Craftster publishes a how-to, penned by someone by the name of "Fluffypants."

Duck Hunt zapper lamp [Craftster via ShinyShiny]

The Octocube radiator is a sculptural concept heater by Vivien Muller that would probably be pretty good at heating up a cold room, given all that surface area. But I can't help but think that with a thin slathering of translucent gelatin and some Pollackesque splatters of red paint, I'd have a lovely Spam-like cube of quivering cerebellum heating my living room.

Octocube [Vivien Muller via Gizmodo via Yanko]

I don't quite understand my particular fascination with toasters — I rarely eat toast — especially since I'm comfortably of the school that specialized gadgets have no place in a proper kitchen. Still I haul my Back-to-Basics toaster from under the counter from time to time, hoping the collected dust and hairballs on the unused egg poaching tray won't make their way into my bagel, trying desperately to forget that brief three-day honeymoon when I scarfed down Egg McMuffin clones.

So let's ignore that the Breville iKon toaster has a built-in coffee kettle (a percolator, I believe) and instead focus on the welcome addition of its "A Bit More" button which pulls your bread back down for a final round of browning, obviating the need for that annoying "wait for the coils to cool but not too much" routine.

Like most combo kitchen devices, this one costs more than the two items it would be replacing. It's $130.

Product Page [Breville.com.au via Like Cool via Oh Gizmo]

The BBQ Sword is for the cook out cavalier who wishes to roast his wiener in Zorro-like anonymity. For £14.95, it even comes with an identity-obfuscating face mask, although for full effect you will need to bring your own pink satin cape and matching banana hammock... at least at the sort of cookouts I regularly and enthusiastically attend, where everyone's already wearing face masks anyway.

BBQ Sword [Firebox]

These tiny robot vacuums — suctioning servos juiced by the miniature power bank cluster of a pair of AA batteries — are very clearly not going to go head-to-head with a Roomba, despite their adorable pincer arms lifted above their heads in a display of preemptive triumph. Still, at $14.99 each, you could unleash a whole swarm of the miniature vacuuming robots upon the filth of your apartment for the price of a Roomba. Boing Boing Gadgets will continue to appraise you of easy and affordable robot overlord opportunities as they develop.

Robot Vacuums [Perpetual Kid]

Introducing Nojae Park's yoghurt-pot spoon: simple genius of the kind that gets chair-bound gadget bloggers excited, but which has probably been available from all good dollar stores since 1977.

... and no sooner than I write the above paragraph, the following presents itself, via Yanko Design commenter Luke:

The date? 1962. My retrometer is off 15 years.

Good to the last drop [Yanko Design]
Kraft jar spoon [Achille Castiglioni]

Etsy craftsman l337motif uses "pixels" of walnut and hard maple to create wooden cutting board with vintage gaming motifs for $125 each. The Legend of Zelda Tri-Force Cutting Board is the only one currently available, and as gaming references in your kitchenware are concerned, it's pretty subtle. But his Space Invaders cutting board is more overtly imbued with geek cred and — I think — far more aesthetically pleasing. Plus, you can plausibly deny that it is gaming related. If anyone asks, just tell everyone that the design on your new cutting board is a macroscopic view of one of the virulent bacterium dwelling in its wooden gouges.

l337motif's gaming cutting boards [Etsy]

Food writer Michael Ruhlman's list of essential kitchen gadgets are what you'd expect from a guy who wrote a book called The Elements of Cooking — no garlic massagers or bacon wafters here.

From right to left, big knife and little knife, rubber spatula, wood spoon with flat edge, fish spatula, microplane, instant read thermometer, Sharpie, sauce whip, string, fine mesh strainer, two spoons, measuring spoons, peeler, heavy side towel for grabbing hot things, and, the most important tool in the kitchen, kosher salt.

He neglects to mention the porcelain ramekin that's holding the salt, which is funny because I didn't start grabbing those until Ruhlman actually suggested using them in Elements. I'm not religious about using them for mis en place — a little bowl works fine, too — but being able to toss them in water or an oven can be handy.

It's worth checking out the whole post just for the yapping in the comments, where foodies go on about their essential tools like we nerds bicker about text editors.

My Favorite Kitchen "Gadgets" [Blog.Ruhlman.com]

Purported to weigh contents to an accuracy of one tenth of a gram, Pro•Idee's Spoon Scales are recommended for "Saffron, truffles, fine balsamic vinegar and crack."

At £18.50, it'll be the most expensive spoon you've ever bought, too. It's capable of measuring up to 300 grams (10.5 oz), according to the product page, but there's no word on whether it's dishwasher safe. I should think not, but I'd like someone to try and then complain anyway, so that we may mock them.

Spoon With Built-In Scale Is A Great Gift For Your Local Drug Dealer [Gearfuse]

It is a microwave. Press a button, and a flap opens to reveal a concealed toaster. Shriek with glee and clap your hands, it's a convergence device that sounds like it might actually been worth the trouble of converging!

Appliances have an advantage over high-tech gadgets, see, in that the technology behind them is generally a settled matter. The performance characteristics of toasters do not follow Moore's law, or anything like it. On the other hand, the other traditional flaw of convergence remains true: sooner or later, one of the components will break, spoiling the experience of the whole thing.

LG's LTM9000 is also a bit of a lightweight: only 900 watts in the oven and 800 watts for the toaster. At $140, it's not outrageously expensive, but much moreso than just buying a toaster and a microwave.

Product Page [via Oh Gizmo and Core77]

Sekai-Kaden's Vitantonia boiler cooks up to seven of 'em on demand, producing soft-boiled eggs in 10 minutes or hard-boiled oned in 15. It even comes with an insert to make three poached eggs, though the ~$50 price tag is a little disconcerting.

Lovely design, though, and a sturdy look. If anyone spots local availability anywhere, drop us a line so that we may give it a whirl.

Product Page [Sekai Kaden via TokyoMango and PC Watch]

In-sink garbage disposal, as it stands, lacks elegance. One is cheffing around like a pro, then ... Wuuuooooorrrrrkkkjkjkjkjkjkjkssssshshhhhhh! So declassé!

Designer Anne Kitzmiller gives the humble appliance some modernist love, offering a custom-designed sink that uses "active touch" to ensure style and safety.

It even has an automatic, urinal-style waterfall to slosh away those potato skins. Kohler (who else?) will sell them.

Prep Cook’s Dream [Yanko Design]

'Bed Fan' clips on to the end of your mattress to blow cool air — or in my case clouds of dog hair — from under your bed into your sheets. One might ask, "Why not just ditch the sheet entirely if you're so warm?" As a bit of a persnickety sleeper myself, especially as an exothermic heat emitter of the first order, let me explain: it's nice to have a sheet around you even if you're warm because it helps wick away sweat while still protecting you from bugbears and wumpuses.

The whole rig is $100 and is probably pointless, even though I sort of want one. (I can just imagine bringing a girl home and then trying to explain why there was a giant black plastic contraption with its head under the sheets. Then I'd ask her to sand my corns while we watched Hee-Haw.)

Catalog Page [FirstStreetOnline.com via Crunchgear via Red Ferret]

I'm a bit of a sucker for bird feeders, weathering the clouds of doves while attempting to spot the occasional song bird or Monk parakeet. (I really hope bird droppings make good fertilizer, because the houseplants are about to be moved out on the deck directly underneath my feeder from TerraCycle.)

I also happen to be sweet on flat-pack products for even less of a good reason. I suppose they scratch the same itch as Ikea furniture and Chinese takeout boxes. It's neat to see what can be designed given the restriction, even if the one thing we have in amply supply in the States is shelf space.

So! Will I buy this "Architect's Birdfeeder," made of eight interlocking pieces of flat-pack acrylic? No, because I already have a bird feeder. (Two actually.) But it's only $25 and is oh so modern. You'll be attracting Scandinavian birds by the dussin.

Product Page [ArchitectsBirdfeeders.com] (Thanks, Brian!)

My friend Harry Sawyers is out at the Kitchen/Bath Industry Show and spotted this 'Balance' tub built by Estonian makers NeoQi. It's got everything but the bacta:

You've got both steam and infrared sauna heat, a couple dozen jets pulsing out the hydromassage, therapies both aroma- and chroma-, and an mp3 player to help you get into that Deep Purple groove that's so popular these days. The best feature of all is the DeLorean door than closes down on you, coffin-like, with a little hole for your head. This creates an "energy cocoon" to make you "feel good...fight stress, and loose (sic) your weight."

I love a good soak with a book, but I'd gladly toss out the book for a direct information beam to my skull.

THE TUB THAT'S BETTER THAN DRUGS [KBIS Live]

Who would spend $7 to buy an egg-cracking gadget (other than people with a disability that prevented them from cracking eggs by hand)?

However, when combined with the much-more-awesome but equally-useless Ronco Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler ($19.95), making breakfast could become as fun as a game of Mousetrap. Link

Blake Royer bought a plastic mandoline with a ceramic blade made by Kyocera for just $25 and found it just as good as more expensive steel models.

Never mind that a cell phone company makes it; this thing works. And it makes me look like a fast, skilled cook, especially with winter salad recipes like this one. Making the dressing, which involves dumping everything into a jar and shaking like mad, is the labor-intensive part. Otherwise, I just lazily slide my vegetables over the mandoline's ceramic blade, resulting in beautiful, paper-thin, uniform slices. I toss, serve, and accept the compliments.

Dinner Tonight: Fennel, Arugula and Green Apple Salad [Serious Eats]

Designer Nobuhiko Arikawa has created a line of edible tableware for the Orto Cafe in Japan, baked from traditional sailor's hardtack—a simple dough of flour, water, and salt. The bowls and chopsticks are shelf-stable for several months as long as they are kept dry.

Edible tableware by Rice-Design [Dezeen]

Previously • Leaf Bowls of India [BBG]

This "Lungs" ashtray from designer Chi-Ja Ling would go great with my liver shot glasses. Sadly, it does not appear to be for sale. Guess I'll just keep my ashes and butts where I normally do: in my actual lungs.

Product Page [FindingCheska.com via Curbly via Core77]

We finally had a chance to put the Krups Heineken BeerTender through a battery of rigorous tests, such as "Will it allow beer to escape its nozzle?" and "Hey, the beer is gone." If you perused the unboxing spread I put up last week you can probably guess my eventual purchasing advice, but let's just say that $300 is a lot of money for a tiny refrigerator that can only serve Heineken.

Also, we didn't labor it in the video, but the little sensor that shows you how much beer is left in the proprietary DraftKeg? You know, one of the only things that the BeerTender adds over a regular refrigerator? Totally did not work on ours.

Some say a good beer doesn't need a slice of lemon or a wedge of lime. And perhaps they're right, but sometimes all that's available is bad beer that can use all the help it can get. The "Lime Bomber" is a plastic plunger that makes it simple to cram a bit of fruit into your bottle of wheat beer or your Mexican lager without getting a faceful of acid.

It's totally unnecessary for the home (I hope), but I could see a few people picking up the $13 Lime Bomber for use in their beach-side tiki bars.

Product Page [LimeBomber.com via Uncrate]

This is totally not a gadget, but it's been sitting in my feed reader for a couple of days and I keep revisiting it thinking about it in the context of reusing technology, so perhaps you'll find it quietly inspiring, as well. Brazilian/Israeli designer Joana Meroz takes old, cracked china, paints it with lovely gold-stemmed flowers, and reglazes the cups and plates to "celebrate their imperfections." She then sells them on her website as "Crackery Tableware."

Crackery Tableware [Cool Hunting]

Charles & Marie are taking pre-orders for the successor to their heat-sensitive "On/Off" mug—this one goes from "Cold" to "Hot" when you add something, you know, hot. Still very pricey at $25, but apparently they sold out of the last ones, so I may not know the going rate for a fancy mug.

They do say that this mug is dishwasher safe, which is good. (I had related my previous experience with heat-sensitive mugs being somewhat fragile in the wash.)

Catalog Page [CharlesAndMarie.com]

Previously • Heat-Sensitive ON/OFF Coffee Mug [BBG]

If ever I start complaining about what a rough job I have or how it's difficult to maintain a high output in the face of an onslaught of new products and the demands of a public job and dealing with PR pressure and blah blah blah...remind me of today. The day that a disinterested man pulled up his SUV to my front steps and unloaded—just for me—free beer.

Now granted, it's Heineken. And I sort of loathe Heineken. (They can brew better! I've had it!) But the point is this: 10 liters of free beer have been delivered to me; lo, to me this beer was delivered free.

So since I have to wait for the thing to cool down to actually drink the beer and the manual says that'll take several hours, you get a lovely set of photographs and initial, not-even-drunken commentary.

Kippis and l'chaim!

Here's how big the kegs are compared to a 12-ounce bottle of beer. The other keg is Heineken Light. I know—how could it get more light? I guess I'll find out when the first keg is finished.

Here is the top of the device. It is black like you know who and chrome like you know who's messiah robot counterpart.

I would call it attractive.

These are the plastic, disposable plugs that snap into the tops of the kegs. The other end is the spout. More on that soon, but basically, all that chrome is an illusion.

Here's the spout assembly open.

And here's the plastic plug laid in. Notice how the whole assembly is basically a ruse to make the disposable plastic bits seem fancy.

At the top, the two sensor readouts that make the BeerTender cost three-hundred dollars: a scale to determine how full the keg is (that has to be how they do it, since the keg doesn't actually hook up to anything and is pre-pressurized) and a temperature readout.

Finally, that attractive badge on the front of the tap? Just a vinyl sticker. (So you can replace it when you replace the beer with another variety besides Heineken, of course.)

I'll wait to pass final judgement until I actually use the thing—tomorrow, at least—but I'm almost certain I'll already give it a big, fat negatory on the whole buying thing. I mean, it's a refrigerator for god's sake. I'm getting ahead of myself!

Anyway, the point is: I should probably review this on camera and I should probably be very drunk.

It's not on sale yet, but "Choplery" will give diners at Asian take-out joints an easy choice between chopsticks and Western utensils. The only way these could be better is if they worked in reverse: starting with chopsticks, then fusing together into a fork when you've realized the error of your ways. (Remember, eaters, the best way to eat rice with chopsticks is to put the bowl to your mouth and to shovel it all in.)

Concept Page [DesignGoStudios.Blogspot.com via Josh Spear]

Unless you've stockpiled dozens of cases of Concord Grape Goober in your larder, you'll likely find the £1,400 "Robot Coupe" to be a bit more bread slicer than your average kitchen requires. Cram a rod of French bread in the Robot Coupe and you'll find up to 180 slices in the hamper in just a minute, provided you have a loaf that is at least 1.44 meters long—the Coupe can cut slices from 8mm to 80mm thickness. (Look at me with my big ol' calculator!)

The Oobject gallery (linked below) from which the slicer was pulled is full of over a dozen similar examples of industrial cooking machines, like a "small (read: not small) juicy meat bun maker" and a "generic fried snack food machine." They all make me wish my spring-loaded jaw were rated for a higher snack-per-second intake rate.

Catalog Page [Catering-Machines.com via Oh Gizmo via Oobject]

The "Laken ISO 70" water bottle's outside shell is made of aluminum, but its filled—partially, of course—with aerogel, that wonderfully lightweight and low density material that weighs just three times more than air. It's a great insulator, helping in making a water bottle that's half the weight of a traditional all-metal vacuum thermos.

The Laken ISO 70 aren't cheap, though, at 60 bucks a pop. But in a pinch you could crack one open and catch interstellar dust.

Product Page [Laken.es via Oh Gizmo]

The NatureMill PRO is an indoor composter that turns your food scraps into rich, healthy compost in just a couple of weeks. You can convert up to 120 pounds of food waste a month into compost producing only a mild smell "similar to sourdough, mushrooms, or damp straw." I'd presume that's mostly when the food bin is open, since a carbon filter cleans the air vented by the built-in fan. You could also use the unit outdoors.

Three models are available: the NatureMill plus for $300; the NatureMill PRO with a foot pedal bin lever and steel chassis for $400; and the "Pet-friendly" NatureMill which can accept pet waste in addition to food waste.

Of course you could ditch the electricity use entirely to build an at-home worm composting box. And a starter batch of worms costs just $10.

Product Page [NatureMill.com via Oh Gizmo]