Hasta La Gadget!

This sleek socket will wake you any way you please

Here’s a great idea: why not put a pair of open, horizontal power sockets up on your nightstand, right next to where you keep that tall, cool glass of water for when you wake up thirsty. Now, if you accidentally tip over your bedtime drink, you’ll be in for a shock — quite literally.

Actually, apart from the Darwin Award possibilities, the Alternative Alarm Clock from Kihyun Kim is a pretty neat concept. The sockets remain dormant until the appointed hour, whereupon the juice flows into any gadget of your choosing. Kim’s suggestions are a coffee percolator and a fan, perfect to waft you gently from sleep to wakefulness with minimal distress.

Of course, you can rig this us from existing timer outlets from the hardware store, but Kim’s clock is actually rather elegant, even managing to make the standard British paranoia-plug socket look attractive. If I ever had need to wake up in the mornings (and if this were a real product), I’d probably buy one.

Alternative Alarm Clock [Kihyun Kim via Yanko]

See Also:

• Toaster-Like Alarm Clock Pops Up iPhones
• Alarm Clock Wakes You Up With Bacon
• Wake Up! Five Great iPhone Alarm Clocks
• LED Alarm Clock. Pretty and Confusing

Cold-brewed coffee is the right place to start for great iced-coffee

Cold-brewing is yet another way to make a great cup of coffee. The idea is that the long, slow process, without heating, gives coffee with less bitterness and acidity than conventional hot-water methods. Of course, you probably won’t want to drink it to warm you up on a miserable winter morning, but for making iced-coffee, it’s ideal.

The easiest (and classic New Orleans way) is to just mix up a pack of grounds with cold water and leave it at room temperature for 12 hours. Strain, and you have around 8 cups of concentrate which will keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks.

Or you can spend $265 on this admittedly beautiful cold water dripper. Made by Hario, it looks like something from a science lab. The kit has enough parts that you can really enjoy setting it up and tweaking everything before the four-hour process begins.

The machine has three layers. Up top is the water reservoir with silicone seal and a stainless steel tap which drip, drip drips the water slowly on the ground coffee below. Here it extracts the coffee goodness and passes through a French-press-like metal mesh filter into the jug below. When the water has finally finished its journey, you have a jar of concentrate ready to go.

I certainly don’t have space in my tiny kitchen for such an elegant rig, but I’m going to be scrubbing a stainless steel saucepan clean later today and cold-brewing a batch of concentrate the ghetto way. For those of you who just can’t bring themselves to slum it like me, the Hario Cold Water Dripper is available now.

Hario Cold Water Dripper [Williams Sonoma via Uncrate]

See Also:

• Make Terrible Drip-Brewed Coffee at Camp with the Propane …
• Steel Disk Replaces Paper Aeropress Coffee Filters
• Loca Brews Pod Coffee in a Stovetop Moka
• Smart Holder Carries Infinite Cups of Coffee
• Set Perfect White-Balance With Starbucks Coffee-Cup Lid

If you’re lucky enough to have a Sherpa or pack-mule, you might like to bring a propane coffeemaker on your next camping trip

It is morning in the wilderness. You have fuel, you have water, and you have coffee. You are thirsty, tired and grouchy enough to be banging your tin cup repeatedly against your leg. How do you proceed?

If you have an ounce of initiative left in your caffeine-starved brain, you might just boil up the water in your cup, throw in the coffee and wait*. You’ll get a perfect cup, and you can continue your hike with only your tin cup and pack of coffee to carry.

Or you could try the Coleman Portable Propane Coffeemaker, a chunky piece of kit which takes the familiar kitchen based coffeemaker and puts it into the field. It runs off a 16.4 oz propane cylinder, pushes 4,500 BTU into the water and can run for up to 4.4 hours on a single charge.

It is also extremely non-portable.

But the worst part is that many people will use this to take their miserable home-based coffee habits abroad. A drip coffeemaker starts burning your brew almost as the first drop hits the hotplate-heated jug (stainless steel in this case), and gets worse after that. The coffee never tastes fresh, is never strong enough, and the longer it sits the more bitter it gets.

If you really want to get fancy on your camping trips, take a large-sized moka pot and stick that on your camping stove. It’s lighter, and the result is infinitely better.

There’s one exception here. The product page suggests using the propane coffeemaker at construction sites. The coffee will still taste awful, but putting on a ten-cup pot is a lot easier than brewing a few cups at a time. $90.

Coleman Portable Propane Coffeemaker [Coleman via Uncrate]

* Pro tip: when the coffee is brewed, run a spoon, bowl-down, around the edge of the cup or jug to push the floating grounds gently under the surface. The grounds will sink to the bottom, letting you drink without having to strain the liquid. You’re welcome!

See Also:

• Loca Brews Pod Coffee in a Stovetop Moka
• Steel Disk Replaces Paper Aeropress Coffee Filters
• Smart Holder Carries Infinite Cups of Coffee

Quite frankly, you’ve got it just a bit too easy. You rise 98 seconds before you’re scheduled to clock in, you mash a power button, and suddenly, you’re at work. PJs still caked to your legs, mouth still steaming from a lack of brushing. You’re a telecommuter, and you’re the envy of the working world. In fact, it’d be just stellar if you’d do us all a solid and add a sliver of complexity to your workday — you know, like swapping out your OfficeMax special for an elliptical machine. And maybe, just maybe, you can convert your laptop into one that’s pedal-powered, forcing you to keep churning for fear of dropping from the virtual office. And no, you can’t ask for donations to cover the $8,000 price tag — your fuel savings from last week alone should just about cover it. Harrumph.

The Elliptical Machine Office Desk: putting the ‘commute’ back in ‘telecommuting’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 07:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Make the end of your life seem to arrive sooner with these drawer organizers

Truth: My kitchen utensils are “organized” into two shallow wooden wine crates. One for cutlery, tho other one for everything else. There are no compartments, sections or organizational niceties whatsoever. I figure that when you need a knife and a fork, its just as easy to pick them from a pile. This approach also makes it a lot quicker to put away washed cutlery.

So I couldn’t care less about DrawerDecor, but I know there must be somebody out there who actually wakes up in the night and has to go check their whisks and corkscrews are parallel before thy can sleep.

The DrawerDecor starts with a silicone drawer liner which can be cut to size. Onto this you stick a variety of modular “divits” which let you organize the space to keep your utensils neatly in check. Thus arranged, you can enjoy wasting an extra ten minutes putting thing just so, every time you unload the dishwasher.

The kits cost $25 each, come in a variety of candy colors and contain a mat and 15 assorted divits.

And before you tell me I should treat my knives better, I should say I have a magnetic knife holder on the wall. All my chef’s knives are in tip-top condition. Even my boner.

Available now.

DrawerDecor [Daily Grommet via Oh Gizmo]