Features:

• Several styles to choose from (this review is for “Cotton T Black”)
• In-line mic for iPhone/Blackberry
• Low-profile headphone drivers
• Regular 3.5mm jack

Pros:

• Hey, they work
• Hat is decent quality, fairly warm
• Easy to set up and remove (handy for washing)

Cons:

• Sound quality not so good
• White cable not so hot against black hat, or going to non-iPod device
• Tight fit can make headphones press against ears too hard

Full Review:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8360056&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

I have to say that when I first tried these out, biking about a mile over to the Central District, I was pretty disappointed. I found the fit too tight and the sound tinny. But a friend tried the hat on and pronounced it perfectly comfortable, and on the way back I played a different playlist and found that they really didn’t sound so bad after all. I mean, let’s be honest here. You’re going to be walking, running, biking, or skiing while listening to these, and if you can make out the lyrics over the wind rush, that’s better than nothing. And while they weren’t beating my eardrums with their bass or allowing me to marvel and their crisp highs, they did sound clear enough once I got the alignment right.

The hat itself is a plain cotton, quite decently made, with a red patterned interior that showed as a sort of rim. It fit snugly — almost too snugly for me, but I tend to prefer looser knit caps. Why I didn’t review a knit one is beyond me. But this one was a bit tall and narrow for me; it fully covered my ears and still had a little poof at the top. Not Smurf levels of poof, but enough that I felt I had to pat it down. I wore it during a cold snap a while ago here in Seattle and it did all right, though it took forever to dry out when I got rained on.

The headphones themselves are touted as having a flat design, which is true, but then again so do most headphones once you take the padding off. Yeah, there’s no padding on them at all except for the millimeter-thin material making up the inner lining of the headphone pockets in the hat. That can be pretty rough on your ears if you have a helmet pushing on them or if they’re just not aligned over your ears just right. In the next generation of this product I’d really appreciate a little bit of padding in the headphone pocket.

The sound is what you’d expect from a plain pair of traditional headphones — something you’d pick up at a drugstore for $15-20. They’re loud enough if you want to push them and I didn’t hear a lot of distortion, but there wasn’t too much clarity either. But the fact is I could hear my music perfectly well while zooming around on my bike, so really, mission accomplished there. I’m not expecting a high-fidelity audio experience while trucking down to the coffee shop.

Conclusion: I think $60 is a little steep for what they’re offering. However, if you do spend a lot of time on the slopes, for instance, or riding your bike around, and want to listen to music or talk on the phone, this is definitely a simple and workable solution. I’d go with the knit version, though.

Product Page

• Public Service Announcement: Holiday Shipping Deadlines
• Gift Guide 2009: Netbooks
• Gift Guide 2009: Portable Media Players
• Gift Guide 2009: Peripherals
• Gift Guide 2009: Smartphones
• Gift Guide 2009: Pocket Camcorders
• Gift Guide 2009: Headphones
• Gift Guide 2009: Gaming Consoles
• Gift Guide 2009: Wireless E-book Readers
• Gift Guide 2009: Toys
• Gift Guide 2009: Gifts for the Technologically Impaired
• The 5 rules of HDTV buying
• Bag Week Review Round-up

CrunchGear 2009 Holiday Gift Guide

My predicament, in pictures:

BestBuy.com’s holiday ordering deadlines (see here). I needed to have ordered an item before yesterday at 11AM Eastern that says “Usually leaves our warehouse in 1 business day” in order to receive it by Christmas.

I order the above item. It says “Usually leaves our warehouse in 1 business day.”

But wait! There’s more!

I ordered the item last Thursday, December 17th – four full days before the deadline.

And when checking the tracking number via UPS.com last night, here’s what I got:

Shipment sent out on Friday, December 18th – fair enough – with a scheduled delivery date of December 29th, a full four days after Christmas. Santa will be long gone by then!

To its credit, Best Buy is offering people who don’t get their stuff by Christmas the following:

So that’s $20 plus $6.95 in reimbursed shipping charges. Fine, I guess. I just reordered everything via in-store pickup instead but let this be a lesson to everyone to DOUBLE CHECK THE SHIPPING INFORMATION FOR YOUR ONLINE ORDERS. The person who’s receiving this gift would have understood if it didn’t show up until the 29th, your small child may not.

Features:

• works with Linux, Mac and Windows computers, plus Android, Blackberry, and iPhone smartphones
• supports up to 4 USB drives, and recognizes NTFS, FAT32, HFS+, and ext2/ext3 partitions
• access and share files from anywhere, with no changes required in your firewall configuration
• create and share media slideshows with ease
• MSRP: $129

Pros:

• super easy to use: setup completes in less than a minute
• diminutive form factor
• extremely extensible

Cons:

• No display of free space on USB media
• All access goes through my.pogoplug.com.
• No wireless networking

Review
I’ve been using Dropbox for a couple months now to synchronize my files across several different computers. It works, but sometimes I just don’t want my data living on someone else’s servers. The PogoPlug solves that problem by allowing me to store my data on my physical hardware, and access it from anywhere using either a web-based interface, a WebDAV system that makes the PogoPlug look like a locally connected drive on my computer, or via a mobile phone. I can also store a lot more data on a PogoPlug for considerably less money than twelve months of Dropbox service.

I have two gripes with the PogoPlug, which should be addressed up front. They’re both pretty small, and do not in any way detract from my willingness to recommend this product to everyone. First, all remote access of my data takes place through the my.pogoplug.com URL. I believe them when they say “the data may be forwarded through our servers, but no copies are retained during this process”, but it still makes me a little uncomfortable. Also, it’s worth noting that when accessing your PogoPlug locally — that is, both you and the PogoPlug are on the same LAN — you talk to the PogoPlug directly, without going through pogoplug.com. Second, there is no obvious display of the capacity of the attached media, nor indication of how much space is free. It’s there in the Settings page, but not on the main screen’s sidebar. This usually won’t be a problem if you’re attaching current vintage hard drives, but if you plug in a USB flashdrive, you might have more interest in knowing how much space is free before you try to upload something.

The my.pogoplug.com website has had a modest update, to properly display the different media that may be attached to the unit. Navigating files and directories is as simple as it should be. Uploading and downloading files is problem-free. Creating slideshows from media is easy to do, and sharing those slideshows is simple, too!

One of the more surprising features of the new PogoPlug is its ability to transcode video files automatically. Upload a video to your PogoPlug, and within a couple moments it’ll have a small preview clip that you can play from your computer or iPhone. Then, while you wait, a complete mobile-friendly version of your video will be produced! This is not a fast process, since the PogoPlug hardware is not super-computer caliber. It took over eight hours to transcode a rip of George Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead that I put onto the PogoPlug. But, once the transcode was finished, I was able to watch the zombie fun right on my iPhone while riding a city bus around town! I don’t know that this is a reason to buy the PogoPlug by itself, but it’s certainly a feature not commonly found in other NAS devices just yet.

Another interesting aspect of PogoPlug is that they don’t shy away from the fact that they use open source software under the hood. Many similar products don’t make any public mention of their use of open source software, let alone provide you root access to your device!

-bash-3.2# free
              total         used         free       shared      buffers
  Mem:       256012        20428       235584            0            0
 Swap:            0            0            0
Total:       256012        20428       235584
-bash-3.2# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mtdblock2           32.0M     11.6M     20.4M  36% /
none                    125.0M      8.0k    125.0M   0% /tmp
-bash-3.2# uname -a
Linux Pogoplug 2.6.22.18 #44 Mon Aug 10 12:57:36 PDT 2009 armv5tejl unknown
-bash-3.2# head -2 /proc/cpuinfo
Processor       : ARM926EJ-S rev 1 (v5l)
BogoMIPS        : 1192.75

That’s pretty cool, in and of itself. But the fun doesn’t stop there! PogoPlug has a robust and well-documented public API, allowing folks to create their own web-based applications to integrate with their PogoPlug devices. And there’s a lively third-party development community over at pogoplugged.com.

Product Page: PogoPlug

If you have a dog and you’ve thrown a party, you know that dogs generally add a bit of fun to the mix at the beginning of the party but by the end, they’ve mostly eaten food off the coffee table, scared the bejesus out of the three guests who have an irrational fear of dogs, and had a few “accidents” in high-traffic areas like hallways and doorways.

You can definitely add some value to your house pet with this collar that features a built-in bottle opener. It’s retractable and it only costs $15 – not a whole lot to think about there, it’s pretty much an impulse buy. If you can teach your dog to fetch beers, too, well then you’ve set yourself up for a long, stress-free life. Man’s best friend, indeed.

Bark4Beer [Product Page via Craziest Gadgets]

Yes, for many of us Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64 was right up there with Goldeneye and Mario Kart 64 as far as massive time sinks are concerned.

If you’ve got a Nintendo Wii, you can now download Super Smash Bros. for 1000 Wii points ($10). Go ahead, it’s not like you’re all that busy at work now anyway. Everyone’s already mentally checked out for the rest of the year.

Super Smash Bros. [Nintendo.com]

Press Release

The product description says it all. “With the Maracas for Wii you can enjoy those Maraca based video games as if you were actually celebrating a big fiesta!” Ah yes, all those Maraca based video games.

Let’s see, there’s…

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Maraca
• Maraca Kart
• Resident Maraca 4
• Maraca Band
• Maraca Hero World Tour
• Samba de Amigo (actually real)
• New Super Maraca Bros
• Maraca Sports Resort
• Maraca Fit
• Lego Maracas
• Call of Maraca: Modern Maraca
• Super Maraca Bros Brawl

…and countless others I’m forgetting.

Only $11, too!

Wii Maracas [Amazon via Toys for Child]

This might make a good last-minute stocking stuffer, although I’m not sure if it’ll get to you in time. It’s a little USB power plug with not one, but two (!!!) USB ports.

Looks like a dynamite travel accessory. It’s got a five-volt output pushing 1000 milli-amps to each port. The price is nice, too, at only seven bucks.

Dual Port USB Power Mini Charger [USB Geek]

Here’s what’s up.

First, a bit about Lottay:

The Lottay online gift-giving and wish-list service helps individuals and groups give and receive better gifts. Lottay gifts are money, wrapped in the emotion of the occasion via e-greeting cards, personalized messages, images and pictures. Givers can specify the gift they would like the money to buy — from a cup of coffee to a Caribbean cruise and beyond — while receivers are free to use the money to buy the intended gift or anything else they want.

The gift is sent instantly and securely, delivered as a surprise via email and Facebook. Unlike gift cards and physical gifts, there are no hidden fees or shipping and handling charges with Lottay gifts. The entire Lottay.com experience is online, safe and secure thanks to PayPal. There is no cost to gift givers and recipients using the Lottay service.

So what’s going to happen? Well, you’re going to head over to Lottay and make a wishlist. Put whatever you want into it. Down at the bottom of the page, over “Add Your Wish” will be a secret code. Cut and paste that into comments. Bingo. That’s it.

Good luck, happy holidays, and thanks for reading.

This is an iron that promises to increase your ironing speed by up to 25% thanks to a symmetrical titanium soleplate, which allows you to iron forwards, backwards, left, and right with ease. It doesn’t make ironing any more exciting but with a street price of around $40, it’s a solidly-built and attractive iron if you’re in the market for one.

There are three versions currently available – I took the mid-range $50 (MSRP) NI-W750TS for a spin. The main feature of the iron is the titanium soleplate, which is shaped in such a way so as to allow for ironing in any direction with minimal friction.

I found it to work well going straight forwards and backwards, and left and right, although changing directions tended to cause a little bit of bunching on the clothes I ironed. Overall, though, it’s a much smoother ride than you’d get with a regular iron.

There’s also a vertical steaming function, which lets you steam a shirt or dress while it’s on a hanger – a nice touch if you just need to quickly de-wrinkle your outfit before work without pulling out the ironing board.

The iron itself looks dapper and feels solid. The outer casing and handle is made of a tough plastic and the titanium soleplate gives everything some nice heft. The plate juts out a little bit from the rest of the body, which makes it easy to see where you’re ironing.

Panasonic promises up to 25% faster ironing, which assumes that you’ll be able to efficiently iron a garment quickly using back and forth lines. If you iron a lot, you’ll probably find that you can iron more quickly with this thing, sure. If you’re like me and you avoid wearing pressed shirts, you’ll still fumble around with the iron until you remember what you’re doing.

All in all, it’s a solid iron with nice features for the price. Available from Panasonic for $50, or you can find it for around $40 elsewhere.

Product Page: NI-W750TS Iron

Product photography is an art form. It must appeal to the senses, tickle one’s fancy, instill a sense of urgency – I NEED IT! Take this Arcade Putting Pro game, available at JCPenney.com on clearance for $30.

The golf balls are MOVING! You can tell because of the whooooosh lines. The father is EXCITED! His son is about to sink a putt! He may also be excited because he bears an uncanny resemblance to Adam Sandler’s friend Peter Dante.

But something strange is afoot. Peter Dante looks excited, yet apprehensive, as if something off camera is about to happen. Something BAD! “My son is about to sink this putt but OH MY GOD THAT MAN-EATING TIGER THAT ESCAPED FROM THE ZOO IS COMING RIGHT AT US!”

The kid, meanwhile, seems to be looking right at the director.

“Don’t look at the camera, Carl, look at me. Okay back straight, shoulders square aaaaand… putt. There you go. Man, that turquoise shirt is showing up great on camera. Turquoise is 2010’s color of the year, mind you.”

“Okay guys, let’s break for lunch,” announces the director. “Dad, I’m going to need you to stick around, Carl you’re all done for the day. Nice work. Everyone else, let’s get set up for the second product shot. This next one will be used for Amazon’s product page and I’m gonna need Randy and Beverly in here. Randy, same story as Carl but look straight down. Beverly, I need to you scream as you notice the tiger charging at you. Dad, you’re going to be wearing a non-identifying red baseball cap, a ringer tee, and I want you to look directly at me as though you’ve been huffing glue while riding the city bus all morning. Perfect.”

And that’s the story behind the Arcade Putting Pro product photos. As for the product itself, a JC Penny customer says:

“Purchased game to use at a fall festival. Set up at my house for a trial by adults, no children. Game started falling apart within 5 minutes. The plastic screws that connect the main part of the game to the mat would not stay in. Used the 2 replacements sent; same thing happened. The folding plastic brace that lifts the main part of the game fell off continuously. I used metal screws to reinforce so that I can hopefully get some use from it.. Very poorly made- not worth the price.”

So there you have it. An otherwise poor-quality product that’s been saved by exceptional marketing photos.

Clearance! Arcade Putting Pro [JC Penney via dealnews]

Short Version: There are two kinds of people in the world: those who will wear Vibram Five Finger shoes and those who won’t. After a bout with plantar fasciitis and shinsplints, I joined the former camp and feel much better for it. These new shoes, called the VFF KSO (Keep Stuff Out) Trek, add a bit of coverage to what are essentially foot gloves for running, hiking, and looking like a total freak.

Review: I’ve been running in VFF Classics all summer and only recently realized that soon it would be cold and there would be snow on the ground. Vibram seems to have foreseen this and created the KSO line, a selection of shoes that cover most of the top of your foot but not your ankle. The Treks, then, are the next level to this shoe style, involving nicely treaded soles and actual kangaroo(!!) leather uppers to keep even more stuff out.

I found these shoes to be on par with the Classics in terms of range of motion and protection. I ran down the icy streets of Jozefow, Poland, where my in-laws are, with nary a slip or slide and I wore these shoes without socks in sub-freezing weather, much to my mother-in-law’s chagrin.

As for styling, these shoes look considerably less freaky than the Classics. They are a closed shoe and they are black so the toes don’t stand out. You could feasibly wear these in mixed company, just like your buddy at Google.

As for their purported benefits, the jury is still out. I believe they have helped me but your mileage may vary. As I said before, the thinking is this: the foot is a perfect running tool. We were “Born to Run” (read the book, it’s great) and running shoes have slowly caused more problems than they solve. There is also some thought that the great shoe industrial complex is a scam and we need to go back to our roots. Whatever you believe, it’s fun to run in these. Maybe you don’t want to hit a 100 miler in them right now but you can take a jog around the block and really feel a bit freer than you ever have in standard shoes.

Interestingly, these shoes have even encouraged me to run barefoot for a time, even in Brooklyn. It’s a great feeling and a lot of fun and I only stepped on one used syringe (JKATW).

The shoes cost about $125 online. I got these shoes in the same size as my Classics (VFF sent these to me but I purchased my first pair) and found that the KSO’s run smaller than the Classic simply because they have to cover your foot. A 44 or 45 for a size 12 foot is fine in the Classics but err on the side of larger (I think I need a 46, although this is only because the strap is a little short) when sizing your Treks.

Bottom Line
Freedom’s just another word for really skimpy shoes.

Product Page
Check BirthdayShoes.com out for more VFF info

Awww, schweeeeeet! This calculator says, “Hey, I need a calculator but I want people to know that I’m down with video games. Please don’t step, mess, or front. I got eight digits to work with, B.”

Shaped like an Xbox controller, you’ve got a D-pad with add, subtract, multiply, and divide keys, number pad right in the middle of everything, functions on the right, and big fat CE and equals buttons. Oh and the shoulder buttons correspond to on and off.

It’s $13 from an Australian store. The product page says that it’s almost sold out, which makes perfect sense since this product is somehow so dumb it’s cool.

X-Cool Calculator [DealsDirect.com.au via Newlaunches]

Good afternoon, chaps. Do you feel underdressed, under-accessorized, and smelly? Nooka has something nice for you. Our buddies over there are giving out a new Nooka Watch (your choice), a Nooka Belt (shown above), and the new Nooka fragrance.

That’s right: you can smell like a Nooka.

So you’ve got the scent, which smells like the future, a belt (of your choice), and watch (of your choice). Your mission? Head over to the site and pick out a belt color and watch. Then comment below with your choices. Then sit back and wait to become the mack-daddy of your gold farm.

Short Version: Sumo is fairly new to the bag game but this is a strong showing for the company. For $79.99 you get a 17-inch laptop bag made of waterproof ballistic, rip-stop nylon. Sadly, a lack of internal organization pockets hampers the overall storage capacity.

Info:
* Sumo
* Messenger Bag
* Fits 17-inch Macbook
* Ballistic Nylon
* Waterproof
* MSRP of $79.99

Pros:

* Cool styling
* Plenty of internal storage
* 3 colors

Cons:

* Three massive pockets don’t lend to organization
* Sideways pockets cause things to drop out
* “Bulking” when full

Oh, the bulking. The bulking. It always happens: you start packing to travel and you stick in some laptops, some cameras, some cables, a book or two, and your laptop bag turns into a balloon. I may be a special case, but I always bulk out my messenger bags. It happens as soon as I start packing and it, sadly, often ruins a bag.

So far the Sumo Messenger Laptop Bag has taken a beating and kept on carrying, although there is plenty of bulking in evidence. Of course if you’re a sane traveler, you can definitely get away with putting a magazine and a laptop in here without issue.

My second issue? There isn’t enough organizational structure to this bag. There are three peripheral pouches, three laptop-sized pouches, and a few zippered areas. There is also an easy access front pouch with Velcro along with three zippered pockets on the front, back, and top flap. You can put a lot of stuff into this bag, but it’s hard to find a lot of them once they’re in there.

But, again, this is a messenger bag. You’re supposed to ride a bike with this thing on, not schlep around airports. So with that in mind I can safely report that the Sumo Messenger Bag is spacious but dangerously overstuffable by the average geek.

Read more Bag Week reviews here.

Short Version: A solidly-built iPhone car dock whose unique, no-batteries-required sound amplification system actually works fairly well provided you get your phone’s microphone and speaker lined up correctly.

Review:

Let me start out by saying that I’m leery of iPhone docks that cost $40 and up without including built-in charging features. Thankfully, Kensington has recently dropped the price of its breathlessly-named “Windshield/Vent Car Mount with Sound Amplified Cradle for iPhone” from $40 down to $30. And for $30 you do indeed get a solid dock that holds on to your windshield for dear life and is easy to use.

The idea behind the dock is to offer a simple, quick way to mount and dismount your iPhone with one hand. There are interchangeable rubber feet that correspond to your particular model of iPhone – one underneath the microphone and one underneath the speaker. The microphone foot is little more than a hole allowing the microphone to fire downward, while the speaker foot feeds audio output into a horn-shaped chamber inside the dock like so:

The result, as Kensington claims, is 2x sound amplification. I can tell you that it doesn’t sound noticeably louder than if you were to place the phone on the passenger seat and make a standard call using the speakerphone, but if you were to place your phone in a dock like this without holes in the rubber feet, you’d have muffled sound through and through. So I guess, yes, the sound is amplified in the sense that it’d otherwise be muffled if there weren’t a hole in the bottom of the rubber foot against which the phone’s speaker was placed.

As for how well the dock actually holds your phone in place, it works well. The windshield suction cup is surprisingly sturdy and the dock easily rotates between portrait and landscape views without much effort. The springy side clips hold your phone in place even if its got a thin protective case on it (Kensington, however, advises that certain cases may impede the aforementioned amplification) and the bottom of the dock holds an Apple charger in place.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold the charger in place so that you can dock your phone directly into the cable. You’ll have to remove the charging cable, dock your phone, and then plug the cable into the phone, because the cable is held in place behind the phone for some reason.

Here’s a YouTube video showing off all the various bells and whistles.

All in all, if you’re looking for a solid dock that’s not going to move around much and makes it easy to pop your phone in and out, this is a good option. Those of you looking for built-in charging features and high-volume sound amplification will want to look elsewhere.

Product Page: Windshield/Vent Car Mount with Sound Amplified Cradle for iPhone

Digital Photo Frames

Digital photo frames have come a long way in terms of style and features. And while you can purchase inexpensive frames in just about any store that sells electronics, I’d personally recommend splurging a bit for one with a wireless connection of some type. A wireless frame allows you to do a few things that you can’t do with standard frames.

For starters, you can put it just about anywhere since you’ll be updating it wirelessly. With a standard frame, you need to make sure it’s placed in an accessible area so you can get at the memory card to add new photos. Secondly, many wireless frames let your family and friends add their own photos to your frame from anywhere in the world. And finally, if you’re interested, wireless frames can often showcase information like weather and news.

A few wireless frame choices for your perusal:

• HP DreamScreen ($200 to $250)
• eStarling TouchConnect ($200)
• Toshiba Digital Media Frame ($180 to $230)
• Kodak EasyShare ($100 to $230)
• IPEVO Kaleido R7 ($150)

Solar Lighting

Solar-powered lights are slowly finding their way into the realm of normal-looking items. With the exception of not having a cord protruding from the base, there are more and more solar lamps coming out that’ll fit in just about anywhere.

I’ve been using the $17 solar lamp from Geeks.com seen on the right here and it’s been working pretty well so far. The batteries take a while to fully charge but once they’re ready to go, it’s nice to be able to use this lamp anywhere I need a little extra light. And aside from the little square solar panel embedded in the top of the lamp shade, it looks just like a regular lamp (again, without the cord, or course).

You’ll want to make sure to place your lamp in a spot where it’ll get decent sunlight and remember that these lamps are basically collecting sunlight and using it to slowly juice up rechargeable batteries, which are then used to power little LED bulbs. Current charge times may be long (9-12 hours) and actual usage time may be short (3-6 hours), but sunlight is free and free is good.

• Can You Imagine LED Solar Lamp ($17 at Geeks.com)
• Sunnan Work Lamp ($20 at Ikea)
• Smart Solar Powered Table Lamp ($80 at Amazon)

For the Kitchen

There are hundreds of potential kitchen gadgets, but here are a few I’ve personally tried and can recommend.

As far as coffee goes, some people get intimidated by fancy coffee makers. If there’s someone like that on your list, these Keurig machines are tough to beat – any of the coffee machines that use “pods” are actually pretty good. You fill the machine’s reservoir with water, pop a coffee pod into the machine, and put your cup or mug underneath the spout. Press the button and you’ve got near-instant coffee that tastes far better than instant coffee. And there’s basically no cleanup other than throwing the empty pod away.

Another fun idea, especially if you have kids, is a home soda-making machine. They can get a bit expensive but the idea is that you’ll save money in the long run, and the soda mixes for this Penguin machine I reviewed, for instance, don’t contain high fructose corn syrup.

For the germophobe in your life, there’s a new crop of touchless faucets on the market (see John’s review here) — “touchless” is a misnomer, but you’re able to control the thing with your wrist, forearm, or elbow.

And last but not least if you’ve got a pancake lover in your life, you’re left with little choice than to spring for a $5 can of Batter Blaster pancake mix. They’re pancakes in a can. Again, they’re pancakes in a can. See my review here.

• Keurig Brewing Systems ($90 to $250)
• Home Soda Machines ($90 to $200)
• Delta Touch2O Faucet ($400)
• Organic Batter Blaster ($5)

If your boyfriend, fiancé, or husband sees that you’re with-child and reacts happily, hooray! If he creates a him-shaped hole in the nearest wall, also hooray! It just wasn’t meant to be.

Now you know that and you’re free to call up the guy you went to high school with who was insanely popular ten years ago but now he works as a courier for his dad’s law office and the last time you saw him he was totally into you.

Either way, this one’s a winner.

Ten bucks at PrankPlace.com.

[via Random Good Stuff]

You like music, right? How about CDs? Do you still have CDs? Don’t have any cash this week? Did you spend a lot of money on presents for the kids already? Do you want one of these Olive No 4 Hi-Fi? Am I asking too many questions? Yes? No?

Well today we have one of the coolest prizes to come over the transom in a while. It’s the Olive No 4 Hi-Fi. How do you win? You need to convince us your current music system sucks in comments. We’ll pick the saddest of the sad sacks. Extra points if you include a link to an image of your sad, sad stereo.

Here are some specs:

–Storage capacity of up to 1,500 CDs in hi-fi digital instantly gets rid of CD clutter and ensures crystal clear sound quality

–Full-color touchscreen display makes it easy for users to find the music they want

–Multi-room music streaming and the ability to import music from a computer (wired or wireless) allow easy access to all your digital music sources in every room of your home

–Seamless integration with existing hi-fi systems and a high resolution DAC deliver the best possible hi-fi audio experience (unlike any MP3 player)

–Fine-grade aluminum and distinctive graphics provide an elegant design

Roll out the comments and we’ll pick a winner on Friday.

UPDATE – Congrats to Fares for winning the Olive.