Cool Kitchen Gadgets That Don't Seem So Once They Arrive

What kitchen in the country doesn't have one of those cool kitchen gadgets that kind of look like they just might be able to do the thing they promise, but never do? The magic peeler, the magic juicer or dicer-slicer or whatever - who hasn't at least bought one or two of these zany cool kitchen gadgets and cursed themselves for their gullibility?

When we buy one of these, we can never bring ourselves to admit that they don't work. Who wants to admit that they've been had? And so, those super gadgets will take up counter space or drawer space somewhere in the kitchen for the next five years until someone one day just gets sick of it and throws it out when you're not looking.

One reason these cool kitchen gadgets never actually make it to being useful devices is that their designers just have the wildest imaginations. They make these things for very very specific needs. Even when we do need them, we don't need them more than a few times in a lifetime. That's not the way to design anything for the kitchen. The kitchen needs multipurpose stuff - not one-trick ponies.

But you know - after all these years, you would think that we would know better than to pick one of these strange contraptions yet one more time. They continue to churn out out these strangely cool kitchen gadgets because, hey - you keep buying them.

And it isn't even just those crazy gadgets. When we travel to another country, often, we will come across some kind of device that they use in their local cuisine - handmade sushi knives from Japan, a pasta maker from Italy or something. Those things can seem great over there where they know how to use them. Once we get them over here, when they don't have the magic of their native culture around them, they just seem useless.

Perhaps the mistake we make is that we plan for things that never happen. When we get a beautiful pizza maker, we imagine that there will be these family get-togethers and everyone will be a nice happy family talking and munching on delicious pizzas altogether.

As it turns out, those family get-togethers are few and far between, and people don't feel like home-made pizza then.

It isn't even just exotic stuff like this. Take a simple food processor that comes with a million attachments. Or a simple thing like an oven. Who would think that an oven was a useless kitchen gadget? But there are plenty of us who just don't do that kind of cooking at home. We just like to trick our kitchens out like that.

Great Smart Phone Apps You Didn't Know About

Just imagine what it would be like if we didn't have smartphones. We would need a phone, a videogame player, a television, an MP3 player and a laptop. And that is only a very limited listing of everything that smart phone apps do for us. Our lives wouldbe infinitely poorer if we didn't have them. But perhaps, a lot of people out there don't really realize how good smart phone apps are. They don't realize how many things there are out there that they never knew about.

Of course, if you're an artist or an engineer or a doctor or something, there are a number of super-specialized apps that could transform your life. If you don't know about those, you won't be really missing out. We, on the other hand,are talking about apps that matter to all of us. You really need to know about what smart phone apps there are out there today that anyone on earth could use and find very useful. Let's look at a few of those.

For instance, how many people know that any camera-enabled smart phone is now a scanner and PDF converter? That's right, you can take a picture of a newspaper or a business card or any document, and right away, a two-dollar app like TurboScan can turn it into a clean scanned document. If you have an app like CardScan, it will even file your card away on your virtual Rolodex.

A couple of years ago, the New York Times star tech reviewer David Pogue made a huge deal about how there was this little pocket device that could not only connect to the Internet through 3G, it could act as a hotspot and connect any laptop in the area through Wi-Fi as well. It was amazing back then.

Today, you can create a mobile hotspot with your smartphone just like that. You can connect to the Internet on your smartphone, and anyone could go on it. Of course, this one isn't a smart phone app - its a feature.

Have you tried the Google Goggles app for Android phones? Goggles is an app that will identify any object for you. One day, it can maybe just take a picture of anyone walking on the street and you'd know everything about them. For now, you can snap a picture of any painting, any building, any storefront and so on - and Google will scour the Internet for what it is and bring you an answer. That's a killer feature.

A lot of TV stations come with their own special apps. Download it, you get access to that channel. There are lots of Internet service providers who offer apps for the streaming all kinds of channels, too. The best part is, the best app probably hasn't been made yet.

Apple TV Review

To fans of Apple's devices everywhere, the day Apple announced their new iPad was the biggest day ever. While the iPad and the iPhone are major franchises to Apple though, they don't represent what the company is totally excited that right now. To Apple, a good part of their future rests on how their new Apple TV turns out. It's that important to them. My Apple TV order arrived in the mail in the second week of March. As you'll see in this Apple TV review, for the most part, their new and reworked model almost totally delivers.

People always complain that Apple's products are not the best value for money. They feel that they can always get better bang for their buck buying a Windows or Android device or anything else. Not so with Apple TV though. At $99, Apple TV is the company's cheapest product - just about. But they don't skimp on the features for the money.

Basically, people buy products like Apple TV just for a few simple things that they wish to do with it. They want to see YouTube on it, they want to download and watch movies from Netflix, and they want to buy stuff from iTunes and watch them. Looking closely at the product for this Apple TV review though, I found that  Apple TV has many more useful tricks up its sleeve. The home screen has NHL Game Center, MLB TV, Flickr, Wall Street Journal Live, Vimeo - and a whole lot more to help you waste your time in a very pleasurable way.

Most people don't even need to be told an Apple product is easy to use. But you know - an Apple TV review does have to include that information. It'll take you two minutes from the time you get your product in the mail, to get it connected to the TV or to your computer, and then to get it running.

They have this new feature on Apple TV called Home Sharing. Whatever stuff you've got on your computer and your phone and other devices, you'll get it on your television screen through Apple TV in just a couple of minutes. You don't even need an Apple Match subscription for this.

If there's anything to complain about in the way Apple TV connects your iPhone, it's just that the iPhone app that promises to be a remote control for your Apple TV, never really gets its act together.

Apple is really good at completely integrating everything they make, for a completely flawless and seamless experience. Since your Apple TV is not an all-in-one device though (that will probably come day one day soon), the experience is not that seamless. The remote causes one problem. The other is that you can't control the volume without looking for your TV remote. That's a decided oversight.

The last problem is not actually a design flaw. It is a lost opportunity. Have you ever thought about how there is no App Store for Apple TV?

The World Of The Ultrathin Laptop

The ultrabook or the ultrathin laptop - an Apple invention that's been nothing but a welcome breath of fresh air to anyone who hates lugging around a 9 pound laptop, right? Well, Intel certainly agrees that it's a welcome introduction. For the claim that the ultrathin laptop was their idea. They say they had lots of rounds of research and identified the ultrathin laptop as a direction to take in the future. Long before Apple over came out with the MacBook Air.

Well, whatever you are comfortable believing in, the truth is that the concept of a very light laptop that you can pick up with two or three fingers is a wonderful one.

If this idea did originate with Apple, you have to give them credit for really understanding  the concept of smallness and lightness really well.

What is it really that an iPad can do? It's far less powerful than even a netbook. And multitouch notwithstanding, it's not the most user-friendly way to use a computer to not have a keyboard at all.

But Apple knew that when you have a sliver of computing device in your hand, you can find all kinds of uses for it. And they were right.

Whoever came up with the idea first, computer manufacturers who make Windows laptops aren't far behind. They have lots of ultrathin laptop models on the market too. Sometimes, they are more expensive than the MacBook Air (that sells for $999), and sometimes they're not.

But they all have two things in common - they are no more than 3 pounds of heft, and they all try to conserve battery power and to give you a speed bump by using solid-state drives instead of regular hard drives.

In general, models by Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Samsung and HP - all the great Windows laptop makers - try to run with a few other common philosophies in ultrathin laptop design. They don't have DVD drives of course, but they also do their best to cut out as many external connectors as possible.

This can be a very annoying thing - not being able to connect to anything. But at least, all these Windows ultrathin laptop models are better than the MacBook Air in this department. The MacBook Air comes with exactly 2 USB ports, a Thunderbolt port, and a card reader slot. That's it.

You probably wondering - a stripped down laptop - is that what an ultrathin laptop is? If so, how is that any different from a cheap netbook?

That's not a fair comparison at all, actually. Most ultrathin laptop models come with a Core i5 processor. Many come with i7. A netbook on the other hand, is powered with an Intel Atom processor. That's like an ancient Pentium 4.

If you're on the market for one of these, look at the Toshiba Portégé Z835 at $900. Now there's a bargain. HP's Folio, also at $900, is an astonishing bargain. And it comes with seven hours on the battery.

Pricking the Balloon of the IPad Owner

The latest iPad that they just call the "iPad", with no generation number  next to it, saw the strongest launch weekend of any iPad yet - they sold 3 million in one weekend. Apple, according to most industry reports, carries home about half the $499 it charges you for the unit. The rest of it, is what it costs Apple to make it.

But that's only if you choose for $499 model. If you choose one of the more expensive models, Apple's take-home is even bigger. You see - it doesn't cost Apple anything more to make the more expensive models - just $15 or so. But they charge you an extra hundred dollars for it. On the other hand, for each Kindle Fire that Amazon sells, it loses a few dollars. In a business where manufacturers work on razor thin profit margins, Apple certainly lives in its own universe.

You mustn't be too unhappy with Apple. As generous as those margins are, they are a lot slimmer than they used to be. You have read about how workers on Apple's assembly lines in China are paid more these days, haven't you? That has to come out of Apple's margins.

The problem with coveting the iPad (the latest version always) is that it's cool only stays for a short period of time. When the new model comes out, you might as well be holding an actual tablet for all that it does for your reputation. You really should look at the cartoon on the website The Oatmeal about iPad product cool cycles.

You're telling yourself that it's not for no reason that the old models become less chool - it's because the new models are way, way better, right?

Not exactly. There've been tests done by consumer magazines. When they give Apple fans who haven't seen the new superhigh resolution iPad yet an old iPad 2 and they tell them  that it's the new iPad they've been waiting for, they right away seem to believe they are looking at a high-res screen. In other tests, testers would camouflage an old iPad and a new iPad so that only the screens were visible. Even then, Apple fans consistently picked the wrong one.

What this tells you is that you shouldn't really go for the latest and greatest. Just buy a generation older. It'll save you money, and it'll be just as good. It may not be cool, but who's going to know? It's all in your head.

When people rave about the iPad, when they say that it's so much better than any kind of computing device ever, it's easy to forget how underpowered the iPad is. Really, you could get a laptop that was 10 times more powerful and capacious and capable, for $100 less. The iPad is great for certain things. It's great for doctors, airline pilots, and so on. It's a great way to consume data. It isn't great when you actually want to create something. For instance, how do you create anything without a keyboard?

An Electronic Chess Game is Like Playing Against an Actual Opponent

I have always had a great love for the game of chess, and last year my wife bought me an electronic chess game for my birthday. I was not sure how complicated it would be or whether or not I would even like it, but very soon I discovered just what a wonderful present it actually was. It has different levels of difficulty and is not hard to use at all. I would honestly say that using an electronic chess game is like having an actual opponent sitting across from you.

I was a bit hesitant when I first saw the game, because I thought it would be hard to figure out. My wife does not play, however, and I don't see my brother often enough to get to play chess on a regular basis with him, so I decided to give it a shot. I took me less than a minute to figure out how to play the electronic chess game, including how to move for the opponent. I was thrilled and decided to take on the game for my first-ever chess match with my new "friend."

I am proud to say that I smoked the electronic chess game the first five or six times we played. At that point I did not realize that there were different levels of difficulty, so I started to feel a little disappointed, thinking that it would be really easy to beat. Then I read the instructions, and saw that there were 10 different levels of difficulty. I figured out how to move the game up and down in levels of difficulty, and immediately shifted it up to a level 10, to see if there really was a noticeable difference in the level of difficulty.

The electronic chess game had me in a check-mate within about five moves, and I knew that it would be a challenge for me. I decided to drop the game back down to a level 2. The first time that I played at that level, I still lost. It was close, though, so I played it again. This time I won, but again, it was close. I played it at a level 2 until I reached a point that I could beat it pretty much every time out. It was not an easy task, but I finally reached that point.

Today, I am on a level 5. I am at the point with the electronic chess game where I beat it about three out of every five times that I play at that level, and I have definitely seen my skills improve. My brother can beat me occasionally, but none of my friends can, and they all say they can notice how much better my game has gotten. The electronic chess game has been one of the best presents I ever received, and I make sure to let my wife know about this every chance I get!