PhoneTray

A shareware application we’d unquestionably have written if someone hadn’t written it first, PhoneTray by traysoft.com is diabolically useful. Connected to a suitable modem which has been plugged into a phone line that has caller ID enabled, PhoneTray will watch for calls with your choice of identifying numbers. It will log the calls, optionally pop up a window telling you who’s calling and more to the point, it will automatically hang up on the ones you don’t want to answer.

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Bushnell BackTrack

While it might appear to be a GPS device intended for use by people who never successfully managed to program the clocks on their VCRs back in the day, the BackTrack is actually just very clever and very simple to use. It maintains its impressive simplicity by only doing one thing, albeit very well.

Turn on the BackTrack and have it memorize your current location. Go somewhere else. The BackTrack will tell you in which direction to proceed to get to where you were, and how far you are away from your destination.

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Belkin Flip USB KVM Switch

A simple device with a pedestrian function, the Belkin Flip is noteworthy because it works reliably where so many lesser — and albeit cheaper — devices fail, break or emit blue smoke. The Flip is a KVM switch — it will allow you to connect two computers to a single monitor, keyboard, mouse and speaker set, and flip instantly between them.
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Ford F150 XLT 2009 Pickup Truck

Ford makes the best pickup trucks in the known universe, and this is easily the best one they’ve ever built. More fun to drive than is probably legal in some jurisdictions, brilliantly thought-out, ruggedly constructed and enjoyable to look at, it’s enough to make one believe that all the bad press automobile manufacturers have been receiving of late was entirely the work of some inveterate journalists and a large bag of mushrooms.
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The Duchess of Duke Street

Another potsherd unearthed in an ongoing quest for something to watch from the past – the present apparently having largely forgotten how to make decent video for the most part – The Duchess of Duke Street is a 31-episode British drama and occasional soap opera. It chronicles the life of Louisa Trotter, a fictionalized shade of one Rosa Lewis, who ran the Cavendish Hotel in Edwardian London. This one sold an awful lot of coffee mugs and tote bags for PBS back in the day.
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Midsomer Murders

As imported British television series go, this is one of the best – and perhaps better still, with eleven seasons and counting available on DVD in the colonies, it’s good for months of nights when there’s nothing on the tube… or on the telly. Set in an imaginary English rural county – wherein someone is always bumping a few of the locals off in particularly sinister and mysterious circumstances – it chronicles the sleuthing of Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby and his several sidekicks as they try to out-think the mad old ladies, deranged attorneys, homicidal undertakers and malevolent tenant farmers who spring up like lethal prize vegetables in each episode.
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Stargate Continuum

Easily the Stargate episode of the gods – real gods, false gods, dead false gods or whatever other sorts of gods you feel like talking to – Continuum qualifies as some of the best science fiction ever devised. While its central premise of time travel and the paradoxes which would arise from such an enterprise will be familiar to anyone who’s watched the television series, it has bags of plot twists, several engaging sub-plots, a cast of actors who have totally surrounded their characters and a real nuclear submarine – apparently the US military loaned the production company a sub just ‘coz they liked the shows.
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Cub Cadet CC2125 String Trimmer

Gasoline string trimmers are noisy, nasty and certain to bring upon their owners the wrath and approbation of every eco-weenie within a three-mile radius. This having been said, if you’re confronted with several acres of yard to attend to, something powered by batteries or a long extension cord will arguably prove about as effective as nail clippers.
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Amati 351 C Clarinet

Clarinets have been deprived of all vestiges of coolness by recent history. A perennial favorite of band teachers on two continents, they’re well and truly loathed by most kids who reach the age of fourteen with two working lips. This is decidedly unfortunate – with a dark, liquid sound and a range of tonalities, clarinets are a unique voice, as long as it’s not obvious what’s making the sounds.
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Hunter Classic Ceiling Fan

The secret dread of interior designers, the stuff of nightmares for electricians and that which is better than cold beer on a hot, sweaty afternoon, ceiling fans might well be installed in every room on earth if they didn’t make so much noise. Unfortunately, stamped out of thin steel and assembled with a few ill-fitting sheet-metal screws, they’re usually audible over a force-nine gale.
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John Deere CS40LE Pro-Series Chain Saw

Made as it is in Italy, we quickly came to regard this as the Ferrari of chain saws – it’s beautifully engineered and a pleasure to use… but a bitch to start at times.

While not a manufacturer immediately associated with chain saws, John Deere actually makes some really nice ones. Perhaps more to the point, John Deere will service its products for decades after they’re purchased, whereas parts for lesser saws can be effectively unobtainable a few years after you beat up your credit card for one.
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Dell Inspiron 910

Having dragged a full-size laptop through several airports – and had it eyed suspiciously by customs agents on two continents – very small, very light laptops couldn’t have happened soon enough. Referred to as netbooks, ultraportables and toys, depending upon who you bump into, the latest generation of diminutive computers redefine portability.
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Epiphone Viola Bass

Hollow-body electric basses have a vibe all their own – they sound like a fusion of a conventional solid-body bass and an upright jazz bass, without the inconvenience of dragging a six-foot fiddle around. They also look cool.
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Casio MTG1000G-9A G-Shock Watch

My favorite watch is an ancient automatic chronometer that’s been through the fires of chaos and back. It doesn’t keep particularly good time, it requires an annual cleaning and if I neglect to wear it for a few days, it will wind down and stop – but it’s immensely cool, and immense coolness makes up for a lot.

The MTG1000G-9A G-Shock watch is a close second in the running for my favorite watch. While it lacks the distressed appearance and faint ticking of my mechanical chronometer, it does address a number of the limitations of mechanical watches with some truly brilliant technology.
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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on Blu-Ray

A weird little film that seems to have enjoyed a working theatrical release of about a week, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a treasure on disc… ‘specially on high definition disc.

With its color palette manipulated to look like the cover of a 1950s science fiction pulp novel – and its sets and characters contrived to match – Sky Captain is an hour and a half in an alternate universe, or perhaps an evening of the kind of science fiction we all read as kids. While just hugely enjoyable to look at, it has a well-wrought, cogent story and credible actors to tell it.
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Cloverfield

A conceptually clever little film, Cloverfield suffers badly at the hands of its central conceit, and ultimately manages to be little more than annoying. It’s an Americanized Japanese monster movie in which a multi-story creature attacks Manhattan. The clever bit is that it’s ostensibly filmed by one of the victims, using a camcorder – admittedly, a miraculous camcorder with a one-terabyte SD card and an invisible 80 amp-hour truck battery to keep it running for the duration of the adventure. Regrettably, the camcorder in question appears to have been selective of its miracles – it omits image stabilization. Watching 84 minutes of shaky video as the largely unseen narrator runs away from monsters will make even the most robust of sailors terminally seasick.
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Sunshine

To it’s credit, Sunshine is a genuine science fiction film that’s not based on a video game, a rare and wondrous event in the new millennium. Sadly, its science is a bit thin and it’s not very good fiction. A spaceship full of astronauts with serious issues is en route to nuke the dying sun, in the hopes of restarting it. Yes, I know, the sun’s still got another four or five billion years left on its clock… you need to ignore that bit.

Still, you’d think that NASA could have found eight people with fewer brain problems to save the world.
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Hawking Technology HWUG1 2.4 Gigahertz USB WiFi Adapter

The really cool aspect of this device is that it works – there being so many of them that don’t. A USB WiFi adapter will add wireless connectivity to pretty much anything with a USB port… at least, in theory… but getting many of them to do so is an exercise in creative head bashing. The HWUG1 plugs in and gets ready to rock with hardly a whisper, and no damage to anyone’s skull.
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Dell Vostro 200 Computer

We were certain that “vostro” must have some significance other than the obvious – “vostro” is the Latin word for “yours.” It turns out that this is not the case – it’s really meant as the Latin word for “yours.” This seems a bit superfluous, as once you’ve handed over four hundred dollars for one of these things, it’s unlikely to be anyone else’s unless you forget to lock your office.

We’ve used Dell computers almost exclusively for well over a decade, and every one of them is either still working or got trashed due to unrepentant antiquity. None of them has ever blown up, caught fire or even refused to boot up one morning.
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Line 6 Tone Port UX2

This thing is so cool I’d almost have bought one just to keep it as a desk ornament. This having been said, the Line 6 Tone Port does what it says on the box to a degree just this side of godlike. If you need the functionally described on its box – to wit, a high-end recording interface for a computer – this is the bit of plastic to spring for.
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