John Gilmore was looking around for cool things to play with and found what he thinks is the next big wave in home and personal lighting, LEDs. Most of us know LEDs as dim red or yellow status indicators on computers more recent then about 1975, well things have been changing recently!

John found the coolest, lightest, brightest LED toy around, and then discovered that it's well beyond a toy, it's a tool! Ah, the perfect geek/hacker synthesis, the Photon Micro Light II.

We went and gave a small bag of these away at the great (fantastic!) CCC event summer 1999 and every one who got one loved it. We found out that in a dark outhouse a little light is a precious thing! We came up with new games to play in the dark with our friends, so long as we did not throw the lights too hard! We marked our tents with them (the Green lasts a whole weekend) so we could find our tents after not quite too much partying!

The great folks who make the Photon Micro Light II will also put custom stickers on them, so now we have some lights that say "LINUX" and "FREESWAN.ORG" on them with Randy Asplund's swan that you see on our web page, and they turned out wonderful. Every now and then we get a few more of the lights, if you see one of the team you can ask if we have any to give out, we just might have one left!

We may be out of lights though, they go quickly after all (most folks like the Blue or White ones, though astronomers love the Red ones for night time work while not hurting ones night vision!). So your best bet is to buy your own lights directly from PhotonLight themselves and any any number you want in any color! Here is a picture of one of the lights: