Attached Link: Story

ahh toys gotta love them. I picked up a gorilla pod last week I love it it may look silly but it works outstandingly well

They always loook nice.

But a storage device is

• always an investment You can get some 6 4GB Sandisk Extreme III cards for the price of one.
• always based on a real hard disk. That rotates, and is far more fragile than the flash kind of memory storage.
• larger and heavier than an extra set of CF's.

As for tripod "replacement": Since that thread that described using  a wire with a screw (that fits into the camera's tripod mounting ) I created and used one of these. It is not a tripod, but it's a huge step ahead.

As for the PS plugins: if you need to cut out things and you don't want to engage in hours of masking yourself, I personally believe that Vertus FluidMask is hard to beat. You can download a demo from VertusTech. This will work about a forthnight. As for buying a serial, you're best off at www.pluginz.com , despite that "z" a fully legal software reseller. (I bought there more than once, and you get your download link from the original creator). Price: some $210 .  Also for those of European residence.

That looks like some impressive cut out software, but a bit pricey for me. If I needed it though, I suppose the cost would be worth it.

Yeah, but that Chromakey that is mentioned in the article is solf at $299. Hence my mentioning of Fluid Mask.
For normal darkroom work you don't need that kind of software. If you're heavy into real photomanipulation it can be extremely handy. After you've survived the slopes of the learning curve that is...

I with you on those storage drives. I was all set to pick up a 80gig until I did a little extra background work on them. The last thing I would want to do is load up cards worth of photos and have the unit get bumped wrong and scratch the drive.