Appliances Archives - Page 6 of 12

Automatic Twirling Spaghetti Fork

Man, eating sure is a hassle, isn’t it? I mean, you have to cut food, which is hard enough. Then, there’s the arduous process of bringing food from your plate, bowl, or trough to your face. Have you tried doing this? It’s awful! Food is just so messy, with greases and sauces and flavors… it’s just asking for trouble. The worst is spaghetti; to me, it’s the perfect combination of messy and hard to eat that just makes it deliciously terrible.

Fortunately, Neatoshop has just the product you need to make Spaghetti Night a little more bearable. It’s a battery-powered fork that twirls your spaghetti for you at the touch of a button! The Twirling Spaghetti Fork just may be the best invention ever created by mortal man. It’s basically one of those electric lollipop twirlers, but with a stainless steel, dishwasher-safe fork on one end and a brightly colored handle on the other.

In case you can’t tell, I’m being sarcastic here. Eating spaghetti is not particularly difficult, but I imagine a product like the Twirling Spaghetti Fork is just the thing you need to make a recalcitrant toddler interested in eating meals. If anything, at least it’s a fun conversation piece, and maybe you can use it for electrically whisking food with a fork when needed to make whipped cream or scrambled eggs.

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Wordless Wednesday: Kagatani Knife

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

Image: Ads of the World

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A Camera That Automatically Retouches Photos

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

One of the hardest things to do is to take a satisfactory picture of yourself. As most people on the internet know, when it comes to self-photography, you have only a few options. You can either find a mirror and do your best to angle the camera to capture your beautiful self, or you can do the MySpace angle and hold the camera over your head so it looks like someone else is taking the picture (possibly a giant). If those two methods don’t work, you may be stuck with a substandard photo, and those photos do not disappear from the Internet. Here’s where Panasonic steps in: the new Panasonic LUMIX FX77 will beautify your photos so you don’t have to!

“According to data we’ve acquired, around 50 percent of our digital camera clients are not satisfied with the way their faces look in a photograph,” said Panasonic spokeswoman Akiko Enoki. “So we came up with the idea so our clients can fix parts they don’t like about their faces after they’ve taken the picture.”

The camera will add makeup like rouge, lipstick, and eyeshadow. However, it does way more than that while it’s processing your photo. The camera will whiten your teeth, improve the appearance of your skin, remove dark circles under your eyes, make your face look thinner, and even make your eyes look larger to give a more youthful appearance. Long story short, goodbye Photoshop, hello FaceBook-worthy photos!

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Emergency Broadcast System Warnings Coming To Cell Phones

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

The world is wired these days. Wherever you go, whatever you do, unless you’re an Amish farmer, you’ve probably got some kind of cellular phone on your person, silently irradiating you with its invisible waves of interconnectedness. Why not use it for the greater good? Alcatel-Lucent has created something known as the Broadcast Message Center, which will allow the authorities to send text messages and other emergency alerts to your cellular phone directly, bypassing the traditional radio/television delivery system used currently.

Or rather, it will be adding to the traditional warning systems. It will be folded under the guidelines of Federal Communication Commission’s Commercial Mobile Alert System, which specifies just how phones can be contacted in case of emergencies. The US Government can use the system to contact phones in the case of natural disasters or terrorism, and local governments can use it to dispense Amber Alerts, traffic information, and local severe weather warnings (though you can opt out of those).

“With the public increasingly relying on cell phones, it becomes mission critical for service providers to be able to share critical, time-sensitive information over these devices during times of crisis,” said Morgan Wright, the VP of Alcatel-Lucent. After all, you may be miles from a TV or radio, but you’ll always have your cell phone on you.

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Ten Spectacular Lap Desks

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

One of the things I like about using a laptop is the portability it offers. However, there’s a problem. With a lot of larger laptops, especially full-sized Macs and desktop replacement laptops, there’s a lot of power crammed into a small package. Where there’s power, and whirring computer parts, there’s heat. That doesn’t work well when it’s time to take the laptop off of the desk and into bed or on the couch, so that’s why there are lap desks. Mashable has a great round-up of 10 spectacular lap desks for the home office.

I’ve been looking for something like this for awhile now, since a lot of my other work requires me to be in front of a television or DVD player for reviews and the like. I doubt I’d take my laptop on the road with me to the movie theater or anything, but to take it into the living room or to be closer to the television when appropriate would be very beneficial for me. The fact that I can use the laptop as a streaming outlet for Netflix is just an added benefit.

Or, you know, that’s the main benefit.

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Efficient Fridge Operations

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

Sure, we’d all love to have a refrigerator last us for 50 years, but odds are most of us are on our second, third, or even fourth fridge at this point in our lives. New appliances are great, but unfortunately, the average refrigerator is the least efficient item in the household. The average coolerator uses 15% of all the energy used in a household, and the fridge is by far the most energy-hogging piece of junk in the household!

Is there a way to cut down on the drain, when even modern fridges are energy hogs? It’s simple: fill the space. The key to keeping things at a steady 37 degrees without working the fridge too hard is to keep the spaces filled, but not stuffed. There needs to be ample room for air to circulate (so be careful not to block the blowers) but not so much room as there’s big gaps between stuff. You want to aim for something like the picture above.

What about those of us who don’t exactly shop ahead of time? Well, a simple trick is to fill the empty space with pitchers of water, or refill old soda bottles with H20. This will fill the space, and help regulate the temperature. That means you’ll not only use less electricity, you’ll also spare your fridge motor from a constant workout.

Using less energy and making appliances last longer? Now that’s what I call saving money while saving the earth!

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iPhone 4 Leaked

by Ron Hogan 1 Comment

It’s something that’s happened to everyone who has a cell phone. Through some twist of fate, some incompetence, or just a poorly-designed pocket, you’ve lost your phone. I’ve left mine in restaurants, movie theaters, my car, work, and pretty much every possible place where my phone could be left overnight, dropped, or misplaced. I can only imagine how much worse that feeling of dread is when you’ve lost a prototype of Apple’s iPhone 4.

However, that employee’s loss is the world’s gain, as Apple’s latest upgrade of the iPhone has ended up in the hands of Gizmodo. If you’re waiting to see what generation four of the iPhone is like, wait no more. Gizmodo has pictures, video, and a full breakdown of all the new features, changes, upgrades, and design quirks of the latest in Apple’s line of smartphones. It looks as if Apple has given as much thought to function this time around as they have form.

Among my favorite upgrades, aside from the glass/plastic back for improved reception is the metallic buttons. Volume, power, mute… all the buttons you press on a common basis are now metal, so they’re not going to lose their polish or get those finger-shaped smooth marks due to frequent digital manipulation! This happens to every gadget I have, and it always kind of bothers me because it causes an otherwise flawless gizmo to show its age. That won’t happen to iPhone IV: The Quest For Peace.

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Greening The Laundry Room

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

When it comes to the laundry room, there’s not a lot you can do to make it more technologically advanced and environmentally friendly. There are lower-impact detergents and whatnot, but for the most part laundry technology is about the same as it’s always been, at least as far as dryers are concerned. The dryer is the second-most energy-hogging appliance in the house, just behind the refrigerator. However, there are ways you can cut back on your expenses and green up the laundry.

The crucial element would be to upgrade your washing machine. New washers use less water, thus that means the clothes that come out of them require less drying (another tip might be to wring clothes out before dumping them into the dryer). It uses less water *and* uses less energy to dry those sopping wet clothes. That also means less detergent sloshing down the drain during the rinse cycle.

If you can’t quite make that big jump, then you can turn your laundry room into a multi-purpose room. I couldn’t do that at my house (I have a laundry room/utility room combination already), but I do like the idea of turning the laundry room into some sort of home office combination. There’s also something to be said of having the washer and dryer in the kitchen or off to the side from one of the bathrooms. Fresh towels, right out of the dryer! Any space you can save is useful.

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Mop Wars

by Ron Hogan Leave a Comment

Every day, you see a commercial for some wonder cleaning marvel. “Throw out that old mop,” they proclaim. “This mop is the wave of the future because of its revolutionary shape/construction/material!” But are they really better than the standard “mass of cotton cords” mop that we all know by heart and instantly identify as the Platonic idea of a mop? Well, in some ways, it depends on what kind of job you’ve got. The New York Times put a wide variety of mops to the test to find out the results.

As it turns out, one of your better mop options is the same mop we all grew up with. The classic, boring old string mop (from Lanier) turned out to be one of the better well-rounded mops, adept at handling both light work and heavy liquid soaking jobs. Kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. Plus it was cheaper than most of the other options.

However, if you need to clean up a wide variety of spills as best as possible, then you might need to take up an assortment of mops. The best of the modern mixed with the traditional seems to be the O Cedar Microfiber Cloth Mop, which takes super-absorbent space-age materials and combines them with the traditional mop design for the best of both worlds.

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Light Bulb Candle

by Ron Hogan 2 Comments

These days, the incandescent light bulb is soon to be a thing of the past. More and more, people are turning to LED lights and compact fluorescent lights to illuminate their home. They use less electricity and are generally cheaper to produce. They don’t provide the same type of light, but they’re better than candles. Unless, of course, that candle is shaped like an incandescent bulb!

The light bulb candle comes from systemdesignstudios, a great group of designers. The faux lightbulb is very well designed. The wick burns on the inside of the bulb, allowing the bulb to keep its shape all the way to the bottom. The candle’s light coming through the bulb allows it to cast light more like an actual bulb, rather than a candle. And, of course, the bottom is screw patterned, in order to allow the bulb-candle to fit into any standard lamp.

I’m not sure how the wax would harm the lamp, but if I had a cool old lamp I couldn’t rewire, I’d definitely do this.

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