GADGET PLANET
Summer Curriculum:
Shop Class, Espionage 101, and Home Ecc
By William C. Altreuter and Catherine Berlin
When my wife and I moved into our first apartment, my brother was a frequent guest and often assisted on various DIY projects. This was a very good thing, as it spread the injuries around between two people instead of just one. In that way we were both frequently wounded, but neither of us was ever entirely crippled. We were improvisers. Once, as he was standing on a ladder, contorted and reaching up into a narrow, dark space, he asked me to hand him a screwdriver. “Phillips or flat blade?” I asked. “Doesn’t matter. I’m going to use it to hammer,” he replied. Neither of us was particularly adept with tools, or adages, for that matter: “Measure once, cut twice,” he used to say, and our handiwork reflected this philosophy. Another rule of thumb was, “If you can’t fix it with a hammer, it’s broke for good.” In that spirit we would like to invite you, loyal readers, to participate in the Gadget Planet “Right Tool For The Job” contest. —W.C.A.
One of the best parts about writing about consumer technology is opening the packages that arrive in the mail. If your idea of Christmas features automatic cat toilets or electric paper towel dispensers, you could say that it is like Christmas at Gadget Planet headquarters, and we’d like to bring some of that magic into your life. Black & Decker has kindly consented to sponsor our event. And this month we have two prizes to give away, the Alligator Lopper and the Broom/hard Surface Sweeper.
 |
The Alligator Lopper is an eighteen-volt cordless tool with metal jaws designed to clamp onto tree logs with its scissor-like action and cut through branches up to four inches in diameter. Then let the neighborhood kids see the fierce face drawn onto the blades and impress upon them who still rules. You can cut overhead branches and then chop them up into manageable pieces to throw away per particular municipal ordinances, or burn them in your backyard fireplace, in violation thereof.
 |
The Surface Sweeper is not, despite our first impression when admiring the image, a spanking machine. No, its real purpose is to blow enough air to clear sidewalks, driveways, and decks. The tube has a built-in scraper for loosening wet debris. It weighs only five-and-a-half pounds and has two eighteen-volt batteries and a charger. For those who do not have the bending capacity to sweep and broom, but live for a meticulous yard, this is one terrific gadget, and much more earth-friendly and lightweight than the gasoline-powered versions. Longtime fans of battery-operated yard equipment, we are pleased to add that Black & Decker helped create the Portable Rechargeable Battery Association, www.prba.org, and supports the activities of the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation, www.rbrc.org, a nonprofit company for collecting and recycling rechargeable batteries within the U.S. and Canada.
 |
Our panel will select the funniest, and if we get more than two entries, the winner will be drawn at random from that pool. All entries become the property of Buffalo Spree and Gadget Planet and may be featured in a future column. Entries must be postmarked no later than July 20, 2008, and mailed to 617 Main Street, Suite M201, Buffalo, NY 14203, or e-mailed by that date to spreegadgets@yahoo.com. Let us know which prize you would rather win.
 |
I’ve always wanted to trim and edge, but I’ve had issues. I bought a manual kind—a circular blade with teeth attached to a long pole, but I couldn’t make it spin. It only threatened to spiral-fracture my ulna and radius bones. Then there was the tool that looked like a half-moon shovel. I bent it in half on the first day. “Too eager?” my neighbor asked. My father brings his edger over on occasion, but it weighs about 200 pounds and sounds like it could cut through patio pavers. I worry for both of us when that baby appears. But something had to be done. A poorly edged lawn looks like a boy with hair on the edges of his ears. Go long or go short, but stuck in-between, it seems like you couldn’t bother making a style decision. The same applies to a lawn. Go ahead and pull out crabgrass and dandelions with tweezers. No one will notice. That’s because a sloppy overhang trumps all by screaming, “We just don’t care.” Well, I do care, so I’ve switched to the Rechargeable Trimmer/Edger. It has the runtime to trim a half-acre home site on a full charge, enough power to keep the grass around the base of the trees, fencing, sidewalks, and driveways shorn, and an automatic feed spool so I don’t have to wonder where that “whipping cutting thing” went. At 6.5 pounds and $99, it’s a bargain. Dewalt Industrial Tool Company, 881 W. Delavan Ave., Buffalo, 884-6220, and other Black & Decker outlets.
 |
Once the lawn is shaved and scared down to an inch of its life, it’s time to think about inviting friends over for a meal. As our backyard has had a constant rotation of visiting Swedes this summer, we’ve had to come up with something other than burgers and chicken, especially as I barely have the talent for eating ribs, let alone cooking them. The solution seemed pretty obvious. Only bears eat more salmon than Swedes. Poached, baked, dried into jerkey, salmon croquets, salmon fritters, salmon dumplings, and salmon surprise: just put salmon in front of it, pour a round of Aquavit, and “Skål!” Actually, the surprise is when we don’t have salmon. The best way is grilled, I think, and the Charcoal Companion lets us grill without leaving half the fish stuck to the grating. (Grilling baskets are a better way to work with vegetables, too.) A little dill, a spritz of lemon juice, and you are picnicking like a Bergman movie. Anyone for chess? About $30. Premier, 3465 Delaware Ave., Kenmore, 877-3574.
 |
It has been said that throughout history every advance in communications technology has been adopted first by organized religion, and second by the pornography industry. While it is easy to imagine Gutenberg’s intern running off a little porno after hours, we’re not so sure that this axiom is absolutely true, and offer webcams as a possible counter-example. Has anyone devised a religious application for this technology? Webcams are a peculiar sort of gadget; their popularity is oddly counter-intuitive. One of the ways you can tell a movie is science fiction is that the telephones all feature video—the reality is that the market has never wanted videophones, reasoning that it would only ring when we were in the shower. Telephones are intrusive enough, without adding video to further erode our privacy. It is ironic, therefore, that the first person to use a webcam was probably undressing before the software was installed. Mac users have webcam capability already installed, but for Windows users who are interested in video conferencing the QuickCam Pro 9000 is a nice choice. It features Carl Zeiss optics, which means that the image quality is sharper than the usual low-res webcam picture. (It is actually sharper than most broadband connections can accommodate and is more suitable for recording video to your hard drive and either uploading to a video sharing service like YouTube or for inclusion into a movie project to be burned to disc.) It includes an automatic autofocus feature, and a double-hinged clip that allows you to fit it on just about any screen. Chances are that you are really just going to use it to chat with your parents, but even if you have something else in mind this impressed us as the best webcam we’ve seen. We are also going to figure out a way to set it up so it monitors the backyard and all our new equipment. Shop around—prices vary, but Amazon has it for $74.98.
 |
Computers in the movies work like no computer you’ve ever seen. They are able to produce reality-defying three-dimensional, active animation, and photo-realistic graphics; they have amazing real-time video phone capabilities, and the internet connects to everything. You can edit credit records, search hotel registries, lookup police criminal files, search (and edit) drivers license databases, edit social security files, you name it. For a long time I thought this was because characters in movies all use Macs, but Macs don’t have icons you can click on that automatically translate a video from Farsi into English. (I checked.) If you are the sort of person who believes that computers can do all that, and you have a kid in the house who you think is using the computer you don’t understand to download porn or chat on-line with kidnappers and child molesters, you probably want this. It’s a dongle that plugs into the USB port of your computer (PC only—read what you will into that). When the software is finished installing, you take the stick out. The computer is now set up to record everything—emails, websites visited, instant messages, the works. You can also then put the dongle into another computer and monitor the other in real time. You can set it up to restrict access to specific sites, and a bunch of other creepy stuff. If the people this was made for spent half as much time helping their kids with their homework as they will using the SnoopStick to read that same homework surreptitiously, they’d be better parents, and their kids would be better kids. The good news is that even though the SnoopStick is pretty simple to use, the sort of person most likely to use it is probably bewildered by the DVD remote, and will be completely flummoxed by the abbreviations their kids use when they are IMing. Since they aren’t going to ask their kid to install it for them, the market for this is probably pretty limited. Except for maybe the use against spouses and SO’s. About $70. www.snoopstick.com.
 |
Let’s switch over to something a little less likely to result in disownment or divorce, although maybe only slightly: painting efficiency. I’ve always wondered about power sprayers. They seem quite qualified for the job if what you want to do is coordinate your arms and legs with the color of the room. But after watching—and listening to—my husband brush four coats of paint on the most recent of outdoor items in need of restoration, I’m thinking that maybe sprayers are not just for the Blue Man Group anymore. Taking the time to cover everything within a quarter-mile radius in newspaper and masking tape, while waiting for a sunny day without a hint of wind may be a quality investment. Besides, with every spray advertisement, there is always a photo of a rickety Adirondack chair that becomes instantly sliver-free with the use of the spray container alone. No scraping and sanding required. While everyone else this summer maims themselves with yard work, searches the internet for porn, and burns themselves silly over a cat-loving, fish-smelling BBQ grill, paint up a chair and chill. About $75, Sears.
Back to the Table of Contents
Back to Top