Handpresso Espresso Machine

If you’re into coffee, and I mean a serious caffeine addict and brew connoisseur, rather than somebody that partakes in the occasional tipple then the Handpresso Wild Instant Espresso machine is an excellent and potentially life saving device costing just £80 at IWOOT and using standard sized Espresso coffee pouches.

The convenient little device requires hand pumping, hot water, and your coffee pouch and that’s it. Once you’ve added the necessaries, which is an incredibly simple step, then you can pour your cup of Espresso and get drinking. It really is a good looking little gadget, too, even if it does look like a modern peace pipe or something from a really dodgy car boot sale.

Of course, the other advantage of the hand pumping, which is achievable by even the most feeble wristed of us all, is that you don’t need batteries, it doesn’t plug in, you’re not draining the world’s resources of soon to be depleted energy stocks, etc… and so on.

If you like your coffee fresh and you have a penchant for the Espresso flavour and kick then the Handpresso machine is great, and there is a forthcoming release of many accessories and related items to make the experience even more positive.

GPS For Motorbikes

The TomTom Rider is a satellite navigation system designed especially for the biker. It features, large glove friendly buttons, an ultra clear display that is visible in any lighting conditions, and a little windscreen wiper type implement for removing dead flies and other assorted motorbiking debris from the monitor.

The screen is an impressive 3.5” touch screen and the software has been altered from the usual TomTom fare so that menus are less fiddly and the on screen display buttons are significantly larger and much easier for gloved hands to press without sending yourself on a wild goose chase in the wrong direction.

To set everybody’s minds at ease about the safety of riding motorbikes in general, the TomTom Rider, which is now in its second generation, also includes a Help Me menu feature. This convenient menu enables quick access to emergency services and roadside assistance and you can also plan the itinerary for your trip and log all of the statistics and data about your journey.

The included rechargeable battery will last for about 5 hours on a single charge and it can be recharged using a motorbike battery (which is a good thing, really, when you think about it).

Olympics Shown on Freesat Via BBC HD

Despite its extremely lacklustre entry into the market, Freesat is coming on in leaps and bounds and it has quite a bit going for it already. After all, it’s a digital freeview service that also offers free high definition content; albeit in fairly limited supply. Well, following the news that Sky was going to be offering their customers HD footage of the olympics, Freesat has followed suit.

The footage will be made available courtesy of BBC HD, as you might have guessed, and will offer viewers free and unrestricted access to more than 300 hours of Olympic footage from the Beijing Olympics. The Olympics open on the 8th of the month so you’ve got yourself but a couple of days to rush out and buy yourself an HD ready TV and a Freesat dish and box.

Unfortunately, while this a great addition to an already expanding portfolio of HD content there’s still no sign of a Freesat box that includes PVR recording capabilities. Anything that enables you to pause Live TV while you make a brew or shut the dog up is good news and it’s possible that a lot more subscribers would be more inclined to get on board if there were a greater range of associated products.

Fujitsu Siemens Amilio Li 2727

As far as budget laptops go you shouldn’t expect to get too much for your money. However, for less than £300 you can pick up the Fujitsu Siemens Amilio Li 2727 which offers a good level of functionality and decent specification for a laptop of this price. It uses a reasonable Core Duo processor with a reasonable amount of hard drive space although the onboard graphics means you won’t be able to run the latest or most graphics intensive games.

The processor is a 1.73GHz Core 2 Duo processor which is one of the better choices at this kind of budget. The 120GB of hard drive is also respectable for laptops that cost a little more so it shouldn’t be frowned at. It does, however, offer an unimpressive 1GB of RAM and the onboard graphics will enable you to do most things except play games.

The monitor is a 15.4” widescreen monitor and like many of the features helps to make the Fujtisu Siemens Amilio Li 2727 a decent buy for the money, especially if you want it for school, work, or as a basic multimedia unit. The graphics capabilities don’t inspire but it does only attract a £300 price tag.

The Laser Guided Pool Cue

You know that if you need one of these when you’re playing pool at your local that you should just give up the game altogether because you clearly can’t cut it. The laser guided pool cue is for those that take things way too seriously and has a touch sensor that enables you to quickly turn the tiny laser out and its range will easily cross the length of a full size snooker table. You really can’t blame the spin on the white when you use the laser guided pool cue because you will hit the sweet spot every time.

It’s the equivalent of about £40 and it has a bag that lets everybody know you’re crap enough to have to use a laser guided cue but it also comes with a fine assortment of accessories including six 1.5V batteries (the cue takes three of these) as well as tip scuffers, chalk, and ferrules. Considering the price of a bog standard laserless pool cue that really isn’t bad.

In the picture it looks a lot like you should take it fishing rather than carry it into the pub.

Dark Knight Brilliant According To Politicians

In my eyes, nothing makes a film more appealing than it getting berated for having an inaccurate certification. Black Knight, the latest Batman movie, is the most recent film to undergo these perils. The film has been rated a 12A which means that anybody can go watch it but that children under the age of twelve should be accompanied by an adult.

However, politicians Ian Duncan Smith and Keith Vaz believe that the 12A rating is not enough because of the graphic realism that is present in Dark Knight, unlike previous Batman films. Such is the current trend with this type of film, Dark Knight is a much grainier and perhaps realistic incarnation of the film.

Smith, who took his 15 year old daughter to the film described Heath Ledger’s Joker as being “a brilliantly acted but very credible psychopathic killer, who extols the use of knives to kill and disfigure his victims during a reign of urban terrorism laced with torture.” – So I think it’s reasonable to assume that I’ll be heading off to see that then. “Brilliantly acted but very credible” seems like an odd statement too.

The film is doing well in terms of complaint ranking, bagging an impressive 82 so far although it still has a little way to go before it reaches Casino Royale’s magic 100 figure. We also thought we’d use this post to try out some tabloid title writing techniques.

Kingston DataTraveler Mini Slim Flash Drive

Kingston has certainly been batting out the PC storage devices lately and have a seriously extensive range of flash drives, portable hard drives, and stone tablets (probably). The DataTraveler Mini Slim is not only vying to be the flash drive that incorporates the most variants of the word small as possible, but it’s actually living up (or down) to its name.

Roughly one and a half inches long, they are minute and you’ll have to be careful not to lose it in the USB plug on your computer never mind in your pocket. They’re available in 2GB and 4GB models for around £5 and £8 respectively. Colour choices are pink, blue, and black

It can’t feasibly be possible to make flash drives very much smaller than this, although I know that marginally smaller devices do exist, because if they were any smaller they would be useless. If you’re into modding everything you ever put near your PC then you’re pretty much guaranteed to be able to slip this into any object and make your very own unique USB flash drive.

With up to 4GB of storage and surprisingly good prices, though, they do represent excellent value even without making them into a fish finger styled USB drive. They’re also a great way for Kingston to make money as people will undoubtedly need replacements regularly.

Yamaha Hybrid Bicycle

As soon as you write a piece on electric motorbikes and how there’s so very few of them available, especially from the big motorbike manufacturers, you should expect to read something within a few days that completely trumps that post. And so, on to the Yamaha PAS Brace hybrid bicycle – OK, so it’s not an electric motorbike but is in fact a modern take on the electric assisted push bike and very modern it is.

The hybrid system intelligently works out when it can be used to optimum advantage and will operate at any one of the eight gears that it features, apparently providing a sporty ride for owners. The majority of the assistance comes at low speed when we need to expend more energy, it then begins to lower at moderate speeds, and switches off at high speeds.

The hybrid bike from Yamaha Motors is due for release in Japan in just a couple of day’s time (8th August to be exact) with 2,500 of them initially going on sale. The price tag is the equivalent of about £600 and presumably if sales go as well as hoped it might (and I stress, might) be available elsewhere.

Intelligent Solar Powered Street Lights

Welsh inventor Ross Lovegrove recently created the solar street lamp that resembled a kid’s cartoon of a tree and several of them were unveiled in Vienna where they apparently went down a real hit. As a result, Ross is now working on an updated version of the solar street lights that will this time include several intelligent and adaptive features that should improve their use, prevent them from being damaged and, frankly, scare the crap out of people.

The branches of the tree will follow the sun, avoiding shadows, and resting in the brightest area they can in order to increase the amount of solar energy they are able to harness. They will also bunch up when it’s windy, making them less of a health risk in high winds, and they will then return to their full branched glory at night when they’re needed to do something quite radical like provide light.

Perhaps even more bizarrely, it is also the vision of Lovegrove to include air purification into the street lights so that they effectively purify the air around them in much the same way as a real tree does. Awesome idea, but I’m not sure how much of their annual budget local councils will pour into buying a set of these.

Toyotron Hunter Electric Motorcycle

It looks decidedly Retro, but the Toyotron Hunter is one of a range of electric motorcycles from the Thai based company. Electric motorcycles haven’t exactly faced the same kind of surge (so to speak) as hybrid motorcars with the majority of motorbike makers reluctant to scare their existing customers off by producing such an oddball contraption. That’s left the market (if there actually is one) wide open to others.

To be fair, though, it most definitely works out to be cheaper than running a scooter, which we all know can do about 300 miles for the cost of 2 litres of cider. It also charges from a standard power outlet and has a reasonable range to boot. While it might prove popular with certain groups of people I don’t see it being that regular a feature on British roads.

First off, Toyotron claims that the Hunter will cover a range of 70km on a single overnight charge plugged in next to the fridge. Based on Taiwan’s current electricity costs that’s about one tenth of a penny in running costs. That’s a lot cheaper than the Red Bull it would take for me to cycle there and the Hunter can apparently reach a top speed of 43mph, which is most certainly better than I could manage.

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