Hasta La Gadget!

You know the Nespresso, the home espresso machine that makes great – if rather packaging-heavy – coffee? Now there’s a version that does the same for tea.

It’s called the Special T, a nice combination of pun and rap-star name, and it works exactly like the coffee versions: pop in a capsule (€0.35 or $0.50 each) and hit the button. Boiling water passes through the tea and you end up with, presumably, a lovely cuppa.

Or do you? Although making tea is about the easiest thing to do in the world, it is also easy to do it wrong. The Special T gets one thing right: the PDF instructions tell you to tip away any remaining water in the reservoir after use, recommending freshly drawn water each time. Boiling water knocks out oxygen, and this results in a flat-tasting cup.

But unlike espresso, which needs a careful balance of water-pressure, tamp-pressure, temperature and time, tea is simple: pour the still-boiling water over the leaves (or bag) in a pre-warmed pot and steep for around 4-5 minutes. After that, it’s hard to go wrong, making me wonder why you’d need this €130 machine to boil the water.

The Special T is launching in France, not the UK, and will be available only by internet order.

Special T product page [Nestle (Warning: Flash and French) via Oh Gizmo]
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Who says good design never makes it into the average home? I don’t know, but when you find them, tell them they’re an idiot and shut them up with this, the Filtrete Water Station from Ideo, which has designer-store looks, but is on sale in Walmart.

Ideo worked with 3M to make a water filter that would actually be used by people who insist on drinking bottle water. Instead of the slow drip-drip-drip filtering of rival Brita’s jugs, the Filtrete glugs in the water through its wide, faucet-friendly top and uses it’s charcoal filter to scrub out chlorine, odors and other impurities in seconds.

But the real innovation here is the bottles, and here’s why: Right now I’m hobbling around on crutches thanks to a broken leg. I live in a city with horrible water, and we use a filter jug to make it even palatable. the Lady likes to leave the jug empty, and filling it whilst standing one leg, waiting, and then trying to fill a small water-bottle to carry back to my desk is something of a chore. with the Filtrete, you plug up to four bottles in simultaneously (auto-sealing valves open only when a bottle is seated) and go. After a few seconds, you just flip up the leak-proof cap which doubles as a handle, meaning you could hang it from a pinkie as you use the rest of your hands with the crutches.

But it’s not just for cripples like me. Amazingly, Ideo’s research says that a family gets through as many as 3,000 bottles a year, which my notoriously bad math tells me is more than two per day per person for a family of four. That’s a lot of waste.

And because it’s in Walmart, it’s cheap. The kit comes in at under $38, a new filter costs around $11 (good for 100 gallons, or a couple months) and a 2-pack of bottles is another $15.

Filtrete product details [Ideo via Oh Gizmo!]

Filtrete product page [Walmart]

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Yes, better than canned beer. Those are the sacrilegious words of MEDEA co-founder Matt Sandy, speaking in this wonderfully chintzy spot on ABC about his company’s gimmicky vodka bottle. The hook? The bottle has a scrolling LED display on the side, with messages of up to 255-letters programmable by the user. If you’re a fan of low-quality TV, and awkward-looking men in badly-fitting suits, take a look:

At first the idea seems doomed. Who on Earth would pay $40 for a bottle as tacky as this one? And then you realize just how dumb and horny people get when they drink. You see the shot in the promo video where the guy walks off with a girl under one arm and a bottle in his hand? That’s what this is all about: getting laid. The boys will order this in a bottle-service bar for a few hundred dollars and start sending messages to the ladies. Here’s the proof, in the form of the tagline from the MEDEA site: “Unleash your inner poet, your inner poet, your inner philosopher, your inner flirt.” Terrifying.

Here’s where you expect me to point out the flaws, and you will not be disappointed. I give you exhibit A, the programming instructions. As you read, remember that these steps need to be carried out whilst intoxicated:

Step 1: Press the ON/OFF button

Step 2: Press the ENTER button to enter programming mode

Step 3: Press the P-U (UP) to select line (1-6) to save message in

Step 4: Press ENTER to confirm the line where the message will appear

Step 5: Press the P-U and P-D buttons to find the first character of your message, and press ENTER to save after each character selection. Note: space can be found after the letter Z.

Step 6: To finish, after you have selected the last character, wait until you see a blinking “A”, then press the ON/OFF to save the entire message.

You’re all set! Your message will now begin to scroll on the ticker.

Note: Do not leave the display on in the programming mode. Press either the P-U (DOWN) or the ON/OFF button to exit the programming mode.

What could possibly go wrong?

The vodka inside comes from Holland, a country well known for its vodka, and is triple-distilled like any other premium vodka. The ‘Worlds first customizable, programmable bottle’ is available in South Carolina and tacky bars all over the US.

MEDEA product page [MEDEA. Thanks, Valerie!]

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Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Quirky’s Boil Buoy is a floating chime that lets you know when a pot of water boils. It also has a pun in the name which only really works if you speak English with an English accent.

“Buoy” is pronounced that same as “boy” on my side of the pond, instead of “boo-ey” in the US, a vocal contortion that has nothing to do with the word’s spelling. Further, a “ball boy” is the young lad that runs across the court to pick up stray tennis balls during a match, which has nothing to do with boiling water.

The Boil Buoy is a floating, weighted mini-buoy with a bell in the middle. When the water boils, the rising bubbles make the buoy jiggle and the bell rings. Simple, ingenious and foolproof. Here’s the video of the prototype stages, complete with excruciating pronunciation of the name included:

The traditional method for warning yourself of boiling water is to drop a few glass marbles into the water. They start to rattle as the pot starts to boil dry: hardly helpful for pasta, but great when steaming a home-made Christmas-pudding (or “plum-duff”) for hours at a time, as I do every year. Another favorite is the coffee whistle, which sits on the top of the exit-tube of a stovetop espresso-maker and toots a warning when the coffee is done. This will stop you falling back to sleep after dragging yourself into the kitchen of a morning.

The Boil Buoy will be just $10, and will trip into production when the requisite 1500 pre-orders have been placed.

Boil Buoy product page [Quirky. Thanks, Tiffany]

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Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

I really hate electric cooking-hobs, but this touch-sensitive concept has even me wanting to try it. Yes, a touch-sensitive, touch-controlled cooker. But first, what’s wrong with electricity?

Gas tells you just how high is its heat with the size of its flame. You switch it off and it is off. You adjust it and it is adjusted, immediately. Electricity, unless you use an induction-hob, lags terribly making it hard to control the heat.

Gas also cuts out the middle-man, where fossil-fuels are burned to make heat, converted to electricity and then – in your home – turned back into heat.

The William doesn’t fix this, but it does a whole lot of cool stuff. The surface is covered with a honeycomb of over 1,500 cells. When you put a pot on the stovetop, it is detected and the precise shape and size of heating area fires up. With more than one pot (and you can squeeze them in thanks to not having just four fixed rings) you can see a numbered plan view on the front screen, linked to numbered touch-controls for regulating the temperature.

And since there’s a computer in there already, you can also set it to, say, slowly drop the temperature to zero over 20 minutes, or to switch off the heat a minute after you remove the pan. The design is pretty ingenious, but I’d like just one more feature: the internet. A net connection would let you download recipes and automatically adjust cook-times depending on the weight of the food (I did say it measures weight, too, right?)

Is it enough to make me give up gas? No. But if I did have to use one of these, at least I wouldn’t hate it.

The Willam Stove [YouTube via Reddit and Serious Eats]

See Also:

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Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.