The Red Ferret Journal

This AR.Drone Quadricopter comes with on-board WiFi and two cameras, which means you can pilot it and view the video image from your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. The thing even features augmented reality code to let you play games with air-to-air missiles and such. Oooh, I hear you say. $299.99.

These mini fridges are getting too cool for words. Arf! This Deluxe Mini Fridge-Warmer comes with a digital thermostat, in-car power adapter, interior light and a nice friendly see-through panel to watch your foodstuffs and drinks chill. Or warm up. Holds a fair bit too. $99.99.

The Nimble Noggin Challenge is a simple ’steady through the wire maze’ game, no batteries required. Just a lot of patience. Not something to play with the kids the morning after the night before, perhaps. $34.95.

Stool Money Box. Does anyone else find it a little strange that somewhere on this planet, someone thought that designing a piggy bank to look like a large brown pile of excrement would be, like…a *good* idea? That it would perhaps encourage saving? $35.09. We particularly enjoy their description sign off –  ‘it is very lovely’. Weird weird.

Iain Barclay bought a field one day. And wanted some way to look at it, when he wasn’t there. So he went ahead and built himself a clever Solar Powered Wireless Webcam –  which he calls a FieldCam –  using some off the shelf parts, a 3G cellular phone dongle and router, and a custom circuit board. The result is very cool.

He’s stuck the box in the field, and set it up to trickle charge constantly, and power up the camera every 5 minutes to take a shot which is then uploaded (automatically I think) to Flickr for his family to enjoy. Running cost is £10 a month flat for the 3G cellular data connection SIM card.

He doesn’t mention an overall cost, but it sounds like around £200 or so for the full kit, which is pretty good considering the functionality of beaming pics back from a field in the middle of nowhere. I’m wondering, though, whether the same result could be achieved somehow by rigging up an old cameraphone (something like a Nokia N82 perhaps?) to deliver a photo at set times.

Why doesn’t someone make a reasonably priced commercial version of something like this? C’mon you guys, get to it.

[Check out also these solar powered DIY Wireless CCTV and WiFi Wireless Webcam –  not 3G –  ideas].

Calimero Skype Launcher is a freeware program that lets you run multiple Skype accounts on your computer simultaneously. Why? Well you may have a number of Skype accounts for business, pleasure and points in between, and now you can have them all running at once in case you’re expecting urgent calls. Or something. Needs Skype 4.0 or later.

Shutter Scouts is an interesting new online service which provides a place where photographers can store their favourite scene info, grab accurate weather forecasts for a shoot location and get help with choosing a location based on a number of criteria.

It’s currently a work in progress (i.e. not yet in beta) but if you’re someone who is driven by perfect photo conditions, this could be a useful place to start.

This 3rd Space Trigger Gaming Vest is a new system which adds force feedback to games consoles like the PS3, XBox and Wii. The system packs eight compressed air sensors into a vest which activate when triggered by video game action. Get shot and feel the impact, get blown up and feel even more.

The new box uses the same tech as the original PC USB vest, but now has  the ability to work with your TV and games console. This is what they call immersive 3D gaming folks, and it appears to involve pain. Note: probably won’t work with Postman Pat Goes to Greendale. Priced at $189.00.

This Grace Tuner WiFi Radio delivers over 50,000 Internet radio stations from the world to your ear-lugs. Podcasts, Pandora, Live365, Sirius and Reciva Internet stations are all there, as well as the ability to stream music directly to your home hi-fi system from your PC or Mac. Oh and it also contains a standard FM radio and doubles up as a radio alarm clock. $219.99 (and you’ll need your own speakers).

This new Urbanlit-e 1603 Electric Bicycle is a Chinese model which actually looks decent, comes with a reasonable spec and appears to come with a reasonable weight of just 19kg all in. Judging from the photos it won’t fold into a very small package, but it’s probably enough to cram into a car when needed.

Range is 35km, charging time 5 –  7 hours, and the low price of £646.25 reflects the fact that it’s using a cheaper brush type motor instead of the more robust brushless versions. Still, an interesting product.

Keyboard LEDs is a freeware program which gives you a quick and easy visual indication in your taskbar when the CAPSLOCK, NUMLOCK or SCROLL LOCK keys are on. This can save time, hassle and prevent the annoying typing of incorrect letters when you’re in a hurry. Useful, especially if your netbook or laptop doesn’t have physical indicators.

Filevo is a new free file hosting and download service. The free (registration) version gives up to 1GB file size upload with unlimited downloads at up to 4Mb/s speeds. Which means it’s fast and useful, and a solid competitor for services like YouSendit or Rapidshare.

Totally anonymous users get a max of 200MB upload and 1GB daily download limit, which is plenty enough for quickly sharing a document with a colleague on the fly. The service also links with BitTorrent and Rapidshare which lets you sideload files seamlessly from these services. Neat.