Hasta La Gadget!

Airspresso uses a bike pump to make a creamy espresso

The Airspresso couldn’t be more appropriate for me to write about if it had my name written all over it. It’s a nerdy espresso maker which uses a bike pump to provide the pressure and drive the hot water through the grounds. It also looks hard to use, giving a good opportunity to complain.

It works like this: you put the grounds in the red part and tamp them with the included tamper. Screw this aluminum basket to the end of the plastic tube, balance on top of your cup and then add hot water. Then, screw on the lid, attach a bike pump and then pump it. Moments later you’ll have a quadruple 120 ml shot of espresso, complete with creamy crema thanks to the pressure.

The cool-looking gadget is designed for outdoors use, which means you’ll also need to bring along some way to boil water. And you’ll also need a flat surface, and probably a very steady pumping hand. I’m no flailer, but when I put air into my tires with anything but a floor-pump, the wheel and the bike wobble. Imagine doing the same with a 250 gram (9 ounce) tube filled with water. It will get messy.

Aside from these problems, though, the Airspresso seems like a good bet if you can’t stand the usual crappy camp coffee, and just have to have a perfectly made espresso when roughing it in the wilds of the back country. Oh, and it costs $180 Australian ($180 US).

Airspresso product page [Airspresso via My Cuppa and Oh Gizmo]

See Also:

• MyPressi Makes Portable Espresso Machine, With a Twist
• Handpresso Wild: Portable Espresso Maker
• Lift and Press With Aerobie's Hardy Espresso Maker

New tech from NEC uses a camera to recognize melons

Smile detection? Face recognition? Pah! That’s so last year. NEC’s new tech is way more exciting: Fruit recognition. Wait… What?

Yes, fruit recognition. Show the camera a melon, a zucchini or any other fruit or vegetable, and it will recognize it. And no, it won’t just tell you “this is a melon.” Instead, it will tell you which exact melon it is, where it came from and when it was grown.

This isn’t magic. The camera relies on a photograph having already been taken. Then, when it sees a fruit later, it uses a combination of face recognition and fingerprint recognition technologies to ID the fruit, matching it up with anything it has seen before. It turns out that the colors and wrinkles of fruit and veg are individual enough to make the system accurate to one in a million.

But why? Tracking. Simple by snapping batches of fruits as they come off the tree, the grower, shipper and buyer can track the movements of their produce without using RFID tags. That obviously makes for cheaper, safer shipping, but what can it do for you, the fruit consumer?

Imagine you have a cellphone with NEC’s tech built in. Now imagine you are in a supermarket, with that phone (if you’re reading this post on your phone, in a supermarket, feel free to get freaked out right around now). You could snap a photo of the banana in front of you and be instantly told where and when it comes from. In this case, it’s likely to be a shock, as unripened bananas store very well for many months.

The very best thing about this news, though, is the headline of the Japanese article that describes it. Where else would you find the words “melon performance verification”?

NEC, a technology that can identify fruits photos [MyCom Journal via Crunchgear]

See Also:

• How Facial Recognition Works in Xbox Kinect
• Face Recognition
• HP Investigates Claims of 'Racist' Computers

JOIN is a concept plastic cutlery set which is both awesome and annoying, in equal measure. A knife, fork and spoon are joined at the waist, intersecting each other as if they were in a teleportation experiment gone wrong. This is clearly a win from an aesthetic point-of-view, and keeps the business end of the cutlery off the dirty table below.

But Konstantin Slawinski’s design also forms a puzzle, one which could take a frustratingly long time to solve as your food gets colder and colder on the plate. Like any puzzle, this one is easy once you know the solution, but getting there may drive you crazy (and make you a little hungry).

It also has one other rather niche advantage. In Spain, you can eat menú del día. This is a cheap, fixed-price lunch served in most restaurants. One “feature” of menú is that you have to keep your cutlery and re-use it for the first two courses. This inevitably means putting dirty knives and forks onto the table. The JOIN would solve this, instead letting you get sauce and bits of paella on your fingers as you tried to reassemble it after the appetizer.

JOIN product page [Ding 3000 via Yanko]

See Also:

• Credit Card Cutlery: Ordinary Cutlery, Without the Cut
• Spudware: Cutlery Made from Potatoes
• Monster Tuck: Construction Cutlery for Kids
• Dead Pen Challenge: Biro Cutlery Hack

Convergence isn’t just for cellphones and cameras. The obsession with cramming ever more functionality into a single device has now taken over the kitchen and the dining room. No, it’s not a combination food-processor / dining chair. It’s a single shaker containing cooking’s bitterest enemies, the Tom and Jerry of the tabletop: Salt’n’pepper.

This unholy cruet-combo is the work of Fred, purveyor of home accessories to the nerd-about-town (Fisticups or Salad Tools, anyone?)

The Switch, as it is called, features a large switch on the top to flip between a stream of savory ground rock or the dried and powdered fruit of the piper nigrum. Both exit through the same hole.

Now really, you should never buy such a thing. Fresh-ground pepper from a mill is so quick and easy, and so full of the hot, tangy volatile oils that have long since left the harshly-spiced desert of pre-ground pepper that you should never consider the dried version. On the other hand, it’s so cute!

Side note: If you’re thinking of buying a salt-mill, don’t. The plastic grinder will wear out in no time, and why the hell would you grind your own salt anyway? It’s a rock. It can’t dry out, or spoil. Just buy a few different sizes from the store and keep them in small bowls. Or buy the Switch, I guess, and keep the pepper side empty.

Pricing TBA, available in the 2011 “collection”.

Fred store [World Wide Fred via Oh Gizmo!]

See Also:

• Swiss-Made, Portable Salt-and-Pepper Pots
• Good Grips Grinders: Salt and Pepper Mills Done Right

Visit a Starbucks and you can now forget about cash or cards: Just flash your phone to pay.

Starting today, iPhone, iPod Touch and Blackberry users will be able to pay for coffee and coffee-themed products in 6,800 of Starbucks’ own stores and in 1,000 Starbucks outlets in Target stores. The scheme has been tested since last year in a handful of stores, and is now available nationwide.

The app doesn’t bother with complex in-store machinery or NFC or RFID chips in the phones, for obvious reasons. (Sorry, Nexus S users.) Instead, you just tap the number of your Starbucks Card into a free app and load the app up with funds from either your credit card or, for iPhone users, PayPal. When you’re ready to pay, your phone displays a QR code on screen, and the barista can scan it using a standard reader.

In effect, it makes your smartphone into a virtual version of your Starbucks card, saving you from carrying around another piece of plastic and giving you the ability to see your balance and add funds as necessary.

Apart from convenience to you, the customer, using a phone to pay should speed up the lines in-store. Especially as most of the people in front of me are already jabbering on their phones instead of actually paying any attention to the staff at the counter. Then again, maybe hunting for the Starbucks icon on your home screen will becom the new hunting for change in your wallet.

Mobile Payment Debuts Nationally at Starbucks [Starbucks]

Starbucks Card Mobile App for iPhone [Starbucks]

Starbucks Card Mobile App for BlackBerry [Starbucks]