Black Rock Cider Kit

Few activities are as rewarding as brewing your own drink. We’ve been making wine for years, and occasional batches of beer. Aside from tasting better than most of their commercial cousins, our home-brewed beverages get past some of the most extreme government cash grabs in the western world. Our pols have devised more layers of alcohol taxes than can be easily counted.

Home-brewed hard apple cider is a somewhat more elusive drink than either wine or beer. For some time, we got by with tinned apple juice and wine yeast, and the results were largely drinkable. This said, the process of commercial canning clearly upsets the sugar balance in apple juice, and getting the resulting brew to taste like proper cider was challenging.

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Zwilling 8-Inch Euroline Stainless Damascus Chef’s Knife

Bob Kramer has a cool day job. He makes knives, and then he makes big bucks selling them through his web page. He’s a master blade smith – not an honorary title – and he’s spent years learning how to make knives that stay sharp.

Making steel from which edged weapons are crafted – or edged kitchen implements, in this case – is an art that dates back several millennia. Discussions of serious knives usually get around to something referred to as Damascus steel… which is more or less what Bob Kramer and other master knife makers create. The “more or less” aspect of Damascus steel arises from few experts on the subject being able to agree exactly what it is, or exactly how it was made.

The original process of creating Damascus steel has been lost in the dust of ages, although a number of contemporary researchers and craftsmen claim to have rediscovered it.

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Moroso 89560 Tire Pressure Gauge

Keeping the tires of your vehicle correctly inflated will potentially save you some cash at your local gasso, save you still more cash when your tires last longer and possibly even save your life. Incorrectly-inflated tires don’t handle as well as they should, especially in the sorts of extreme conditions that contribute to highway fatality statistics, and they can fail catastrophically.

All this having been said, keeping the tires of your vehicle correctly inflated might prove a bit tricky if you attempt to do so using the inexpensive tire pressure gauges available from big-box retailers. Costing about ten dollars and banged out in their countless thousands in China, low-end pressure gauges are often shockingly inconsistent. Their readings can vary considerably, finding themselves perturbed by temperature, pressure and even the number of times they’ve been used.

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Sangean DAR-101 Digital Audio Recorder

If a machine this sophisticated had been built back when tape recorders had actually involved tape, it would have weighed about as much as a refrigerator, and been almost as large. Despite it’s diminutive size and unthreatening price, it’s a remarkably capable recording device. However, beyond its laudable technical specifications, it has been designed with an admirable degree of forethought and prescience, to allow it to record all manner of things.

As nearly as I could determine, Sangean spends most of its time building sophisticated radios. The Sangean DAR-101 appears to have been created to record radio transmissions. This is hardly it’s best trick, however.

If it talks, sings, beeps, squawks, barks, plays, enunciates or howls at the moon, this recorder will listen to it, digitize it and store it in flawless, easily-accessed digital audio files. More to the point, it will do so using an intuitive tape recorder-like interface that could be easily mastered by three out of four bricks, and some liberal politicians.

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Bunn MyCafé MCU Single Serve Coffee Brewer

The technology for brewing coffee seems at times equal to that of placing people on other worlds, or at the very least of letting them pretend to be there… with convincing 3D graphics and surround-sound. A kettle full of hot water and some ground-up beans doesn’t begin to cut it.

Single-serving pod-based coffee makers offer a number of salient advantages to more traditional coffee-tech – bereft of simmering vats of antediluvian brew, they promise a fresh cup every time someone stabs the Start button. They also allow every cup of coffee to be of a unique blend, for those coffee illuminatae who can really taste the difference. Finally, entirely lapsing into somnolence between sessions, they can save a lot of watts by not keeping anything hot while they’re idle.

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Fender Champ X2 Combo Amplifier

Buying a Fender Champ X2 amplifier feels somewhat like buying a really nice BMW, and subsequently discovering that a hitherto unnoticed button on the dashboard activates a faster-than-light engine and a time-travel device. It’s a fabulous little amp, but you won’t believe what else it knows how to do.

I confess to a degree of nostalgia for Fender Champ amplifiers. Most of the earlier Champs of my experience were bought second-hand – they were held together with duct tape and random wood screws, and they sounded like the ocean. The Fender Champ X2 shares little of the questionable apprehensions of its ancestors.

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Rosewill Six Outlet Individually Switched Power Strip RPS-200

It’s monumentally difficult to get excited over a power strip. For the most part, they only ever do two things, to wit, provide power to whatever is plugged into them or emit blue smoke and subsequently catch fire if you bought one of the really cheap ones.

The Rosewill RPS-200 power strip is noteworthy in that it addresses a frequently-encountered power management issue… and it actually exists, which was distinctly surprising.

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Korg TMR-50 Tuner Metronome and Recorder

Very likely the coolest music accessory of the decade, the Korg TMR-50 is a combination digital tuner, digital recorder and a configurable metronome. Perhaps more to the point, it’s a masterwork of convenience, with each of its functions flawlessly executed and intuitively crafted to make the whole works an extension of your fingers.

Nothing the TMR-50 does could be considered new or remarkable, but it does it all so well.

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Garmin Montana 600 GPS

A great GPS receiver means never having to ask for directions. It also means never having to try to understand directions being provided by an old guy with three teeth, a propensity to lapse into Norwegian and breath that could stun a warthog. A great GPS receiver is worth whatever it costs for these reasons alone.

The definition of “great” in this context can be somewhat elusive. If you shop the sales assiduously enough, a hundred dollars will buy you a GPS receiver that will show you maps, tell you when to turn and locate the nearest gas station, shopping center… and probably a few handy brothels, should you choose a system that originated in one of the more uninhibited countries of Europe.

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Rikon 70-100 Mini Lathe

This machine could have manufactured parts for the space shuttle. Admittedly, they would have been for the all-wood space shuttle, rather than the more traditional titanium and aluminum space shuttles that got most of the media attention. None the less, the Rikon 70-100 mini lathe is just that cool.

A full-size lathe is a useful and engaging shop tool, as long as you have a full-size shop and a full-size credit limit that you don’t mind maxing out. Big lathes can get well into four figures for a respectable one.

Upon consideration, you might decide that the most notable applications of a full-size lathe – that would be making really big fruit bowls and baseball bats – don’t turn up in your woodworking efforts all that often. For many users of spinning wood technologies, a full-size lathe is overkill… and overspending.

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Ripper Street

Easily one of the best boxes of television to appear this century, Ripper Street will tear your remote from your fingers, shock your flat-screen clear off your wall and explode your cat. This is the sort of BBC import that PBS wouldn’t touch with a hazmat suit.

Set in the Whitechapel district of London in 1889, Ripper Street follows singularly embittered Detective Inspector Edmund Reid as he deals with the whores, derelicts, madmen, evil venture capitalists, corrupt civil servants… and at least one legendary elusive serial killer… who haunt the east end of London. Dis is da reawy grotty bit o’ the city, wot ‘as bodies everywhere. Y’d fink it were a bleedin’ war zone.

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Böhm Stirling Engine HB11

Robert Stirling was a nineteenth-century Scottish inventor. In 1816, he created a closed-cycle air-driven engine as a putative replacement for the ubiquitous steam engines of the period. Steam engines, while cool to look at if you’re sufficiently removed from the devices themselves, are large, heavy, dangerous, maintenance-intensive and tricky to keep running.

Stirling’s engine is a masterwork of sneakiness, and you have to wonder how anyone could have imagined that something like this could possibly work. A classic “alpha” Stirling engine has two cylinders. The end of one cylinder is heated, causing the air inside it to expand. The expanding air pushes a piston along the cylinder, which turns a flywheel. The flywheel pushes the piston in the second cylinder to compress the air behind it. The cold air flows into the first cylinder, where it’s heated, and the cycle starts over.

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TP-Link TD-8816 ADSL2+ Modem and TD-8840T ADSL2+ Modem (with Router)

These things may be the nicest DSL modems in the known universe. Paradoxically, they’re also among the least expensive. Plug one in, connect it to the Internet and within five minutes you’ll have entirely forgotten that it exists. One can ask for little more from a telecommunication device.

As nearly as we’ve been able to tell, the TP-Link TD-8816 DSL modem and the TP-Link TD-8840T DSL modem with router are technically identical, save that the former provides a single RJ45 Ethernet connector to communicate with your computer, and the latter provides four. The built-in router in the TD-8840T to drive the four Ethernet connectors allows it to interface to additional devices without the use of an external Ethernet switch.

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Teksavvy DSL Internet for Ontario

High speed Internet in Canada is a warped reflection of most of the governments in this country – it’s expensive, oftentimes broken and usually impossible to contact by telephone. That the latter has set up the rules for the former will surprise almost no one.

Residential DSL Internet access employs a conventional telephone line to connect your computer to the ‘net, and it will more or less allow said phone line to be used for conventional voice phone calls while it’s doing so. DSL is always on, and it’s usually quick enough for almost anything you’d like to access over the Internet, including streaming video and interactive games.

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Zotac ZBOXSD-ID12-U

The device to your right is a desktop computer. No foolin…

Perhaps more to the point, it’s a very nice desktop computer, with some truly unexpected features. It’s also a very small desktop computer. While the photograph here doesn’t provide much of a sense of scale, the Zotac ZBOXSD-ID12-U towers all of eight inches high, and it could easily be mistaken for a game console or an external hard drive.

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Gibson Baritone Les Paul Studio Guitar

This is one of the coolest guitars I’ve ever played… but if you decide you want one too, you’ll probably have to firewalk an even greater distance over still more incandescent coals than I did.

Several yeas ago, I came upon a Taylor Baritone GS acoustic guitar, which remains a singular instrument. Tuned a fourth below a conventional guitar, it’s dark, powerful and brooding. After playing it for a while, I began to think that an electric counterpart would be a useful voice.

Nothing rocks quite like a Les Paul – elegantly understated, fluid and expressive, the known universe’s first electric guitar remains my decided favorite. I was delighted to learn that a baritone Les Paul did indeed exist. At least, it used to.

In fact, there were two of them.

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Netgear WN3000RP Universal WiFi Range Extender

As we’ve added more WiFi devices to our in-house wireless network, and their habitat has sprawled beyond the building and occasionally into the forest that surrounds us, the range of our original router… impressive though it was when we bought the beast… has begun to prove inadequate.

Honesty bids me say that our selection of the Netgear WN3000RP WiFi range extender was not the result of our usual exhaustive research – there was a pile of them at the local WalMart one Sunday afternoon, and ours was something of an impulse purchase in the faint hope that it would forestall a lot of serious head-scratching and fishing of Ethernet cables to subdue our increasingly fractious network.

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Line 6 POD Farm UX2

Several years ago, when the world was a simpler place and the word “crisis” didn’t always immediately follow the word “monetary” in newspaper copy, we bought a Line 6 TonePort UX2 digital guitar interface, and we immediately found it to be the coolest plastic box with a USB interface yet devised. Positioned betwixt an electric guitar and a computer… substitute a microphone or any other instrument with a pickup if you like… it rendered faithful high-quality digital audio to the latter, allowing said computer to become the twenty-first century equivalent of a room full of audio consoles and a big reel-to-reel tape recorder.

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Dewalt DC390B Cordless Circular Saw

There’s nothing so preposterous as having to transport a fifty pound generator with which to power a five pound electric saw. Trying to operate a traditional corded electric saw at the end of a few hundred feet of extension cord isn’t much of an improvement – power tools draw a significant amount of current, and line loss is rarely their friend.

Despite a laudable degree of civilization and some impressive technology that would have seen our recent ancestors accusing many contemporary tradesmen of witchcraft, sometimes you just need to cut wood in places without plugs.

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Danger Man DVD Box Set

Without question among the coolest ancient British television series to rise from the mists of antiquity on DVD, Danger Man successfully evinces the stealth, treachery and engaging sneakiness of the cold war by virtue of having been filmed during the height of it. The “big blue box of spies,” as the set has come to be known in these latitudes, is a well-oiled time machine set to 1961.

Danger Man was originally broadcast as Secret Agent in the United States, and as John Drake in other parts of the world.

The terse, shadowy episodes of Danger Man – all but the final two of which are filmed in stark black and white – follow the adventures of John Drake, a secret agent working for the good guys. The nature of his employers shifts somewhat over time – his wages are paid by NATO in the first season, and thereafter by M9, a fictional shade of MI6, the British intelligence agency.

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