Definitely worth a check.
Winter is on its way in, and there’s always one room in the house that is freezing cold. More often than not, it’s also the room you like to spend the most time in. While you want to turn up the heat, you don’t want to have to pay more on your bills at the end of the month. If you would prefer not to bundle up in more clothes, a space heater will fix your temperature problem.
It’s a noisy place this Internet. Forums, social networks, comments, chat, video, news…it’s all go, on the go, 24/7. Which makes it a curse as well as a blessing. It’s no surprise that there’s a rise in the levels of procrastination around the globe, we’re all too busy checking stuff out to get on with real work. Or maybe that is real work? Anyway, the fact is sometimes it would be nice to be able to switch the whole thing…
![Internet Off – because sometimes you just need a bit of peace and quiet [Freeware]](https://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/internetoff.jpg)
You can never tell when things are going to get a bit sticky. Y’know, nasty natural disasters like flood, pestilence, plague and all that stuff. Not to mention the occasional hurricane barreling down your front path intent on mischief. For the Special Forces folk of this world this is probably a walk in the park, but for the rest of us, a bit of preparation can come in handy and maybe save lives.
At one point or another everyone has a need to share a file. Whether it’s sending a photo of the new baby to dear Aunt Maude, or circulating a document amongst work colleagues, it’s all the same problem. Modern files are typically too large to reliably send as attachments without a lot of work, and file sharing options like Dropbox are both vulnerable and limited because your files end up stored on their servers.
![AeroFS – all the file sharing goodness of Dropbox without the limitations [Freeware]](https://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/aerofs4.jpg)
It’s crazy out there. All that rushing around doing busy. No time to think, but no point in complaining either, because we’re all happy runners on the treadmill, eh peeps? Luckily there’s lots of tools out there to help us cope with our bizarre lifestyle choices, and if they’re free and easy to use, so much the better.
![Calme – free calendar and planner maker is perfect for organizing your life [Freeware]](https://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/calme2.jpg)
We first featured the wonder product Aerogel back in 2003 when we wrote about a high performance jacket designed for mountain climbers. The €1900 coat is just one item in a rapidly growing stable of commercial products based around this wonder material, which was developed in 1931 by Dr Samuel Kistler in the US. Despite its amazing thermal insulation properties and an absolute slew of world records (lowest density solid, lowest thermal conductivity, lowest speed of sound through a material…
Walking or biking at night is pretty dangerous if you’re gallivanting on the side of a road. Not all towns are well-lit for pedestrians, and if you’re stuck in an rural area, most of the town probably doesn’t have much lighting in general. If you want to make sure no one side-swipes you, then you’ll need to do more than just have one reflector on your bicycle or jacket.
We love freeware programs here on the Ferret, but more than that even, we love teeny tiny freeware programs. Specifically because these small parcels of code tend to offer a highly focused set of functions and do away with all the bloat and install trauma you get with commercial programs.
![FlicFlac Audio Converter – tiny program quickly converts your audio files [Freeware]](https://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/flicflac.jpg)
If you run a small business, especially with a loyal set of regular customers, you know that it pays to understand what they like about your service or product and why they use you and not your rivals. Unfortunately it takes time and money to get this kind of information, which is something most small biz owners don’t have.
Most of us charge our phones at night, and use them for an alarm in the mornings. This means that our charger has to be somewhere near the bed. If you don’t have some sort of docking station for your phone, then you likely have a loose cable haphazardly hanging around during the day. If you’re like me, then you’ve probably kicked it out of the socket a time or two, or found the cat thinking it’s a toy that…
There are 365 Android apps installed on the Samsung Android smartphone sitting here in front of me…how on earth did that happen? And more to the point, what are they worth to my life? The fact is that most of us carry around an unfeasibly large number of sophisticated computer programs on our modern phones, but can we really say they’re useful or valuable? I recently sat down to evaluate which of my installed apps were important, and came to…
The web is a wild place, full of beasts waiting to pounce on the innocent and rip their email addresses from their cold lifeless keyboards. Make one bad move, like leaving your email address with an unscrupulous retail or service website and you could end up with a barrage of spam messages or worse flooding into your inbox. Not pleasant! But there is a way to protect yourself easily and for free.
Photography is all about light, as any pundit will tell you, and this is especially true when you want to make the most of limited light indoors or in otherwise less than perfect environments. Most cameras and camera phones use on-board flash units to try and solve the problem, but they’re seldom up to the job, and the results they give can be awful. We’ve all seen those stereotypical New Year’s Eve party snaps which are the result of crude…
![MagneFlash P102S Panel Flash – budget professional lighting for phones and DSLR [Review]](https://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/magneflash2-730x543.jpg)
Amazon seems to have a nasty habit of thinking it can pop along and delete user’s legitimately purchased e-books from their Kindle reader whenever it feels like it, and it’s starting to annoy a few people. It may well be ‘legal’ in respect of the Amazon terms and conditions when you buy your Kindle and/or e-books, but it’s certainly not ‘kosher’ as far as us ordinary mortals are concerned. I buy a book, I don’t expect you to come to…
You don’t have to look far to find lots of horror stories about ID theft, phishing and malware attacks on unsuspecting WiFi users. Sure, some of them are designed to generate more cash for the security business, but that doesn’t alter the fact that it’s generally a pretty hostile place out there if you’re not careful. Current solutions typically involve the installation of various complicated programs to protect your computer, but up till now there hasn’t been a really comprehensive…
![WiFi Protector – easy instant protection from wireless hackers [Freeware]](https://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/wifiprotectoron.jpg)
