Hasta La Gadget!

Track your food and share the pictures. Just like Twitter, only people actually care

You know how people are always posting pictures of their meals on Twitter? Well, now there’s a (proper) app for that. It’s called Eatery, and it’s like a cross between Foursquare and Instagram, for food.

There are other apps for tracking your calorie intake, and that’s not really what Eatery is for. It works like this: You snap a photo of your latest snack, dinner or drink and rate its healthiness by dragging a slider. Zero stars for a deep-fried Mars Bar and 11 stars for a plate of celery, for instance.

And that’s it. Your pictures are shared friends who are following you, and they can rate an comment on your dietary choices. The app does most of the work behind the scenes, remembering when and where you ate, and then showing it all on handy graphs. You can see all of the dishes you ate at your pizza place, for instance, or see just how healthily you have been eating for the last week.

You can even while away some time rating photos other people have snapped, kind of like an anonymous Hot or Not. For food.

My only complaint is that you have to connect to Facebook to use the social aspects. Still, I’ll try it out for a week and see if I lose any weight. I have a feeling that posting a photo half a bottle of whisky every night might guilt me into drinking a little less, at least.

The Eatery is available now for the iPhone, and is free.

The Eatery [Massive Health]

This is the Corkcicle, and it’s here to save your wine. The Corkcicle is an artificial icicle which you insert into your red or white wine to keep it at the right temperature, all the way to the last drop.

It sounds like a great idea. Red wine won’t overheat in the summer, and white wine won’t get too cold when left in an ice bucket. But then the problems start to show.

First, you’ll need to chill down your white wine first — the Corkcicle, even when taken straight from its home in the freezer, won’t actually do this. Second, you need to tip out enough wine to give the Corkcicle space inside the bottle, and this thing looks like it displaces about a quarter of a bottle.

And third, it costs $23 and doesn’t do anything you can’t do already. If you are drinking red in hot weather, put it in the refrigerator for half an hour before opening. If you need to chill white in a hurry, put it in a bucket with lots (and I mean lots) of ice, add a little water and a handful or two of salt. The salt will let the liquid water stay below 0˚C and the wine will be ready in minutes. It’s a waiters’ trick, and it works great.

Finally, if your bottle of wine lasts long enough to heat up or get too cold before you finish it then — frankly — you’re doing it wrong. Either give up on the booze altogether or learn to drink properly.

The Corkcicle is available now.

Corkcicle product page [Corkcicle via Oh Gizmo]

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Try to use this concept kit without simmering your skin, I dare you

It’s Friday, which means I’m cranky enough to pick apart an ill-conceived concept design. This week we take a look at Ziv Lichi’s Kettle and Mug, aka Hoffee, a rather pretty piece of kitchenware that puts a tea/coffee mug inside the scalding interior of an electric kettle.

It works like this. You put the fluted cup into an identically-shaped receptacle in the middle of the kettle. You then carefully fill the surrounding moat with water, and switch on. As the water boils, the cup heats.

Then, when the water is roiling towards vaporization, the kettle clicks off. What on earth do you do next? Do you reach in and try to pull out the now too-hot cup by its rim, your delicate fingers mere millimeters from the blistering sea below?

Or do you pour the hot water into another, presumably cold receptacle, which might defeat the one and only point I can see to this design: Making tea. Good tea has to be hit by still-boiling water (as the Brits and Aussies know well) to make a good cup. This can involve pre-heating your teapot. But not pre-heating your cup! All that will do is burn your lips and lengthen the time it takes for the now-brewed tea to be drinkable. And while the cup is hot, the pot is still cold.

Also, imagine pouring from this kettle with the cup inside. As you tip it past perpendicular, the cup will slide out. Good luck catching it with all that boiling water sloshing around.

I guess it could be that you’re not supposed to put the cup inside at all when in use, and this just makes a take-anywhere coffee kit. But then, I can already fit at least one cup inside my regular kettle. Utterly bewildering, and yet I still kind of want to try one out. Or at least watch somebody else do it.

Mug in a Kettle [Yanko]

A (non-Kodak) film canister. Photo Brian Turner / Flickr

If you have a hankering to take a teeny tiny packed lunch along with you, and you happen to have some old film canisters around the house, then Kodak has good news. While the plastic tubs aren’t FDA approved for food, Kodak reckons that they’re safe enough, despite not going so far as to actually recommend the practice.

After having made roughly 10 gazillion of the handy little pots over the years, Kodak knows a thing or two about them. The bodies of these canisters are made from high density polyethylene (HDPE), used in kitchen utensils amongst other things, and the lids are LDPE (guess what that stands for), which is also commonplace.

So, while kids might choke on the lids, human adults should be fine if they choose to store and carry food inside the watertight containers. There are no toxic or chemical residues from the film that was once therein, and the containers are “exceptionally clean” upon manufacture.

Which leaves us with one problem. What to put in there? Flakey Maldon salt is one idea, and a lollipop might fit in if you cut off its neck. You could even store a few cherry tomatoes inside for an impromptu (and minuscule) salad. After that, though, I’m stumped. Film-canister picnic ideas in the comments, please.

35mm Film Containers [Kodak via PetaPixel]

See Also:

• USB Film Rolls Hold Thousands of Photos

When good bike forks buckle and die, they go to beer-opening heaven

Instead of adding yet another bottle-opener to your already overcrowded bike, the Bike Fork Bottle Opener recycles the dropouts or forks of old, dead bikes and turns them into beer bottle-top poppers.

Made by Etsy-er EH84, each opener is unique, although you can specify the wrapping on the handle — you can choose between leather and rope. The results are brutally beautiful, and cost $30 each, which isn’t bad for a hand-crafted implement.

Due to popular demand, EH84 says that you’ll have to pre-order and then wait for a while. If you have access to a hacksaw and somebody else’s bike frame, though, you could quickly and easily make your own.

Bike Fork Bottle Opener [Etsy via Uncrate]

See Also:

• The Road Popper Turns Bike into Giant Bottle-Opener
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• After Office Tie With Built-In Bottle Opener