Mar 22

Washing Machine Cleans in Just 12 Minutes

Posted in: household, Today's Chili

This Russell Hobbs washing machine will wash a load in just 12 minutes

Picture this: You’re ready to leave the house for a hot date, but inexplicably you’re also about to bite into a slice of garlic bread, which is soaked with delicious melted butter. The oily gunk runs over your fingers and drips onto your freshly laundered pants. What do you do?

If you own a new Russell Hobbs washing machine, then you can just toss those pants inside, hit the go button and wait a mere 12 minutes for them to come out clean. That’s right — 12 minutes. This is apparently the fastest wash-cycle around. Of course, if you are only washing one pair of pants, then hand-washing would be quicker, but the Russell Hobbs machine can do a full 7Kg (15.4 pound) load in that time.

The magic comes from two jets which spray in water and detergent together, and the savings aren’t just measured in time. The washer uses 15% less water than equivalent models and — thanks to those short washing times — it also uses 30% less electricity.

Lucky you: your evening has just been saved. Well, almost. You’re still going to have to pick up your date whilst wearing wet pants and with breath that reeks of garlic, but at least you won’t be late. And all this for just £280, or $460.

12 Minute Wash Cycle! Russell Hobbs Washing Machine [Asda via Oh Gizmo!]

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Mar 18

Drill-Mounted Pencil Sharpener: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Posted in: amazon, household, Today's Chili

The Pro-Sharp drill-mounted pencil sharpener can hone 144 pencils in just 15 minutes. Photo NotCot

C.H Hanson’s Pro-Sharp Finishing Pencil Carpenter may seem like a spoof from the pages of Mad Magazine, but it is in fact a real product. And better — as we shall see — it is a real product available to buy at Amazon.

This is no ordinary pencil sharpener. As you can see from the hexagonal shaft protruding from its rear, this sharpener is designed to be used in a power drill. If there was one thing that I wouldn’t fire up a drill for, it’s sharpening a pencil: just a few strokes with a knife or box cutter would do a better job, and probably take less time than just finding my chuck-key.

But the Amazonian reviewers disagree. Here are some testimonials. First, it appears I was wrong about this being slow:

New pencils are too long. It takes hours of chewing or whittling to get them reduced to a manageable size. This drill powered pencil sharpener cuts my pencil reduction time by at least 90%. Ever household needs one! — David Giles (Seabrook, TX)

Next up, another speed test:

This is the next best thing to sliced bread in a bag! Sharpened a gross (144) pencils in less than 15 minutes! This item paid for itself in the first use! — David L. Hobbs

144 pencils in 15 minutes! That’s an average of 9.6 pencils per minute, or just under one pencil every six seconds.

Clearly, if you are a heavy pencil user, this is a must have device, especially as it sells for just over $7 on Amazon and comes with not one, not two but four carpenter’s pencils in the box (which could all be shaved down to stumps in around 30 seconds).

Seriously: A fast-spinning blade hidden inside a tempting hole. What could possibly go wrong?

Sharpener product page [C.H. Hanson via NotCot and Neatorama]

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Mar 16

Hot Ceramic Stove Heats Your Home

Posted in: household, Today's Chili

Winter is almost over, so you may want to make a note of this one for next year (unless you live in the Southern Hemisphere or England, in which case the next six months will be nice and cold). It’s a rather lovely-looking ceramic stove, a heater that’s more at home in the pages of a decor magazine than in the traditional dirty log cabin.

The stove is called the Stack, and comes from La Castellamonte and Adriano Design in Italy. This one is the Cube Stack, and puts a pair of ceramic cubes on top of a fetching hardwood stool. The bottom cube eats the fuel, either wood or special fuel pellets, and the top part lets the hot air waft out. Think of it as an open fireplace for modern apartments.

Alas, it also comes with the same requirement as any other fire: the smoke needs somewhere to go. So while chimneys are conveniently absent from the entire Stack Stoves catalog, you’ll need to put one in. It’s not too hard, as long as you aren’t averse to knocking a hole in the wall. My neighbor, who shares the top floor of our building, has had a rather less fancy stove for a while. It seems to work, although I have never seen it in action as he no longer speaks to me.

The Stack Stoves catalog is price-free. And we all know what that means in the luxury home-goods field: scary-high prices.

Stack Stoves [Stack Stack via StoveCrunch]

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Mar 16

Clever Hanger Gives Clothes Room to Breathe

Posted in: household, Today's Chili

Jhihjie Liou’s clever hangers let the air circulate, and convert into miniature shelves

Jhihjie Liou’s Tree Hanger is a coat hanger designed for use in Taiwan, but is also perfect for use in any crowded, humid city. The hangers are L-shaped in section, which pushes the front and back sides of shirts and t-shirts apart, letting air circulate. If you ever tried drying clothes on a cold day in 90% humidity air, you’ll know why this is a good idea.

If you live in a city like Barcelona, Spain (to pick a completely random example), then you’ll further appreciate these hangers. Most apartments have a clothes racks outside the windows, often built into the balcony railings. These consist of a pair of metal rods that jut out and up diagonally and have twine or plastic cords strung between them. Even the largest offer barely enough space for a full load to hang. Combine that with our humid climate and Liou’s hangers start to look perfect. If only they had locking hooks to stop them blowing off in the wind.

The Tree Hanger has another trick. A flat section can be fixed between the flat bases of two hangers to make a quick shelf. Ingenious.

I would totally buy a set of these if the concept design ever makes it into Ikea. In the meantime, I shall MacGyver-up a set of my own by taking the hook off a pants-hanger and then dropping the rectangle of plastic over a regular hanger to make a square spacer. And then waiting for this damn multi-day rainstorm to stop.

Tree Hanger [Jhihjie Liou via Yanko]

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Mar 15

Glowing Tron Plug Glows

Posted in: household, Today's Chili

The Universal Plug could be a prop from the Tron movies

As power-plug concepts go, the practical aspects of this plug with a built-in finger-hole are rather disappointing. After all, with Euro-style two-pronged plug, how hard is it really to yank it from the wall? What saves Seungwoo Kim’s design, and elevates it into the category of awesome, is its Tron-like ring of light.

By day, it’s just another plug, albeit a plug with a hole. By night, the inside surface of the ring lights up thanks to an electroluminescent strip, casting an eery, annoying but nerdily fantastic blue glow across the room.

The idea is that it will help you find and unplug the thing in the dark, but that seems like a flawed idea. First, having your plugs lit all night long in case you might need to unplug them seems wasteful. Second, what happens once you have unplugged it? You’re plunged into darkness as rudely as Jeff Bridges was plunged into a virtual computer world.

This didn’t stop the Universal Plug, as it is called, from winning an iF Concept Design award. I guess the judges are huge Tron fanboys, just like us.

The Tron Tug [Yanko]

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Mar 15

Chopula, The Pun-Tastic Chopping Spatula

Posted in: household, Today's Chili

The Chopula spatula has a large, stiff head

Chopula might just be the ideal spatula, despite its punny name. By clever choice of materials and shape, it manages to out-spatch most wood, plastic and metal spatulas.

The head, made of silicone rubber, is curved to scour out food from every nook and cranny of a pan, and also stiff enough to cut soft foods without scratching delicate non-stick finishes. It’s also wide enough to flip your eggs over-easy without breaking the yolk.

And see that odd dog-leg right at the junction between handle and blade? That forms a built in stand that keeps the head of the Chopula off the counter-top, which means one less thing to clean.

I’m sold. I wince every time the Lady uses a metal fish-slice in the non-stick frying pan, so I will happily send the Chopula people $13 in exchange for one of their spatulas. Now, if only they could do something about her habit of using my chef’s knives on the ceramic tiled counter-top.

Chopula product page [Dreamfarm via Oh Gizmo]

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Mar 09

‘Lid with Wings’ Is a Clever Kitchen Upgrade

Posted in: household, Today's Chili

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The Lid with Wings is a deceptively simple saucepan lid which makes the humble pot cover into a rather more useful multitasker. The lid, as the name suggests, has some “wings” molded into its glass body. These help keep the lid stable when it is not set properly on the pot.

These glass lugs, two internal and two external, let you push the lid to one side for ventilation without having it flip up and fall off the pot. It also lets you tip the pot to empty it of liquid, whilst using the lid to hold the solid contents back. This is a rather dangerous proposition with a normal lid.

There’s more: The lid is slightly oversized for its companion saucepan, with a long lip that has a smaller radius than the lid itself. This matches the radius of the pan, and gives a longer opening around the edge for faster draining.

It’s ingenious, and one of those designs that is so clever and simple that you wonder why it wasn’t made years ago. The inventor — Vitaliy Gnatenko — has made his prototypes in glass, but the Lid with Wings could also be made in cast iron, steel or aluminum. I’d buy a pan with this lid, or even a pack of Lids with Wings for my existing pots and pans. There’s one thing I’d change, though, and that’s the name. It should be something much cooler sounding, like “Lid-o-Matic” or “Drain-a-Tron.”

Lid with Wings product page [Lid with Wings via Yanko]

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Mar 07

Hot Portable Grill Isn’t Quite Smoking

Posted in: household, Today's Chili

My own portable grill is pretty low-tech: an ancient turkey-roasting tin and a discarded oven-shelf. That, combined with a bag of charcoal, has seen me through countless picnics and on-balcony rilling sessions. The Fuego Element portable grill is far more elegant (and expensive), but I’m not sure the results will be any more delicious.

The grill has some great features. The handles fold down to become legs, and a silicone strip keeps the legs folded and the lid on when not in use. Inside is a cast iron grill grate, a dishwasher safe drip-tray, and it comes with a push-button ignition for fast starting. And this last should be your first sign as to why my ghetto grill is still better: the Fuego Home Element uses gas.

Yes, gas, the same kind of odorless, flavorless and smokeless fuel you’d find in your oven at home. So why not just stay at home? After all, isn’t the point of grilling the smoky taste you get from burning charcoal? The food that comes off my $1 grill tastes fantastic, and I can afford to buy decent meat because I didn’t waste my money on hardware.

Still, it might be good for baking a small pizza: the 16.4 or a 14.1 LP gas canisters and 8,000 btu/hour burners can heat this baby up to between 350 and 650ºF. Perfect for a crisp and chewy Margherita. Available soon, for $150.

Home Element product page [Fuego via Uncrate]

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Mar 04

Cat-Library, A Stairway to Feline Heaven

Posted in: household, Today's Chili

If you ever “owned” a cat, you’ll know that while they might seem cute and loving, they are in fact selfish, single-minded creatures intent on two things: filling their bellies, and finding a warm comfy place to sleep. Actually, three things: if they can possibly fit it in with the other two tasks, they will go out of their way to piss you off.

Enter the Cat-Library, a bookshelf equipped with a stairway to cat-heaven. It might seem indulgent, but the alternative, of which I have bitter experience, is to have Tiddles scramble up the face of the shelf, shredding the pulp of your first-edition Philip K. Dick paperbacks and dropping heavy cookbooks to their corner-smashing doom.

The shelf is also modular, so you exact some revenge on the feline overlord in your life by moving the sections from time to time and confusing her dumb little cat brain with the shifting steps up to her comfy cat-nest up top. And she won’t be able to resist. The designer, Corentin Dombrecht, has left the shelves paint and oil-free to “to seduce cats more.”

There’s one more thing that makes the Cat-Library worth a mention, and it’s not the furniture itself — it’s the contents of the shelves. There, up top and in its original box, is the old-school console game Firefox F-7 from Grandstand. It dates from 1983, and I once got one for my birthday. It was, at the time, awesome. Thanks for the nostalgia fix, Corentin!

Cat-Library [Corentin Dombrecht via Yanko]

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Mar 01

Pit-In: A Drive-In Desk for Bikes

Posted in: household, Today's Chili

The Pit-In is a drive-in desk for bikes

Imagine, if you will, cycling to work. Imagine further that you ride straight into the cargo elevator and clank your way slowly up to the office, sitting astride your ride. Now, as the doors whirr open, you still don’t dismount. Instead, you ride past your astonished, jealous and frankly awed co-workers straight to your desk. Still you are in the saddle, and — dammit — you’re going to stay there.

You brake, skidding the rear wheel across the cheap nylon carpet, and enter the cubicle. In there, you roll easily into your Pit-In desk, sliding the front wheel through the large slot. You place your feet firmly on each of the two raised platforms, lift your hands from the handlebars to your keyboard and relax onto the yielding leather surface of your Brooks saddle, ready to start the day.

This dream could be reality if you could somehow secure a copy of the Pit-In from the Store Muu design studio, a desk made to be used while sitting on your bike. Made from plywood and measuring 71×90x115cm, the Pit-In probably won’t find its way into your office, but it would make a pretty cool outdoor table at a bike-themed bar.

I think its fantastic, and I’m thinking of making my own, if only as a way to trick the Lady into letting me keep my bike in the apartment. Bonus: at 1 meter 15cm high, it could double as a great standing desk.

Pit-In [Store Muu via Book of Joe]

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