Looks like the Light Brite toy I played with as a kid has gotten a major hi-tech overhaul.

Sketch Art from Hi-Tech Art allows you to make your own art by sticking LEDs.  You use the included background to stick LEDs into and watch them light up.  The board has no circuitry, no soldering, no resistors.

It includes eight differently colored LEDs to choose from.  It runs on batteries, wall power or USB, so you can take it pretty much anywhere.

The Sketch Art is available here, at a price of $49.95

This orange stake looks like any other tent peg. Look closer and you’ll find that there’s a white LED lamp built into the side. Powered by 4 LR41 batteries (included) this peg will help you survive those hurried late night tent setups by illuminating the ground. The manufacturer claims the light will run for up to 5 hours on one set of batteries.

Lighted Tent Peg – $3.72

It’s every host’s worst nightmare. You set up your house just so, with bright candles in your favorite color (let’s say pink), and everything is going smoothly…when one of your guests shows up wearing orange (clashing terribly with your candles)! Now Bree Van De Kamp will never come to another one of your parties! And in your guests’ haste to flee your home of bad taste, one of them knocks over a candle, burning the entire abomination to the ground.

Of course, you could dodge this scenario and use a Mooncandle: a wax, flameless candle that changes color with remote control. Yes, even candles have remote controls these days. Helpful if you want to put a candle on a high shelf, or just want to hide lights around the room to give it that proper gothic mood one moment, and the unnatural blue of a rave the next, all with the push of a button. Truly, we are living in a golden age.

All joking aside, this sounds like a neat idea. It’s economical (you don’t need several candles for each color), uses LEDs, has a timer so you can get your groove on without worrying about lowering the lighting at the right time, and won’t burn your house down if you forget to turn it off. And seriously: REMOTE CONTROLLED CANDLE. Who can resist that?

Find it here: Mooncandle (£29.99)

These Battery Snaps Flex Lamps will convert plain old 9v batteries into a power source for a reading light. Perfect for using in your car to read maps or even for the kids to use to light up their games in the back seat. Twin LEDs power the brightness and each lamp is sold separately in either green or black.

Battery Snaps Flex Lamp – $10.99

The Sungale CD358LD Desk Lamp is a super energy efficient LED Desk Lamp sporting an ultra thin 3.5 Inch LCD Screen that not only displays and stores hundreds of photos of friends and family back home but it also doubles as a video and audio player with built in speakers, calendar, analogue clock and alarm functions with user friendly navigation buttons and shortcut keys to access content.

With internal memory storage of 512 MB with optional SD, MMC, and MS memory card support the Sungale CD358LD Desk Lamp can store up to 2 GB of JPEG, AVI and MP3 files so watching movies, video clips and listening to music while studying is easy and convenient.
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This EZYFlare boasts 8,000 foot (1.5 mile) visibility and a battery life of up to 12 hours. Naturally the problem with all battery life estimates is when you leave batteries in your device for months they tend to naturally decay – and when the moment of truth comes you’re left looking at a slowly dimming light. However if you’re one of those people who regularly replaces the battery in their smoke detectors and is otherwise is diligent about such power matters – this may be a good deal to buy for $6.99 and keep in the trunk of your car or to take on your small fishing boat. Rubber feet on the bottom prevent damage to surfaces and the LED lights pulse when turned on to further increase visibility.

EZYFlare – $6.99

Eternal LEDS announces their 4W LED Hydralux-4 LED bulb which they say lasts 35x as long as a traditional bulb while saving $157 over the life of the bulb. The base includes liquid cooling in place of more traditional metal or fan cooling. The resulting LED bulb is fully dimmable, can be used indoors or out – and is cool to the touch. Expect 8W, 12W and 16W versions by the end of 2009. Cost is $34.99 and includes a two year warranty.

Eternal LED Hydralux-4

Are you always searching the house for a flashlight? Try these Battery Snaps. The LED light is illuminated by your 9V battery. when the battery loses power – simply unsnap the light and attach to another 9V. There’s not indication of how long you can expect the light to glow – and this tiny Snap seems pretty easy to lose but for $4.99 they’re intriguing. Available in black, pink, white and yellow.

Battery Snaps – $4.99

Need a durable LED Light that has multiple uses?  Need a light that is good for the environment?  Then the AltusLumen’s PAD-L may be the light for you.

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DealExtreme has this 10 pack of LED Keychain flashlights for a total of $4.73 shipped (batteries included). That works out to a $ .47 per keychain light cost, making them perfect stocking stuffers or kid birthday party favors. You can even use these as zipper pulls on your coat so you’ll never be without a working light. I’m not quite certain how they ship these for free when the price is low to begin with. Take advantage while the deal’s available! There’s even a YouTube demo video (1:32) for those who are skeptical.

DealExtreme Keychain – package of 10 for $4.97 shipped

There are so many good reasons why you might be interested in getting a clip-on safety light; perhaps because you ride a bike at night, or you walk in darker areas, or simply because you need a way to look inside a big gear bag in a darkened room.

The story goes that Tom Bihn spent three months searching for a light that would meet his expectations, and the result of that search was the Guardian Dual Function Light. Make no mistake about it, this is no cheap flasher that will break after a few uses; the Guardian Dual Function Light is made in Canada to military/law enforcement specifications, and it offers a lot of versatility. How so? Read on…

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Thomas Edison…It was nice knowing you, but the days of the incandescent light bulb are numbered! Ok, so here’s my scenario. I’m definitely not your classic Al Gore save the spotted clam type. So when I tell my friends about this purchase, at first they don’t get it.

I often work out of a home office that is about 12 feet by 12 feet and is located in my basement. Due to that, it is a naturally cool area to work. We do have air conditioning that was piped in from the main system via a thermostatically controlled gate so during very long hot spells in the summer, it can be cooled from about 75 which is the norm in July down to my preferred 72.

However, in this office, I have an AMD 4400 based PC, a Core 2 Duo 3ghz Hackintosh (just using for learning purposes:), a Xerox Phaser Printer that melts wax as its mode of printing, a Core 2 Duo laptop, my wife’s AMD 3800 based PC, and 10 50watt PAR20 Halogen light bulbs to light the place up.

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Inside my house, there are 28 recessed lighting receptacles; if you count the garage apartment upstairs, there are another six, so let’s say 34 lights total. These receptacles are sized to take indoor floodlights, and they measure approximately 5 inches across and six inches deep; you could put a standard lightbulb inside one, but its light beam wouldn’t be properly focused, and it would simply look wrong because the fixture would swallow the bulb.

When I bought this house, it had been remodeled a few years before, and the recessed lighting was actually a selling point. What no one bothered to point out, and what I never really questioned until later, was the wattage necessary to drive those beautiful, bright, incandescent lights.

For those who were wondering, take a look…

Yeah, you read that right. It’s a 120 watt bulb, and I have 34 of them running at various times. No, they never all run at once, because obviously I am never in every room of the house at the same time, but just having four of these lights in the office, running in the evenings, was the equivalent of 480 watts. The truth of that horrific wattage amount was borne out every time I turned on the lights and sweltered underneath them, but even more importantly – every time I saw my latest electric bill.

Something had to change, and the new solution would have to work with my existing light set up. I wanted lights that looked right in the holders, that were more energy efficient, and that would hopefully reduce the amount of each month’s energy bill. The way I saw it, I had two obvious choices: compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs or a less familiar option – LED bulbs.

I’ve been using CFLs in my outdoor lighting fixtures for some time, but hadn’t really brought them inside the house. I had never bought an LED bulb, but I have been reviewing LED flashlights for some time, and I already knew that even the smallest LEDs were capable of significant light output with minimal power. Each type of light would have their own plusses and minuses, and they were up to me to discover…

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