BuddyZoo.com is a buddy list site with a difference. It apparently aims to let you know which buddies you have in common with your friends. The theory is that each of our friends has other friends who we may or may not get on with, if only we knew what we had in common. Geddit? No well, I’m not so sure either. This kind of stuff seems to be a ‘flavour of the month’ at the mo. Huminity.com also promises…

Hear that sound? It’s the rustle of a hundred thousand shirt sleeves being rolled up in Japan as the Far Eastern mega-tech-corps prepare to unleash a flood of fuel cell products onto an unsuspecting world. Early next year, looks like. First off the block may well be NEC and/or Toshiba who have both begun to show off suspiciously well built prototypes. When connected to a notebook, Toshiba’s direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC), featured above, ‘can generate power to operate the…

Mr Main Man Fahim Farook, awesome programmer at large and developer of the Blog proggie what powers this ‘ere blog, has set up his own online programming consultancy – Geek for Hire. Trust me, if you need something technical done, use him. He’s more than good!

For the lady geek who has everything – the iPurse. Designed in tasteful white synthetic leather and cotton, complete with integral speakers and a slot for that all important iPOD player. Yours for only $144.95.

Big time MSN Messenger users may want to bookmark Ewan Fisher’s Happy-Messaging.com site, especially if they have been attacked by one of the current crop of viruses (e.g. ‘wanna see my picture?’). It provides walkthroughs on how to remove the top three MSN Messenger viruses of the moment. Very useful. Oh, and RAV4MSN is a free MSN Messenger integrated anti-virus package which apparently ‘scans all the files you receive by MSN Messenger, checking for and cleaning viruses, worms, Trojans, and…

Them clever folks wot brought us the free and rather groovy pdf995 program for converting files to PDF format, have released another gem. Omniformat is a utility which will convert between 75 different file formats, including AVI, GIF, TIFF, MPEG and PhotoCD. It also has a useful sounding OCR module which will convert any suitable image file to text. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, but it goes onto my list of funky apps immediately. Like pdf995…

The howtocleananything.com site. 1,377 tips on cleaning just about anything. Everything from how to clean saxophones, to removing stains from shirts. You can even ask a pro. Mind you I couldn’t find out how to remove stubborn limescale stains from toilet bowls, so it’s not a totally complete resource, is it? [via madville]

Brighthand has a report on the imminent arrival of virtual keyboards, which are apparently about to appear on the market in force later this year. [via gizmodo] Keen Ferret readers will remember that we first mentioned these puppies a year ago and in the interim I’ve actually tried one out in the wild. I ran across the Canesta keyboard at the GSM World conference in Cannes a while back, and to be honest was less than impressed. Sure it worked,…

The International Federation of Inventors’ Associations has an online store. Selling cool and groovy ideas. Some are ludicrousely idiotical – like this double headed toothbrush whilst others, like the helicopter trainer above (which would look really cool in my garden – honest!) appear to be quite neat.

Reason Products’ new Unleash headset uses Near Field Magnetic Wireless technology (no I don’t know either) to give low power, high quality sound and performance. So the company claims anyway. I’m not sure just how safe it is to have a magnetic/electronic device tucked behind your ear, but no doubt we’ll soon find out. It will cost around $100 when released, and features a portable re-charging cradle which can run off AA batteries. Meanwhile: Reasons to be cheerful – part…

Steven Gibson, author, programmer extraordinaire and privacy evangelist now has a full page devoted to his freeware utility goodies. Quite a few neat privacy/security tools on here like Leak Test for checking on firewalls, ID Serve for checking Web servers and Wizmo a kind of Windows toolbox. Worth a sniff around.

The Enfora WP802b is a leather case for Palm handhelds which also sports a WiFi wireless connection doobry. Install your Palm into this little marvel and you too will be able to surf, email and what-not anywhere you can find a WiFi hotspot. It even has a battery to keep you going longer. It’s still in concept stage at the moment, but the makers are hoping to have it on the market soon at a price below $200.00.

The Recode.com site is being posted everywhere at the moment. It’s basically a site which lets you create your own barcodes of major retail products. It’s a weird thang, but it seems to be making some people happy. And some, like Wal-Mart, unhappy. Such is life!

Shock press! Philips enters the iPod battle with what could be a real contender. The HDD 100 Recording Audio Jukebox is a 15GB handheld MP3 recorder/player with a host of cool features like super fast USB 2.0 support, direct recording and a 5 band equaliser. No price, just a beta test at the moment, but this is one to watch.

The ultimate numeric conversion site from Science Made Simple. Money, distance, temperature, area, volume you name it!