"gadget" news and stories

Well, it seemed like we may as well get the obvious punchline over with right at the beginning. Mocha, a UK company with a eccentric home gadget line--specializing in items like Swarovski crystal egg crackers and mugs with built-in cookie holders--now offers these tres barbarique drink coolers. The Nordic Rock stone ice cubes are genuine chunks of "pollution-free base rock" mined in Sweden--who else would invent this but some kind of Viking?

Just pop the Nordic Rocks (in their charming leather pouch) into your freezer (or igloo) for an hour, then drop two or three into your cocktail. On the practical end, they help conserve water and prevent your precious booze from being diluted. Impractically, you get to walk around drinking from a glass full of rocks--whether you use the opportunity to play practical jokes or share your best Hagar the Horrible/Kirk Douglas in The Vikings impersonation is up to you.

I was just over at Crate&Barrel, swooning over all of the gorgeous new kitchen gadgets for spring. My new favorite? The oil and vinegar pump bottle, which allows you to pres a button and squeeze precise amounts of the mixture into a resevoir, where you can then pour it onto your salad, fish, bread...or directly into your mouth. (Wait. that would be gross. Scratch that).

Craving more fun, brightly-colored kitchen doodads? You know you are. Check out the marvelousness below.

Every time you turn around, there's a new brightly-colored, cleverly-named kitchen product adorned with google-y eyes and baring a twenty dollar price tag. We've all come across these products, smiled, cooed, and handed over our Visa, only to get them home and dizzily wonder, What the heck was I thinking? The utensil then sits unused, in your junk drawer, until, in a furious bout of spring cleaning three years later, you stumble upon it and have absolutely no idea what it is.

Don't feel bad. We've all done this. It's awful fun to peruse these items at stores, play with them, and make them into little puppets in order to entertain/freak out your other customers (in fact, the latter is one of my favorite pastimes). So in an effort to dissuade you from buying these little gadgets in the future, we've provided some of them here, so you'll know 'em when you see 'em.

Now, for the record, I understand that these products do serve some purpose, however insignificant. And if you happen to own one of these products, more power to you! I am simply suggesting that there are, perhaps, other ways to accomplish the same kitchen tasks that these products purport to execute...

Now, without further ado...

One of the continuing joys of my life is the practice of making lists with pen and paper. It gives me a moment to get organized, I get the opportunity to firmly cross the items off the list once I've completed them and there's something so satisfying about looking at a slip of paper at the end of the day and knowing that you accomplished a series of tasks or errands. I especially love making grocery shopping lists because in addition to my previously discussed love of lists, I also love food. It becomes the merging of multiple loves and that just makes my day.

That was a long way of saying that I totally don't understand this gadget, the SmartShopper Grocery List Organizer that "alphabetizes and groups items by where they're found in the store." You pay $149.99 for the privilege of using this electronic list maker to do a job that a $.19 pen and a piece of paper could probably do just (if not more) effectively. Oh technology. You claim to make our lives better, but sometimes I wonder.

[via Treehugger]

Source

Still only existing in concept, this whiteboard/toaster could become the wave of the breakfast future someday soon. Need to leave a note for your partner, but you leave for work before they do? Just scrawl it on the toaster. If they don't see that note, then they'll surely notice it when it appears on their toast (provided they aren't following a low carb diet). I do see a couple flaws in the plan though, like the fact that the writing surface seems awful close to where the heating element would be. So you'd have to wait quite a while between toasts to write a message if you wanted to avoid burning your hand.

This isn't the first time that someone has designed a toaster that leaves an imprint on the toast. This very pink and white Hello Kitty toaster creates toast that has Kitty's image baked in and has the added bonus of being available now.

Thanks KF!