Yearly Archives: 2008

Bookmark This! January 22, 2008 posted by

Really Worried – help and advice for free

Really Worried is a new community website which combines group therapy with a nice purple colour and lots of helpful advice. The idea has been well explored via places like AskMetafilter, but this version looks like it could be a friendly place to unload a worry or two. Relationships, pets, legal, money, it’s all here.   Hello. ReallyWorried is a place to seek or share help and advice on just about any worrying topic. It works on the simple notion…

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cool tech January 21, 2008 posted by

iPod Retro Cardboard BoomBox – pump up the volume for cheap

iPod Retro Cardboard BoomBox. We’re talking flat-packed, cardboard crafted, retro styled, battery powered, shoulder mounted, iPod dockin’ speaker system. Just don’t try gettin’ jiggy wit it in a downpour and you should be fine. Perhaps. Once the people around you stop laughing. Maybe. £19.95/$39.10.  Despite its lowly price tag and cardboard construction, the iPod Boombox produces surprisingly crisp, powerful sonics. It’s perfect for a quick blast, particularly if you’re playing a few retro tunes or bustin’ some old-skool moves in front of…

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cool tech January 21, 2008 posted by

Safe Turn – wrist mounted bicycle indicators for safer swerving

Safe Turn. Strap these onto your wrist/s and let those crazy SUV nutz know where you’re heading when you want to make a turn.  Customisable to operate at different angles so you can tailor them to fit in with your particular arm waving technique. A$19.95. Video.  The Safe Turn Indicator is a new Australian invention. It is a small, portable, automatic bicycle light indicator that easily clips to the wristband that is provided or to your own glove. Unlike other…

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cool tech January 21, 2008 posted by

CIGS 52W Folding Solar Panel – power up for power rangers

CIGS 52W Folding Solar Panel. There’s none of your piddling little iPod charging solar tech here, this puppy will push out a whopping 52W of power from its state of the art Copper Indium Gallium diSelenide panels. And you can link up to three of these together and re-charge a small village post office while you’re at it. Juicy. $880.00.   * 12V output for video and digital cameras; laptops and dvd players * Flexible high performance CIGS solar cells * Multi-section…

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Bookmark This! January 21, 2008 posted by

SP3500 Portrait Studio Lighting Kit – shine out with those portrait skillz

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…

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cool tech January 21, 2008 posted by

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…

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Awesome January 21, 2008 posted by

CuePrompter – 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…

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opinion piece January 21, 2008 posted by

14 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…

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Bookmark This! January 21, 2008 posted by

Hashrocket – 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…

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reprise January 20, 2008 posted by

Ferret 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…

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opinion piece January 19, 2008 posted by

The 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…

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cool tech January 19, 2008 posted by

PICO 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…

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opinion piece January 18, 2008 posted by

The 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…

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Gadgets January 18, 2008 posted by

One 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’…

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Gadgets January 18, 2008 posted by

Credit 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…

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