Hasta La Gadget!

I regularly laugh and snicker at the Great British Power Plug and Socket, a pair of devices so safe, so mollycoddling that they are almost physically wrapped in cotton-wool. But today I will not laugh, at least not at this particular British shame. Today I shall point out that this over-protective system actually solves many problems in a surprisingly elegant way. Don’t worry, though. I shall instead be ridiculing a U.S-born contraption, the Safety Plug.

The Safety Plug does two things. It stops itself from being yanked from the wall, and it stops fingers from touching the bare prongs as they slide in and out of their wall-slots. Noble cauuses both, but the implementation is pretty clunky, verging on awful.

To protect the fingers from accidental touching bare, live metal, the plug has a plastic hood that concertinas open and shut. Compare this to the UK plug. It has three prongs. The third “earth” or ground pin is longer than the others and must be there in order to let the other two pins in. The live and neutral holes are actually closed until the earth pin is inserted. As well from stopping kids poking things into the holes, this also works to stop any exposed metal from showing when live.

The conducting pins are also covered in plastic for around a quarter-inch from their bases, so they are even safer.

And accidental yanking? The Safety Plug takes care of this with a squeezable switch that needs to be pressed to release a catch. The Brit plug? Just try pulling it from the wall. The cable exits from the bottom of the plug, perpendicular to the prongs. The cable will be ripped from the plug before the plug leaves the wall.

It’s a nice idea, and at least it doesn’t require that the entire U.S power infrastructure be redesigned. What next? An American making a proper cup of tea?

Total Plug Safety [Yanko]

See Also:

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• Plug-Watch: Cute Power Cube, The Best Adapter Yet?
• Mysterious Spinning Power Outlet Accepts Any International Plug …
• Fold-Flat Concept Fixes Bulky British Power Plug

Screenshot via PairItApp.com.

When you buy a bottle of wine, you usually have both too much and too little information. Unless you know your stuff, you might find yourself scanning hundreds of bottles in search of a label whose font and color strike your fancy. In the age of the iPhone, there are apps for that.

Wine and lifestyle writer Jessica Yadegaran looks at a few new applications for oenophiles in the Contra Costa Times. “Sure, wine’s great with cheese,” she writes. “But it’s better with technology.”

Pair It, which matches wine with food (and vice versa), has been a longtime favorite for iPhone wine drinkers and has been recently released for Android. More interesting yet might be the forthcoming app from wine information/social-networking site Snooth.com, due out later this month. According to Yadegaran, it solves the what-do-I-do-with-this-label problem by packing in image recognition technology. Take a picture of the bottle using the Snooth app and it will give you background, reviews, and even pricing help for comparison shopping.

Sadly, the Snooth app won’t be ready for tonight’s Rosh Hashanah supper. However, there’s still plenty of time before the Kiddush to find out what will go well with apples and honey.

Story via MercuryNews.com. Image/screenshot from PairItApp.com.

See Also:

• What Climate Change Means for Wine Industry
• Wine Snobs Geek Out on “Systems Oenology”
• Food: How Iron Chef America Engineers a Visual Feast
• Hate Talking to Restaurant Workers? Download This iPhone App …
• Yelp Takes On Foursquare in Latest iPhone App Upgrade

Promotional photo via rogerebert.com.

Roger Ebert’s blog is consistently so smart, warm, and well-written — not just about movies, but about books, politics, biography (auto & regular), and more — that it didn’t surprise me in the slightest when he started writing about how much he loved his rice cooker. His rice cooker posts were likewise so funny, intelligent, and passionate that it doesn’t surprise me that Ebert’s written a cookbook, titled The Pot and How to Use It: The Mystery and Romance of the Rice Cooker. (You can preorder it now; it should be in stores later this month.)

Ebert’s 2008 post sporting the same title lays out the book’s program:

First, get the Pot. You need the simplest rice cooker made. It comes with two speeds: Cook, and Warm. Not expensive. Now you’re all set to cook meals for the rest of your life on two square feet of counter space, plus a chopping block. No, I am not putting you on the Rice Diet. Eat what you like. I am thinking of you, student in your dorm room. You, solitary writer, artist, musician, potter, plumber, builder, hermit. You, parents with kids. You, night watchman. You, obsessed computer programmer or weary web-worker. You, lovers who like to cook together but don’t want to put anything in the oven. You, in the witness protection program. You, nutritional wingnut. You, in a wheelchair.

Rice cookers really are ingenious, versatile little devices. They bring liquid to a boil, cook whatever’s inside, then shut themselves off. Add a microwave, crock pot, and toaster oven, and you can cook almost anything without cleaning a pan, reaching for an egg timer, or worrying about leaving something on too long ever again.

The Secrets of the Pot [Roger Ebert’s Journal/Chicago Sun-Times] and Roger Ebert: No Longer an Eater, Still a Cook [New York Times]

See Also:

• Sous Vide Supreme Countertop Immersion Circulator
• Wired 12.06: The Thermochemical Joy of Cooking
• Pixelated Grill for Close-Up Cooking
• America's Test Kitchen for the Nintendo DSI XL Makes Cooking With …
• Touch-Sensitive Cooker Detect Pans, Changes Shape

Gadget Lab reader John Costello sent in his ingenious invention, one of those ideas so simple that you slap your forehead and wonder why it hasn’t been done before. John has designed an induction hob which uses LED “flames” to stop you turning it up too high.

While induction hobs give the instant control of a gas flame, there is no way to see how high you have set the heat (there are numbers on the knob, but that’s hardly intuitive). John noticed that people would set the controls too high, so he decided to fix it.

His hob uses LEDs arrayed around the perimeter of the heat-rings. these project a light onto the pot which varies in height depending on the amount of heat dialed-in. As the power creeps higher, so do the “flames”, giving visual feedback that can be read by anybody, even from afar.

I love it. I still use gas, as I like to melt the plastic handles off my stovetop espresso pots every few months, but if I went to electric, it would certainly be induction, and I’d like to have John’s electric blue flames licking up the sides of my saucepans.

See Also:

• Siemens Multi Touch Cooktops. Kinda
• Use Your iPhone As a BBQ? There's (Not) an App For That

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

The pitch for Steelcase’s modern take on the classroom chair, the Node, is full of nonsense about trying to “implement multiple pedagogies”, but all you really need to know is that the new desk/chair combo adds wheels and proper under-seat storage to the classic school furnishing.

I tested a Steelcase chair soon after starting work at the Gadget Lab, way back in 2007, and found it to be “comfy”. It was also huge, dominating a small room. The Node might be designed for the classroom, but it would sure look pretty great in my small office (read: bedroom), especially as it would also do away with the need for a desk.

The plastic seat offers no adjustment, so it is rated by Steelcase as suitable for a “short-term sit” only. The table section, though, is adjustable and is good for use by both left and right-handers. And in addition to the wheels on the bottom, for scooting around the room, the chair will swivel.

The Node comes in a bewilderment of colors, with 12 options for the seat and three for the base. Cost will vary depending on how many you buy, so you probably will have to enroll in college to use one of these. We’ll wait for the inevitable Ikea knockoff.

Node product page [Steelcase via OhGizmo]

See Also:

• Steelcase Walkstation: Combo Treadmill and Desk
• Furniture
• The Five Gadgets You Need To Start A Business For Less Than $750 …

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