A common mistake I see people make is overloading their kitchens with skillets of all shapes and sizes. You really only need two to cover your bases, though: a cast iron skillet and a good stainless steel pan. For the latter, the All-Clad 12" fry pan is my recommendation. You might think I'm crazy for suggesting a $150 pan, but believe me,…
It's that magical time of year again when people start doing home DIY projects. Whether you're painting the house or cleaning the gutters, you'll probably be spending a lot of time on a ladder. To make your life easier, use a LadderLimb to hold your work materials securely. The rubberized end fits snugly into the hollow rungs of most ladders, giving you…
I'm at the point in my cooking "education" (part self-taught, part watching a lot of YouTube videos) where I'm starting to get fed up with my cheap knife set. Several of the knives are on their way out or were never really good to begin with, and the one knife still worth my time —a Santoku model—isn't the most versatile tool around.…
We mention a lot of fancy gadgets and whatnot around here, but sometimes it's good to think about the little things, like personal grooming. A common mistake I see people making is not taking care of the appearance of their nails—even people whose hands appear in close-up promo shots of iPhone apps (shudder). The first step to fixing this problem is getting…
For serious coffee fanatics, having an espresso machine at home can certainly be an expensive affair. Most of us aren't world champion baristas though, and prefer not to break the bank to get our fix. The Rancilio Silvia V3 is a commerical-grade machine that, in the right hands, will brew espresso on par with what you'd get at your favorite local coffee…
Another Amazon gadget? This is getting weird. Amazon Dash is a supplementary device for members of the AmazonFresh delivery service (currently only available in certain zip codes of San Francisco, Southern California, and Seattle). It's a neat way to shop for groceries and other household items without leaving home. Out of milk? Scan the empty carton's barcode. Plan on making cookies soon?…
Fire TV is Amazon's new $99 media-streaming and gaming box for HDTVs. Like its competitors—such as the Apple TV, Chromecast, and Roku—Fire TV can stream from a number of services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, YouTube, Pandora, and more. One feature that sets it apart is the remote control's built-in mic, which allows you to hold a button and search…
Research has shown that sitting at a desk all day is terrible for our health, well-being, productivity, and even life expectancy. Standing desks—especially those that adjust between sitting and standing positions—are a good way to counteract the negative effects of all that sitting, but they can be pretty expensive. (A fact I'm all too familiar with; my current "standing desk" is a…
As I've mentioned in the past, the best tool in my kitchen is my cast iron skillet. My cheap metal spatula kind of sucks though, so I've been on the lookout for something better. Thankfully, The Sweethome did the leg work for me by testing a bunch of spatulas and naming the Mercer Hell's Handle fish spatula ($23) as their top pick.…
This is one of those things I wish I'd known about sooner. My 2yo son has a habit of closing house doors a little too roughly, and this whole time we could've been using the Safety 1st Finger Pinch Preventer as a precautionary measure. It can be fitted on the hinge or knob side of a door, preventing those horrible finger pinches…
Mike Dudek, the guy who writes about pens over at The Clicky Post, also handcrafts some very nice pen-and-notebook holders. My favorite of the bunch is called 'The Display', because it displays your pens nicely (up to 5) and also holds a few Field Notes notebooks. It's obviously a great item to have in your workspace, but I think it works just…
An HDTV wall mount can be a nice thing to have. It helps clear up space normally taken up by an entertainment center, and depending on where you mount it, there's an added bonus of keeping your TV out of reach of children. The problem is that most mounts are inflexible, so wherever your TV is mounted, you'd better be happy with…
Here's one for the book nerds out there. This upcoming print, titled A Diagrammatical Dissertation on Opening Lines of Notable Novels, is exactly what it sounds like: a diagram of opening lines in famous books. Examples include: Fahrenheit 451, Moby Dick, Gravity's Rainbow, The Old Man and the Sea, Don Quixote, and a lot more. The team at Pop Chart Lab have…
This Friday—February 21, 2014—would have been the 52nd birthday of one of my favorite essayists, David Foster Wallace. To celebrate the occasion, designer Debbie Millman teamed up with Brain Pickings to capture a passage he wrote about leadership, both in print form and as an 5 recorded by Millman herself. Millman originally created the print as a handcrafted felt-on-felt piece for the…
Sometimes there's just nothing better than a simple bowl of steaming, slightly sweet, slightly sticky, Japanese-style short grain rice. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. It's possible to make this stuff in a standard stovetop pot (and I have), but it's a little time-consuming and requires close attention. A good, automated rice cooker like the Zojirushi NS-TSC10 makes the process way…
Yes, we're a full week into 2014, but that doesn't mean it's too late to get the 2014 edition of the NeuYear Calendar (27"x39"). This is a great calendar to hang in just about any workspace, since it can be hung vertically or horizontally depending on which side you use. It's also pretty easy on the eyes. Personally, I intend to use…
If you ask me, no kitchen is complete without at least one cast iron skillet around — they just cook food so perfectly and only get better with age. The one I own used to belong to my grandma and was given to me after she'd passed away. It has so many years of seasoning on it, I can't even see the…
I don't know about you guys, but in my household we tend to accumulate a lot of plastic grocery bags. We rarely just throw them away after grocery trips because they often come in handy later, so there's a big pile of them at the bottom of our pantry. I'm thinking we might pick up this Simplehuman grocery bag dispenser to free…
Ever since I was a little kid, I've had a love for all things Transformers. I don't play with those kinds of toys much these days but the MK1 Transforming Coffee Table, which easily changes from coffee table to dining table, could be a sort of grown-up substitute. The crossed table legs can become uncrossed, which causes the side "walls" of the…
The Gravitas is an upcoming dock for iPhone and iPad that promises to be extremely stable even for one-handed docking and undocking. At first glance, it looks like it would be made of lightweight aluminum, but it's actually a much denser metal alloy. The resulting dock is one that has a small footprint but still weighs 2.54 lb (1.17 kg), which is…