Well it’s that time of year again, and the Ferret feels the call of nature…the lure of the wild…the keening attraction of raw open spaces. Normal service will resume around the 18th July. NB For those who can’t be bothered to keep checking back to see when Ferreting resumes, I’ve thoughtfully, oh so thoughtfully, added a Notify Me button on the page. Use it and you will be notified by email when the next posting goes up. Enjoy and catch…

It had to happen. Text Vault is an online service which provides secure storage of your most important SMS messages. ‘Never lose that special message again.’ It costs around �4.50 to set up your own personalised vault and password and thereafter 30p per message per year for storage. Forwarding a message back to your phone costs an additional 60p. I’ve got to say that this is a pretty cool idea if you do have important txt messages you want to…

The FlyCAM SD is billed as the world’s first ‘SD-camera solution in the world with Flash Light and 1.3 Mega pixels’. It also does video at 320×240 x 30 frames per second and works with any PocketPC PDA with an SD flash memory expansion slot. Street price is estimated to be around $169.00.

The Ebolamonkeyman.com site appears to be one man’s obsessional pursuit via email of the Nigerian 419 scam artists. It is funny and kind of pathetic in one go. Funny because these fraudsters deserve to be ridiculed for their nasty activities, but kind of pathetic because these people basically make their money out of our stupid, blind greed here in the West.

Meet Volkswagen’s latest test driver. Robot Klaus is cheap to run, doesn’t take sickies all the time and never indulges in office party pranks. On the other hand there are those who feel he’s a little cold and standoffish. [via everythingisnt]

FujiFilm has announced the Axia Slim Shot Mega digicam (warning: Japanese site). It’s a 1.3 megapixel device with 16MB of internal memory, an SD expansion slot and a USB 2.0 interface. It doesn’t appear to have a flash or a re/preview LCD so it must remain an also-ran in the league of honourable must-haves. [via digitlife]

Watchmakers Timex has released a range of watches which work in conjunction with the Speedpass service to let you ‘pay for your gas, snacks and merchandise….without ever reaching for your wallet. Just point your Speedpass-enabled Timex watch at the reader.’ At the moment the watch is accepted at 8000+ gas stations, 440 McDonalds (yeah riiiight, fast food-fast payout) and a number of supermarkets in Boston. Still and all it’s a neat idea if you’ve ever gone bright red whilst fumbling…

Wired takes a look at a new Italian gadget called the TRIMprob (Tissue Resonance InterferoMeter Probe), a battery powered baton which a doctor swipes across a patient’s body to check for tumours or other nasty ‘irregular tissue’. Good news, it’s cheap (ish) at around $30K, bad news, it’s not as accurate as it needs to be.

Want to know just how fast you can overclock your PC? Then check out the CPU Database which lists just about every permutation and overclocking stat around. [via madville]

The UtiliKilt.The ultimate in macho style? Yours for a mere $175.00.

Is this a good idea? Well is it? The TxTBoard from Bristol based Appliance Studio is a little touch screen doobry which sits on the wall and displays text messages sent from any mobile phone. It obviously has its own mobile telephone number and is designed to be hung on the wall of any ‘communal area at home.’ Is it a good idea? I suppose in some ways it could be considered brilliant, but then again, isn’t texting all about…

Now where did I put that darn server? Oh yeah I remember, I hung it on the wall in the form of a 6 string guitar. Of course! Welcome to the Pomgolian Web server.

FotoTxt is a new service that lets you add text captions to photo messages from mobile phones. The service has been launched in the UK by O2 in conjunction with the Big Brother TV program, but expect to see it rolled out in many other guises over the coming months if it takes off. [via the rather neat picturephoning site]

The latest Cringely column covers the potential for a new high speed broadband service over copper. Dynamic Time Metered Delivery from TelePulse Technologies (sorry they don’t appear to have a Web presence, all Google can produce is this HTML slide site) can provide 22 megabits per second out to homes more than 2 miles away. And you can combine wires to increase bandwidth. The upgrade path for the telcos is also relatively painless, requiring only an exchange of cards at…