it sounds good don’t it?). Anyway just to prove that the Redmond Rockets are a really nice bunch of – rich – guys, they’re going to be giving away a nice download of goodies from 22nd April. The Windows XP Creativity Fun Pack has lots of stuff in it for you to play with. Oh and…

Er…the Vigilant Watch is a geiger counter in disguise. Yep, for a piddling $1499.00 you too can have a little ‘radiation monitoring device’ on your wrist that looks cool and bleeps when you’re in mortal danger. Oh the joys of hearing that cheerful little sound just before you see the mushroom cloud vapour.

Wow. It appears as though the new and increasingly famous Honda advert [warning: link to Quicktime video.] is actually real. That’s right, no computer trickery involved. Apparently it took them over 600 takes to get it right. Now that’s dedication. Isn’t it nice when things just work? [via metafilter]

A short but interesting Wired article looking at the rather peculiar inversion of the statistical bell curve in general life. ‘Although bell curve distribution is still considered normal, a surprising number of economic and social phenomena now seem to follow a different arc. Instead of being high in the center and low on the sides, this new distribution is low in the center and high on the sides. Call it the well curve. The end of the middle ground?