This SP3500 Portrait Studio Lighting Kit looks like a fairly complete portable lighting set for budding photographers with ambition. And it seems to be selling for an attractively reasonable price, Jeremy. One might almost consider it a bargain at $399.95. This new 3 light kit gives you plenty of power, is lightweight, portable, and simple to set up. Just like our other kits we wanted to offer a complete package with all of the necessary accessories. Thus, we have included a…
Read MoreMonthly Archives: January 2008
RED, The Reading Eye Dog – your mechanical scanning bookreader friend
RED, the Reading Eye Dog. Put a book in front of his eyes and he’ll read it out loud to you while displaying it on his tummy screen. Strictly conceptual at the moment, but cute and maybe useful one day? RED, the Reading Eye Dog loves to read out loud to you! Put any printed text in front of his eyes and he will pick out the text and put it together on his tummy screen. Then not only does he…
Read MoreCuePrompter – the online teleprompter
CuePrompter. A brilliant new free online teleprompter service and an excellent piece of market disrupting technology methinks. Suddenly all you need is a laptop, web browser and Internet connection and you’ve got yourself a fully fledged teleprompter for those on the cuff reports to camera. Podcasters, online television producers, heck even the majors could use this. And yes, a 3.5G HSDPA cell phone service dongle for the laptop would give you a lot of mobility too. Free teleprompter/autocue service CuePrompter…
Read More14 Stupid Things That Drive me Nuts About Online Sign up Forms
I’m really getting tired of badly designed sign up forms. I spend a lot of time subscribing to various services, applications and stuff, and it’s amazing how many subscription forms are still really really rancid. Please web developers, take a course in form design UI or something, and stop wasting our time and brainpower. Specifically I cannot stand – Forms that display indecipherable captchas that you can’t read, contain both zero and the letter O, and thereby trap you in an endless refresh-fail hell! Forms…
Read MoreHashrocket – your web application developed in 3 days
As a timely follow up to my Groupzz search engine post last week, here’s news of a new development house called Hashrocket which is promising to deliver a full blown Ruby on Rails web application in 3 days flat. It’s fixed bid pricing at around $30,000 to $60,000 but again it goes to show that traditional barriers to entry are all but gone in the web world nowadays, whether it’s at the $99.00 level or higher. It’s a great time to…
Read MoreFerret posts this week
Here’s a quick round-up of Ferrety posts from the past week for anyone who missed them. Enjoy. The Red Ferret Journal Product of the Year 2007: Software – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – The Red Ferret Journal Product of… DIY Fire Alarm Clock – loud, loud, and red, red.. – This DIY Fire Alarm Clock may be… The 150 mpg Extreme Hybrid SUV – rocket scientists aim to revolutionize hybrid vehicles – A collaboration between a bunch of… GMER – freeware…
Read MoreThe Red Ferret Journal Product of the Year 2007: Imaging – Sony Alpha A700
The Red Ferret Journal Product of the Year 2007: Imaging – Sony Alpha A700. The Sony marketing blurb cheekily asserts, ‘What you once called a photo album you can now call a portfolio’, and that’s a remarkably accurate assessment of the market positioning of this excellent 12.4 megapixel digital SLR camera. On the face of it, this is just another entrant into the increasingly crowded digital SLR market, as manufacturers desperately retreat from the advancing quality of cell phone cameras…
Read MorePICO RFID Security Disk Enclosure – keep your data safe with a smart chip key
PICO RFID Security Hard Disk Enclosure. Drop a 2.5 inch hard disk into this puppy and you immediately get the benefit of RFID key security for your data. The enclosure comes with a complete encryption system which locks and scrambles your disk in 3 seconds when you wave the magic key in the right place. Perfect for paranoids who need to go to the bathroom now and then. The disk will also wipe itself clean with a ‘disk partition format’ if anyone…
Read MoreThe Red Ferret Journal Product of the Year 2007: Computing – Drobo
The Red Ferret Journal Product of the Year 2007: Computing – Drobo. It’s hard to explain to techie types the appeal of this box, primarily because it looks expensive compared to supposed alternatives. But to those who have a real need for fail-safe, super super reliable data storage without any hassle whatsoever, this is the product to beat. The geeks can keep their complex RAID boxes, or their infinitely configurable but arcane NAS solutions, the rest of us will happily…
Read MoreOne Click Recorder – create powerful presentations with soundtrack
One Click Recorder. OK, gotta admit, this one has got me beat. I can see where it works, but I can’t for the life of me work out how it works, what it creates where stuff is stored or anything remotely useful. The blurb says that you can ‘produce, present and record’ virtually any form of presentation, but what does that mean? Powerpoint? PDF? Does the device have on-board memory for storage? The spec doesn’t say. Throw us a frickin’…
Read MoreCredit Card Microscope – 1000x magnification helps you look sharp, stay worried
The Credit Card Microscope apparently lets you see stuff at 1000x magnification that you probably don’t want to know. Like checking the state of your hair, examining ‘micro-organisms’ (huh?) or…ahem…bodily fluids. Kind of a gross out gift to give to the mother-in-law if you ask us. $89.00. [Via Madville] These disposable compact microscopes allow you to magnify small amounts of material instantly, and view them through a light simply by holding it up to your eyes. Choose between 500 or…
Read MoreRetro Webcam – lights, action…
Retro Webcam. Liven up your personal chat with a Cecil B DeMille style webcam which probably works better than his real proper camera did back in the day. Weird huh? Anyhoo, this puppy will be yours for just £24.95, so hurry along now and make a spectacle of yourself in style. The RetroCam can either happily rest on your TFT screen but also comes with an authentically stylish tripod, making it an attractive desktop conversation piece. The RetroCam may look…
Read MoreThe $99, 4 hour search engine – or why zero barriers to entry mean your web app will probably fail faster than you can blink
Groupzz. The meta music search engine. OK, so here’s the thing. There’s too much stuff out there, and it’s getting worse. More web apps, social networking, community drivel, tagging, blah… So it gets me thinking. How hard is it to make a simple web application today? Really? Step 1 – Spend half an hour searching, locate a $99.00 script on Sitepoint (there’s probably free around, but I’m in a hurry see?) Step 2 – Spend a couple of hours creating and tweaking a simple logo…
Read MoreLine Golfer – create your own golf course and play it…awesome
Line Golfer. Aaargh, yet another superb idea for a game, so more hours lost. The idea is that you design your own golf course – Line Rider style – and then you play it. And good luck to you, dear reader. Brilliant stuff! How to create a course: Use the tools at the top while in edit mode to design your course. When you are finished editing, use the disk icon and follow the onscreen instructions to publish your course…
Read MorePDF Hammer – free online PDF file editor
PDF Hammer. An online PDF file editor. Well actually it’s a part editor. You can add, delete and re-arrange pages, and soon you’ll be able to rotate and watermark them. But you can’t edit the actual pages themselves, which is a shame. I can see it being useful for last minute changes to a PDF you’ve received from someone else. You know, to add a new title page, change the order of a PDF presentation, that sort of thing. And…
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