Hasta La Gadget!

The Titanium Water Bottle weighs almost the same as a steel one, and costs just 15 times more

If you regularly buy bottled water, you should probably stop ruining the planet for the rest of us and refill a bottle from the tap instead. An old water bottle will probably do just fine, but in case that’s just not cool enough for such a fashion conscious person as yourself, why not try the Titanium Water Bottle from Exotac?

The bottle can be had with a plastic or titanium cap and holds 650ml (22 ounces) of water. The main selling point is weight, although as it is designed to lug around 22 ounces of water, the weight saving over stainless steel seems moot. The bottle has an empty weight of four ounces including the cap. This compares to around five ounces for a comparably-sized steel bottle. If you’re not keeping count, that’s a saving of one whole ounce.

Like steel, the bottle can also be used to heat water on a fire or camping stove. Unlike steel bottles, which can be had for $5, the Titanium Water Bottle costs an absurd $75 (plus another $10 for the titanium cap). Maybe that old Evian bottle will do fine after all.

Titanium Water Bottle [Exotac via Oh Gizmo]

See Also:

• Water-Bottle Filters As You Drink
• DuKJug: MacGyver's Water Bottle
• Paper Water Bottle is a Triumph of Marketing Over Design
• Bottle Shock: 4 BPA Free Water Bottles Endure Torture Testing …

Pretty much the only kind of paper books I still have are cookbooks. I have a ton, and most of them aren’t available in electronic form, plus I really like it when the food-stained pages fall open at favorite recipes. What I have no love for is the stack of hand-written recipes I have. They’re hard to find and easy to lose. If only there were some way to put them on my iPad?

BigOven, the iPhone, iPad and web-based recipe index, will now do the hard work for you. The service is called RecipeScan. You upload a photo of your hand-scrawled recipe (or even a page you have torn from a magazine) and — in two to five days — you’ll get it back in digital form. The worker is done by a team of human minions, so you should get back something fairly close to the original. Members get three free scans to try the service out and pro members get 25 credits. More credits can be bought for a dollar each.

To test it out, I put it head-to-head with another word-recognizing app, Evernote. Evernote’s handwriting recognition is done by machines, and I also have a paid account which bumps me up the queue. The recipe I used was one I hastily photographed from my mother’s notebook on a recent visit: Lancashire Hot Pot.

Speed

I dragged the photo into Evernote, synced with the server and set a timer for 30 minutes. When I checked back, the handwriting recognition had been done.

BigOven took just over an hour and a quarter, and I got a notification e-mail to let me know. This is likely to be slower if the service gets popular, hence the two to five day estimate.

Winner: Evernote, but not by much. If my account wasn’t paid, it would probably have been even.

Accuracy

Evernote was, as usual, uncannily accurate. Even with my mother’s handwriting it managed to pick out some hard-to-read words. It even recognaized the word “top”, which my mother had written without a cross on the “t”, making it look like “lop.” Evernote had trouble with word in all caps, but if I was searching for this recipe I would find it right away.

BigOven not only makes the recipe searchable, it also turns it into text and puts that text into the appropriate recipe fields. This — in theory — means you can swap between metric and American measures. However, the human translating my mother’s recipe didn’t know that “LB” means “pound”, ot that “PT” meant pint. Score even with Evernote.

The human also failed with some spellings — “braun” instead of “brown”, for example — and also went awry on the classifications, classing the dish as an appetizer. Anyone who has had my mother’s rib-sticking hot pot recipe will know that it’s a lot more than an appetizer.

Also, the recipe is marked as “American.” Lancashire isn’t very close to the U.S.

Winner: Evernote, but mostly because you still see your original scan, and human error is reduced.

Conclusion

I’d probably stick with Evernote, unless I was already a big user of BigOven. It’s free, automatic and you can also see the original picture you took of the paper, making mistakes impossible. Also, currently I can find no way to upload scans to BigOven direct from the iPad.

Big Oven’s RecipeScan works fine, but I also feel a little guilty using it, knowing that someone, somewhere is being paid pennies to do data entry on my behalf. And imagine if those poor souls are hungry. Reading about delicious dishes would be torture.

RecipeScan Frequently Asked Questions [BigOven]

Evernote product page [Evernote]

See Also:

• Evernote Peek, an App for Your Smart Cover
• Evernote Brings Proper File Syncing to iPhone
• Eye-Fi and Evernote Team-Up to Turn Cameras into Notebooks …

There’s no possible way that I could not write about the Plug Cup. It has the winning trifecta of power-plug, coffee (or tea) making and unholy danger, all in neat, plastic package. But before I continue, take a good look at the photos of this concept design:

This Plug Cup is so dangerous it’s hard to know where to begin

That’s right. Your eyes are not deceiving you. What you see is a cup of water with a power plug on the bottom. Inside is a heating element, and you are supposed to balance this cup, full of water, on top of a power-strip. You can also flip the plug (it’s hinged) and plug it straight into the wall.

Let’s count the ways that this could go wrong. The most obvious is that you will risk almost certain electrocution every time you brew a cup. One slip and water will course into the open –and live — socket beneath.

But what of the secondary threat of scalding? Assuming you manage to get the water up to temperature without frying yourself into oblivion, you are now faced with a pint of boiling water balanced precariously atop a power strip. Further, this strip is either on your desk right next to your vulnerable hands, or under that same desk, down on the floor and ready to be kicked over (see “electrocution”, above).

This fatal folly does come with a lid, but if it fits tight enough to prevent spills, it also fits tight enough to blow off with the buildup of steam and cause further injury.

One bright point in this bleak story of death and scalding is that the Plug Cup is unlikely to make it into stores, unless those stores have complete disregard for liability and lawsuits. As an invention, it’s right up there with bulletproof contact lenses in terms of practicality.

Single Cup Special [Yanko]

See Also:

• Twettle: The Story of a Tweeting Kettle
• Kug, a Combination Kettle and Mug
• High-Tech Tea Kettle Serves Up Precision Heating
• Electric Kettles Steeped in the Future
• Kenwood Response: Color Changing Kettle

The Smart Holder lets interns own the coffee run

I don’t like to be mean, but it seems like designer Jongwoo Choi has spent a lot of his work life being sent to the kitchen to make the coffee. However, he took these coffee-flavored lemons and made coffee-flavored lemonade. Now it doesn’t matter how many abusive bosses an co-workers place their orders when he tries to grab a quick snack: Jongwoo can carry them all at once.

Used on its own, the Smart Holder works as an insulating collar. It has slots into which you can slide a separate handle, should you be drinking tea in the English manner. But then things get clever. These slots are actually male and female connectors which slide together. This lets you join together any number of collars and therefore any number of cups. The male connection is recessed so you don’t really notice it until you need it, just like some other male tools.

Any single one of these solutions might not be worth a look, but putting them all together in such a simple and clean way makes for something any office dogsbody will love. Jongwoo clearly had a lot of time to think while the coffee was brewing.

Alas the Smart Holder is only a concept. If it makes it to market, though, perhaps Jongwoo can hire some of his own minions to make the coffee.

How Many Cups Can You Hold? [Yanko]

See Also:

• Tea-Tray Liner Helps Early Morning Memory
• Loca Brews Pod Coffee in a Stovetop Moka
• Coffee Table
• Experimental Tech Turns Your Coffee Table Into a Universal Remote …

The WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery is the OG Beer Robot

If Willy Wonka had invented a home brew beer machine, it would have been the WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery (is it a coincidence that they share the same initials?). The stainless steel, floor-standing factory will give a chilled, ready-to-drink pint in seven days, which is impressive enough. Better, though, is the clever way it does it.

First, a quick recap on manual home brew (we’ll assume you’re using a kit and not mashing your own wort). First, sterilize everything. Second, mix the ingredients, heat them and add to the bucket. Place in a warm spot, cross your fingers and wait.

Then, drain the clear beer from the sediment beneath, into a second sterilized container, or into a pressure barrel, or bottles. Add sugar, seal and wait for the beer to get fizzy.

It’s bigger than you thought, right?

The WWPB does all of this inside one machine. After sterilization, you add water and it is boiled and sterilized. Then add the wort (either from a kit, or of your own making). Add yeast, then sit back and do nothing but check pressure until next weekend. This is the first innovation: the brewery ferments the beer in a pressurized container, meaning you don’t have to carbonate it later — it is fizzy from the beginning.

Next comes clarification. Draining the clear beer into another container would lose the fizz, so the WWPB injects a clarification agent into the beer, under pressure (using CO2). You then attach a small vessel to the bottom of the brew tank and the sediment settles into this. Remove the vessel and you have a tank full of clear, fizzy beer.

Then you switch the temperature control to chill, and the beer is brought to serving temperature. There’s even a tap and pressure system to dispense the beer and keep it fizzy down to the last drop. The brewery uses a 23 liter (6 US gallon) tank

If you have ever made beer, you will be suitably impressed by this very clever design, invented by New Zealanders Ian Williams and Anders Warn. You may be put off by the price, though: US$4,500. That’s certainly a lot for even the most dedicated home brewer, but for a cafe that wants to make and sell its own brew, it’s a pretty good price.

The WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery [WilliamsWarn]

See Also:

• Extreme, Custom and Pimped-Out Kegerators
• High-Tech Home Brew Kit Would Make Beer Robot Swoon
• Genetically Engineered Beer Could Combat Cancer