Hasta La Gadget!

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

Regular readers will know that I’m a sucker for a nifty twist on the plain old power-plug, or a clever cable-management gadget. Imagine, then, my joy when I found out about the SideWinder, which is not only a power-plug and cable-manager in one, but is also named after a frikkin’ snake.

Like any good gadget, the SideWinder is dead simple. It plugs permanently into an existing double-socket and duplicates the two outlets. It also adds a little depth, and has a “waist” around which you can wrap stray cords. A lip behind the front-plate allows you to tuck any charging-plugs out of site.

The SideWinder attaches with a screw – unscrew the the one that holds your existing socket to the wall and use the one provided with the SideWinder to fix it in place. This screw also makes the ground connection.

Simple, ingenious, and not quite yet ready. The project is looking for funding on Kickstarter, and $20 will get you a SideWinder if the project takes off.

SideWinder product page [SideWindMe]

SideWindMe Cord Organizer (Kickstarter)

See Also:

• Power Plugs
• Power-Plug Concept Fails to Out-Coddle UK Version
• Quirky Jointed Power-Strip Is 'A Creative Outlet'
• Kickstarter

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

This is the Molecular Cuisine Starter Kit. Welcome to culinary hell.

During the 1970s, The French developed Nouvelle Cuisine, simpler, fresher dishes that were a reaction against the heavy, overwrought, cream-laden excesses of classical French cooking. The fashion spread, and by the time it hit England, Nouvelle Cuisine was a tainted word, with crappy regional hotels serving giant plates with minuscule portions. The name became a joke.

And with the Molecular Cuisine Starter Kit, the latest food fashion can be equally mauled, in the privacy of your own home. The set is more like chemistry kit than a cooking kit, containing sachets of agar-agar, calcium lactate, sodium alginate, soy lecithin and xanthan gum. In short, it’s the same as the list of ingredients you’ll read on the back of any pack of processed food. You also get silicon tubing, pipettes, a syringe along with other less weird tools, plus a DVD with recipe demonstrations.

Molecular gastronomy is a wonderful thing, bringing critical scientific thinking to the superstition-laden world of cooking. But it is also a fashion, with freeze-dried raspberries appearing in the salads of otherwise traditional restaurants. Can it be done in the home with a simple kit of chemicals? We should probably leave it to the professionals, like Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal.

On the other hand, playing with this stuff is probably awesome fun, and even if it doesn’t taste so great, at least you get to eat the results. $70.

Molecular Cuisine Starter Kit [ThinkGeek]

See Also:

• Kitchen Lab: The Highest Tech Food Gadgets on Show
• Cocoa Pipe Lets You Literally Inhale Chocolate

Like a spindly steel insect, the Rima Light from Dreipuls stalks your desk and plants its legs amongst the detritus carelessly strewn thereon. Unlike an insect (unless it’s a giant, adjustable firefly), the Rima Light also offers ingeniously adjustable illumination.

The four legged structure suspends a semi-cylindrical “bulb” which runs the length of your desk. This bulb has four rings circling it, and these rings form the bounds of the lit part of the tube. Thus you can slide them to light up the whole length of the Rima, or you can have two any-sized sections. Thus you could avoid shining light onto the super-reflective screen of a MacBook, or just opt for small pools of light when working into the night – just enough to spotlight your glass of whisky and your ashtray, and no more.

The Rima has picked up a Red Dot design award, which pretty much always means that the product is both great-looking and works well (I have a Red Dot-winning food-processor from Kenwood and it kicks ass and takes names).

The aluminum and plastic lamp uses 65 LEDs and sucks 10-Watts of power (on a 220-Volt supply). It weighs in at a satisfyingly stable 750-grams and measures 800 x 410 x 130mm (that’s 31.5-inches long). It is also, criminally, not yet for sale.

Rima Light [Dreipuls via FastCode]

See Also:

• Ugly Duckling Lamp Makes Swan-Necked Lights from Junk
• Paranoia Inducing Security Lamp Brightens Homes, Cells
• T'Light Gadget-Charging Desk Lamp: Bad Name, Great Idea
• Rolling Lamp Looks Like QuickTime Logo
• DIY Book Lamp's Puns Don't Stop with the Name