appliances

The age of the dual-use appliances is upon us with toasters that make your morning tea, microwaves that bake chocolate chip cookies and dryers that iron your shirts. And then there was the sink that cooked.

It sounded odd and slightly unhygienic at first--the idea of cooking potatoes at your sink; boiling side dishes within coughing distance of all the nasty stuff you do at the adjacent sink, like dump old yogurt, strain your pickles or, say, pour out some fermenting chick pea juice.

Nonetheless, Kohler had come up with something that might just make the cook sink risk worth … Read more

Have you ever looked at your file cabinet and thought that space was just wasted? After all, it could be holding cold sodas and sushi, thanks to Marvel Industries' refrigerator drawers. Keep the fridge under wraps with overlay doors or go for the sleek stainless steel look or various color choices. An extra deep lower drawer lets you store 2-liter soda bottles and opened bottles of wine. It comes in several widths, so you can find something to fit any room in the house.

But why limit yourself? The Outdoor series lets you toss out cold beers to go alongside … Read more

When planning a dinner party, the most important part is deciding what to do with the leftovers. While it would seem sensible to just throw them out or give them to the dog, Siemens wants you to enjoy them just as much as the first bite. Its latest line of avant-garde refrigerators and freezers will do just that. The refrigerator features the Quickcool and Quickfreeze technology that, with the push of a button, temporarily maximizes cooling to stabilize the temperature and keep those hot pans from spoiling anything that happens to be close by.

Forget space, it seems as if the kitchen is the final frontier for computing. Companies have tried for years to create a computer that offers the right mix of design, functionality, and price so that people feel comfortable incorporating it into the household hub. (See also 3Com's Audrey, or even our recent post on Pandigital's kitchen TV.) As our Webware colleagues tend to roll their eyes at "yet another social network," so we kitchen geeks often scoff at yet another kitchen computer.

But even a jaded geek like me has to admit: the Kitchen Sync concept … Read more

The quest to make kitchens around the country more eco-friendly just got a little easier. NatureMill, a San Francisco-based company founded by an MIT grad in 2004, is adding to its lineup of indoor automatic composters.

NatureMill's composters speed up the process of composting by heating, mixing, and aerating the waste that gets put into it. After two weeks, fresh food waste can be turned into nutrient-rich fertilizer for the garden, according to the company. They're small enough to fit into a regular kitchen cabinet (20 inches long by 12 inches wide by 20 inches high), and to … Read more

Clothes dryers are the second biggest hog of household energy, according to the Department of Energy. Most are so similar in terms of power hunger that the Energy Star label of efficient appliances doesn't even mark dryers.

By this fall, however, consumers could enjoy faster, greener, and safer clothes dryers that draw half the power of conventional models, according to Hydromatic Technologies Corporation.

Its Dryer Miser technology would dry garments 41 percent more quickly without shrinking as much or stinking them up with the odor of burnt lint, said Michael Brown, the inventor and company president.

He plans to … Read more

Sometimes watching sci-fi shows can be depressing. On the one hand, the imagination blossoms with all the possibilities the future holds. On the other hand, everything you see? You can't have it. Because you know what? You don't live in the future. Sorry. No gagh for you.

So it's with mixed feelings that I point you, dear readers, over to io9, who has put together a list of the best sci-fi kitchen gadgets. The list of neat things you can't have includes such wonders as the knife that toasts your bread while it cuts, and the … Read more

While most people in the tech sector are watching what's going on at CES in Las Vegas, some of us still have our eyes on what's going on in the kitchen.

Apartment Therapy's Kitchn blog today points to a half-size dishwasher that could start popping up in apartments around the country. The Smeg dishwasher comes in three sizes, the most interesting of which tops out at just less than 24 inches tall. On the outside, it's a standard, stainless steel appliance. Inside, it's basically like the bottom basket of a regular dishwasher.

This design works … Read more

Every few years, some new technology or application comes along that everyone's sure will miraculously conquer every obstacle in its path and, in some ludicrously short time period, make existing technology obsolete. And then, long after all the media hype fades away and investors' checkbooks disappear, well, nothing happens.

So what? Who cares? Why bother talking about our industry's bombs, the next big things that weren't? Well, for one thing, it's interesting to note how hungry we all are for news about new technology. It gets us excited. We complain about media hype, but love the hype.

It's also fascinating how existing technology has this way of hanging on by its fingernails way past the point of its predicted obsolescence. More importantly, we learn more from mistakes than we do from successes. That's part of the scientific method: hypothesis, test, learn, repeat until you get it right.

Lastly, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Those are all good enough reasons for me. So here are my top 10 technology flops. But first, some ground rules. I stuck to the last 50 years or so. And I avoided specific company products. We've heard enough about the IBM PCjr, Apple Newton, Microsoft Bob, and OS2 to last 10 lifetimes.… Read more