Budget Holiday Gift Guide 2010

Oh God how I wish my kids could be as happy this holiday season with a nice warm kettle of stone soup as this Brady Bunch birthday party seems to be. Just fire up the kindling from a smashed Ikea bookcase (we already tossed the books onto the fire), bring the pot of water and rocks to a steady boil, and wait for the townspeople to come over offering us iPads, Uggs, and XBox Kinects for every room in the house.

But life doesn’t work that way. The fact is, we’re still staring down the barrel of the Great Recession and the neighbors aren’t coming over to give us anything except the stink-eye for the inflatable we had on the lawn this Halloween (still up, by the way).

So what to do? Kids don’t really get the intricacies of the Wall Street sub-prime meltdown so it’s up to us as parents to cinch our belts even tighter and stretch our holiday budgets even further this year to make sure everyone on our list has at least one big smile come Christmas morning.

Here, then, is this year’s Budget Holiday Gift Guide. I’ve been writing these for years but this one’s special, as it’s the first one I’ve done since I left the old media pinheads at Techspurt and joined the cool, totally rad young Web 3.0 visionaries at Geegawd (the whole atmosphere here is so different — these kids eat free candy all day out of wooden troughs that surround the cubicles, as opposed to the uptight losers at Techspurt who ate free candy out of plastic bins all day. Yah, like a plastic bin is supposed to inspire the Next Big Thing? Keep dreaming, losers. Meanwhile I’ll be jetting to Monaco in Beiber’s Gulfstream with the rest of the Geegawd gang and lighting my cigar with the wrappers from all the free candy we’re eating).

Gateway NV55C03u laptop: $379

Every year it’s the same — whether you’re a parent or a student, a new laptop is what everyone wants most. But of course, nobody wants to spend any money on one. That’s what made cheap netbooks explode as a market leader a few Christmases ago. Remember that? I was one of the few techspurts geegawds cautiously recommending those $300 Intel Atom-powered Honey-I-Shrunk-The-Laptops but reminding consumers that while the price was right, netbooks just didn’t have enough horses under the hood for things like gaming, media creation, or even just full-screen Flash video on YouTube for that matter.

This year I’m recommending a real laptop. Gateway’s bang-for-the-buck NV series. Best Buy’s selling them on Black Friday for $379, not that much more than the netbooks were going for, except here you get a real fire-breathing laptop with more than enough oomph to power anything you want to do. Edit home video? Check. Edit HD home video? Check. Run Flash videos in ten open browser tabs while Photoshop and iTunes are running in the background? Check and checkmate.

Geek alert: don’t sweat that “Pentium Processor” description, the NV’s CPU is actually a real Intel Core2Duo just like you’ll find in Apple’s MacBooks and other expensive notebooks. For some reason Intel dragged the Pentium name out of the mothballs to slap on Core2Duo chips now that the company has moved on to the newer Core-i series. So the “Pentium Dual Core” chips are exactly the same as the Core2Duo chips Intel was selling Apple et al as recently as this year. In fact, I’ve got a desktop Dual-Core Pentium chip (the E5200) powering my office server and it’s a bona fide beast.

The Gateway NV comes with a 320GB hard drive, a nice 15.6-inch LCD display, DVD drive, high-def audio and an HD webcam. It also includes HDMI output so you can use it as a Windows Media Center with an HDTV. Bottom line: it’s a real laptop with a lot of meat on its bones for the price of a wimpy little netbook.

Want one yet? It’s available Black Friday at Best Buy for just $379.

AppleTV2: $99

The new AppleTV2 is by far the best way to enjoy all your favorite movies, music, photos, and Netflix streaming movies all together in one neat, easy to enjoy package. It’s easy to set up, easy to use, and easy to live with. We’ve had three of the original AppleTVs and loved them to death.

The new AppleTV2 is even better. It’s smaller, quieter (as in, totally silent — gone is the internal hard drive spinning 24/7 and the audible fan that cooled it, replaced by solid-state storage and a new all-streaming strategy that relies on streaming everything from your home networked computers on-demand rather than continuously syncing with them as the old AppleTV did), and most importantly, cheaper — while the old ones cost us $229 a pop, plus whatever it cost me to upgrade them to bigger hard drives, the new AppleTV2 is a mere $99.

$99!!! Do you people understand what that means to someone who bought three of the old ones? I loved the first AppleTV, told everyone I knew they were chumps if they didn’t rush out and buy one, and we enjoyed every minute these wonderful boxes piped our movies and music and photos all over the house. But the new one is better in every possible respect, and it costs a fraction of what the old one did. It’s not just a bit cheaper. It’s less than half the price.

Also, if you’re a Kill-A-Watt freak like me, you’ll like this bit of AppleTViana: the old one sucked 18-25W from the wall at all times, day and night, as long as it was plugged in, but the new one only pulls 6W. It runs cool, silent, and your bathroom night light probably consumes more power. It’s totally nuts.

Some people don’t “get” AppleTV2. They think it’s just for renting or buying movies and music from the iTunes store. I mean, sure, it can certainly do those things, and if that’s all you want to do, it’s the easiest and most convenient way for you to enjoy those things in your living room. But if that’s all it did, well, I wouldn’t be very interested in it either.

No, the way to look at AppleTV2 is this: it’s the magic little box that takes all your DVDs, home videos, music, and photos, sorts them out for you (via iTunes library on your Mac or PC), and serves them to your HDTV on one simple, unified menu. It’s not a rental set top box for the iTunes Store. You can ignore the iTunes Store if you want.

All you have to do is put all your media in your iTunes library and let it and AppleTV2 make life easier for you. The free iTunes software for Mac and PC does a great job ripping CDs, and I recommend the free and awesome Handbrake program for ripping perfect AppleTV-friendly copies of any DVD you care to archive.

AppleTV2 is by far the best $99 you can spend on living room entertainment. It’s my first choice in a home theater media player, price be damned. Nothing else comes close (and yes, PS3 “media center” users, that includes you).

Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS5 camera: $215

Next to laptops, the question I get most often from consumers is “what digital camera should I buy?”

I feel your pain, really, I do. There are WAY too many digital cameras on the market. Canon alone has four thousand models. The price increment between models is less than a penny in some cases.

I don’t understand why these companies do this. Because consumers just aren’t that squinty when it comes to choosing and buying a digital cameras. For the vast majority, the decision tree can be boiled down to, in descending order of picture quality:

Digital SLR;

Point and shoot;

Disposable.

Right off the bat, let’s forget about disposables. They make zero sense anymore, if they ever did in the first place. They flat out suck, and no more will be said about them here.

DSLRs are for pros and serious photo enthusiasts like, well, me. We want the best possible image quality, and we’re willing to put in the time to master all the manual shooting controls on these cameras because when you shell out the long green for a DSLR, the last thing you want to do is shoot in fully-automatic “soccer dad mode”.

But really, DSLRs are not for most people. They’re larger, heavier, and much more complicated than most wish to deal with. You don’t grab a DSLR out of your jacket pocket and snap a quick pic in one easy movement. So, for most people, DSLRs are out too.

That nice, money in the bank middle ground is the compact point and shoot camera. This is where the sweet spot it. Biggest bang for the buck, best image quality for the money, easiest to use, anyone can get great pictures with them.

But it’s got to be the right one. And that’s where I come in.

Lots of people think Canon owns this market, and up until several years ago I would’ve agreed. It’s hard to buy a bad Canon point and shoot. They’re all pretty damn good, I have to say.

But they’re not what I’d buy if I was shopping for a point and shoot. Me? I’m a Lumix man.

I was reading the must-bookmark Cool Tools site a few years ago and Wired editor Kevin Kelly was raving about this Lumix camera he loved, how it was this secret giant-killer among Those Who Know. At the time I was an avowed Canon man, but I was looking to buy a new camera and I gave the Lumix a try.

Wow. Despite a solid rep in the professional video camera sector, Panasonic has never quite had the same street cred when it comes to consumer cameras. But this little Lumix blew my mind. It was much, much better than my old Canon, and easier to use to boot. These days I’m shooting with a Lumix GF1 DSLR but I still have that first Lumix point and shoot I bought five years ago and it’s still serving well as my daughter’s camera.

So if you’re looking to buy someone on your list a digital camera, or you want one for yourself, here’s the model I recommend: Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS5. This is currently Lumix’s biggest bang for the buck camera, a really gorgeous piece of kit that’ll only set you back a bit over $200. Beautiful, fast Leica lens. 12 megapixels. Shoots beautiful 720p HD video as well, shockingly good for such a small and inexpensive camera. Miles better than the HD Flips and their Kodak ilk. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Flips for what they are. Own a few myself. But the Lumix, besides being an excellent stills camera, eats their lunch when it comes to HD video. You’ll see.

Gorillapod Focus: $65

While we’re on the subject of cameras, here’s a great accessory I just bought myself that I know any photographer or video buff on your list would love: Joby’s top of the line heavy metal Gorillapod Focus.

The little plastic Gorillapods are hugely popular with compact point and shoot camera users — they’re little bendy, grabby, hangy tripods that cost almost nothing and have endless utility for the creative photographer. I’ve used the regular plastic Gorillapods for years and they’re great, much better than the cheap full-size tripods at Best Buy etc. You want to stay away from pretty much any tripod you see at Best Buy, and get a Gorillapod instead. There’s not much you can do with a full-size tripod that you can’t do as well or better with a Gorillapod and a little ingenuity.

But the Focus is the one you really want to get. It’s the biggest, heaviest, sturdiest Gorillapod of them all. I’ve been eyeing this thing for awhile and a few weeks ago finally bit the bullet. Love it. Haven’t touched a full-size tripod since I got this thing, and I have some really nice pro tripods. But the Focus is too good, and too much fun to put down. It’s got this great manly feel to it — it’s much stiffer and more confidence-inspiring than the plastic Gorillapods. You can mount the heaviest DSLR on this thing without a worry. For even greater flexibility in positioning, I recommend adding this ball head mount to the Focus. You can use the Gorillapod on its own with any digital camera, but the ball head opens up a lot more possibilities and it’s only another $12.

Corey Greenberg

Back To School Buyer’s Guide: Laptops

Now more than ever, a fast, reliable laptop PC is the most important tool for today’s student. Whether you’re sending your kids back to high school or off to college this Fall, a quality laptop makes all the difference between getting ahead and falling behind.

So you spend hours aimlessly wandering the aisles at Wal*Mart and scrolling through endless user reviews on Amazon with lots of confidence-inspiring speling erores and lol smileys, and all you get is more confused. Netbooks vs. tablets, laptops vs. iPads, Mac vs. PC, Intel vs. AMD — it’s a jungle out there, and every week there are eight new buzzwords to chase down. Who has time to keep up with this stuff?

I do.

So here’s the deal. I know you’re busy, so I’m going to cut to the chase and answer the five questions every parent has for me about which laptop to buy for back to school:

1. Is a student better off with a laptop, an iPad, or a netbook?

Laptop. It’s the only one of the three which can do everything students need for school. Netbooks are too underpowered, while the iPad, cool though it is, just isn’t there yet as the main computer a student can take to school and do things like print reports, produce multimedia projects, and view any online content the University puts up that has Flash video. So, the laptop is your best choice for your student.

2. Mac or PC?

You’re safe either way, so this is really just a personal preference. Know a few things going in: iPods, iPhones, etc. work just as well with Windows PCs as they do with Macs, so don’t be afraid to get a Windows laptop if your student wants to use it with their other Apple devices. And the new Windows 7 operating system is such a huge and welcome improvement over Microsoft’s disastrous Vista that any new laptop that comes with Windows 7 pre-installed will be just as easy to use right out of the box as any Mac.

3. How do you make sure a laptop lasts longer than a semester while away at school?

Buy a good protective laptop bag — it’s by far the best insurance you can buy for getting the longest life out of any laptop. Forget the ones at the store, they’re hip looking and all that but they offer no more protection than a pillowcase. You want a laptop bag your kid can throw onto a dorm room bed at the end of the day, drop from shoulder height, smack against the side of a bike for 8 straight semesters without so much as scratching the laptop.

I own and recommend Tom Bihn bags. I’ve been using these bags for years and they’re by far the best and most protective laptop bags you can buy. I carry my laptop in a Brain Cell strapped inside a Zephyr, but you can get by with just the Brain Cell if you want to use it with another brand of laptop bag, though why you’d want to do this is beyond me. Everything, and I mean everything sucks next to a Bihn. I’m rarely this one-brand-minded but really, in this category there’s a ton of garbage and one unicorn named Bihn.

4. How much should I spend?

$750. Yes, I already spec’d a price for you. $750. Spend less on a laptop and you’re asking for trouble, because it won’t be built as tough and it won’t last very long. Spend more on a laptop and you’re spoiling that kid rotten. Seriously, $750 is the sweet spot, the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to new laptops.

Here’s the laptop I would buy if I was sending my kid off to school — Acer’s new $750 Timeline X:

It’s the fastest and most powerful laptop on the market for anything close to $750. It’s got the bleeding-edge Intel Core-i3 processor, 320GB hard drive, 4GB RAM (that’s right, you don’t have to pay extra later on for a RAM bump), a gorgeous LED-backlit 14″ screen, 64-bit Windows 7, great onboard audio and integrated webcam, the whole nine.

But what really sets the Acer apart from the crowd is its sterling build quality. The TimelineX is built like a tank, like all Acers I’ve tested in recent years. You may think all Windows laptops are the same, and for the most part, you’d be right. But Acers are built better, with stronger materials and smarter designs. They look good, they work well, and they last longer than any other brand of Windows laptop I’ve tested to date. They’re the closest thing you’re going find on the Windows side of the aisle to the overall level of quality of Apple’s notebooks, and they cost significantly less than even the least-expensive MacBook.

With 64-bit Windows 7 and 4GB RAM, this Core-i3 Acer flies through whatever and however many apps I run at the same time. It’s a hugely powerful, seriously fast laptop, and and it’s the best you or anyone else is going to do this back to school season for your $750. My advice to laptop-hunting parents is take the TimelineX and run.

5. How can I ever thank you enough for saving me from having to stand near a blue polo-wearing fat guy smelling strongly of weed and salted vending machine snacks as he literally reads me numbers and specs from the same display card I am also standing directly in front of?

There’s no need to thank me, good citizen. Just knowing your child is properly outfitted with the right hardware is all the thanks I need. For our children are our future.

From Cyber Monday To Sufferin’ Succotash Saturday: Coping Skills For Media-Induced Holiday Shopping Insanity

Are you as sick as I am of media jackasses braying every third week of November about how you need to man up and get full-on Grand Theft Auto on everyone’s ass now that there’s only A WHOLE MONTH left to shop for Christmanukawanzafestivus?

In a few weeks we’re finally putting a period on the War Against Terriers Decade, and that’s as good a time as any to finally shake loose the shackles of annually-recurring end-o’-the-year Media Induced Holiday Shopping Insanity. Let’s just all agree that it’s over. Done. Finished. Old news, lame, massive phail, pwned, whatever idiot slang you kids are twitting these days.

Because let’s face it, we’re always going to scramble the week before the holidays to buy gifts for everyone on our list. It’s in our DNA. Even the Pope says we are all imperfect, and while we’ve certainly had our differences over the years (sorry Your Eminence but you’re just plain wrong about Oliver bringing a much-needed breath of fresh air to the Brady Bunch, his addition was a desperate ploy to shore up ratings at the end of the ride and frankly the fact that you rush to his defense speaks volumes), in this case we’re on the same page.

Nothing wrong with the last-minute scramble for gifts. Use it to Reach your Potential! Adrenalized panic is what jerks you forward through the slog because you know you’ve got to deliver and it’s the 11th hour and all the stores are out of the Star Wars Clone Wars Banta Neuticals every kid on your list asked for nay drew a line in the sand and stated flatly that if those giant furry polypropylene ovoids didn’t appear under the Christmanukawanzafestivus tree/bush/pole you were dead to them.

So let’s cut to the chase here. No more nonsense about “last minute shopping” — leave that to the blow-dried walking dead anchoring local news lite. From now on, we’re all about smart, targeted, calmly-deployed strategies for drama-free holiday shopping as you float like an unruffled feather above the teeming masses on the ground waving their Li’l Wayne licensed Glocks sideways and screaming over who saw this or that Fisher-Price piece of BPA-laced crap first.

RULE #1: AVOID THE DROID

You’re going to hear a lot of jibber about the Motorola Droid in the next few weeks, calling it this season’s “It Phone”. Except that “It” isn’t. The Droid may be the best Android-based smartphone yet, but that’s like saying Steven Seagall’s the best blues singer of all the martial arts movie stars who ever released an album. The iPhone’s still the best phone you can buy, but that’s beside the point. Buying someone a phone as a holiday gift is a really dumb thing to do. Think about it. “Merry Christmas! Think of me when you’re hassling with switching over to a new provider and paying the $175 early termination fee of your existing contract! And goodwill to all men!” This kind of hell should always be self-inflicted, never given as a gift.

Instead, go for something everyone would love to get for Christmas: a new laptop. This holiday season happens to the big Windows 7 rollout, with the first wave of desktops and laptops shipping with Microsoft’s new operating system already pre-installed. Windows 7 really rocks, and this is coming from a Mac user who despised Vista and XP and would rather run a Chumby than any PC loaded with those OSes. But Win7′s a horse of a different color. I really like it a lot — it’s clean, quick, stable, and a joy to use. I consider it a must for anyone still trapped in Microsoft’s older versions of Windows.

Gateway wins my vote for the biggest bang for the laptop buck this holiday shopping season with its brand new NV5302u 15.6″ notebook (this particular model is a special one Gateway sells only through Best Buy’s site and retail stores). This notebook is a real screamer and tears through applications and games, as well as it should with AMD’s Athlon II M300 dual core processor, 4GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics, and a superb widescreen 15.6″ LED-backlit screen. When you consider it also comes with Wireless-N 802.11n WiFi, webcam, dual-layer DVD burner, HDMI output, and a 320GB hard drive, it’s even harder to believe this laptop only costs $479. Really, I looked high and low, and nobody’s offering a better deal on a laptop this Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Sufferin’ Succotash Saturday than this Gateway NV5302u for $479. You want to make someone ecstatic this Christmas? Get them this Gateway.

RULE #2: GIVE THE GIFT OF SAVING MONEY

Like I have to tell you money’s tight all over. So what if I told you you could give your friend (or yourself) the power to save over a thousand dollars in 2010 and every year after? Would that make you guys happy? I gave myself this gift years ago and I’ve been saving that much and more ever since. How? By getting the Starbucks monkey off my back, that’s how.

Like everyone I know, I was dropping $5 a day on Starbucks. Most days I probably spent more, especially during that phase when I just moved to LA and discovered Frappacinos which I drank four of every day not reading the calorie count and then pretty soon thereafter my ass got too big to fit inside my car and I stopped drinking four Frappacinos a day. If you’re spending $4 a day at Starbucks, you’re actually spending $1,400 a year at Starbucks. That’s right. $1,400. A year. At Starbucks.

So I decided Starbucks was Satan which in fact it is and then I researched how to make the best possible cup of coffee at home so I could stop overpaying sullen kids wearing green aprons to do it for me while Nora Jones CDs played in the background. I read all the coffee geek sites, tested every coffee maker under the sun, and finally settled on Jura-Capresso as the best overall brand of home coffee makers. I’ve been using them ever since and have saved thousands and thousands of dollars while enjoying far better coffee, espresso, and cappuccino than I ever did from Starbucks.

Capresso’s got a brand new machine out for the holidays and I got it in for testing recently. it’s called the CoffeeTeam GS and it sells for $179. Forget anything Braun, Krups, DeLonghi, et al are selling for $200, $500, $750. Forget them all. This one’s better. A lot better. One thing I’ve learned over the years is whatever $200 coffee maker Capresso’s selling is vastly better than anything else in its class. And this new CoffeeTeam GS is their best one yet, even though they’ve dropped the price $20.

It all begins with the stainless steel conical burr grinder. This is where the magic happens. Because if you don’t grind whole beans right before you brew like Capresso does, and if you don’t grind your beans with a burr grinder instead of a whirring blade grinder which burns the beans before you ever start brewing and gives your coffee that patented burnt Starbucks taste, you simply aren’t going to get the kind of smooth, full-bodied, dare I say fine wine-like coffee that Capresso machines are known for. It’s just not going to happen.

If you don’t like making coffee at home because you’ve got a ratty old Braun or Krups, the CoffeeTeam GS will be a revelation to you. Friends who come to our house can’t believe how good our coffee is, and all I feed my Capresso are CostCo’s house beans (cross my heart). That’s how good this machine is. The thousands of dollars I save every year is just the crema on the cake. Jura-Capresso.

Rule #3: SLEEP BEATS ROCK, PAPER, AND SCISSORS PUT TOGETHER

A good night’s sleep is the most important thing in life. Nobody and I mean nobody you know, including you, is getting one tonight. Why? Because your bed’s too hot. Keeps you tossing and turning. You stick your feet outside the covers to try to cool off, and then your feet get cold, and then you toss and turn some more, and then it’s morning and you feel like you’re 80 years old.

The answer lies in space. To get the space shuttle astronauts a better night’s sleep, NASA developed a special material that equalizes a body’s temperature during sleep by absorbing heat from the body to cool you off, and then releasing it back to your skin if you get too cold. By keeping its shuttle astronauts at just the right sleep temperature, NASA was able to ensure that they all got perfect night’s of sleep every night of their mission. It didn’t make having to pee into a mylar balloon any more pleasant, but it made everything else better because a well-rested astronaut is a happy astronaut.

I’m a huge fan of Select Comfort’s Sleep Number beds. Best beds in the world at any price. I’ve written about them for years, put them on TV segments, and we bought them for every member of the family including the guest room. Once you lie down on a Sleep Number bed and dial in your own personal Sleep Number, you understand why people get so attached to these amazing high-tech beds.

So of course it’s no surprise that Select Comfort has licensed NASA’s special sleep material technology and put it in their new line of bedding. They call it In Balance, and it brings the same temperature-optimizing magic to your bed that it does for the shuttle astronauts. Keeps you cool when you’re too hot, warms you up when it’s too cold. Sleep Number In Balance products include mattresses, mattress pads, mattress layers, blankets, sheet sets, pillow cases, pillow protectors and even slippers from $29.99-$299.99

I thought our Select Comfort beds couldn’t be improved upon. I was wrong. Select Comfort

Greening Your Kitchen

In this Summer of Bummer ’08, roof-busting gas and food prices have kept many of us at home, staring at the car we don’t drive unless absolutely necessary and the milk we dare not waste on such things as topping off coffee or helping the kids grow stronger bones and teeth.

Want to put some money in your pocket today? Start greening your kitchen. It’s the most energy-hungry room in the house, and odds are you’ve got a bunch of appliances that are bleeding you dry every month whether you use them every day or hardly ever. In fact, most kitchen appliances (as well as most gear that plugs into the wall like TVs, stereos, cable boxes, video game consoles, the list goes on and on till your throat is hoarse and only dry dust rolls off your tongue) consume a significant amount of energy even when turned off. That’s right. Put your hand on the appliance, especially near where the power cord attaches to the unit. Feel warm? Say hello to watts you’re paying for 24/7 that aren’t doing a @%#$ thing for you except fattening your utility bills.

The good news: appliance makers are finally starting to take energy efficiency seriously enough to rethink how they design their products. Here are some good examples of new kitchen appliances that pare their energy needs to the bone without sacrificing performance.

Whirlpool’s new GU2800XTV and GU3600XTV dishwashers use one-third less water and energy than the company’s models from seven years ago — 20 gallons less per load, which adds up to 4,300 gallons you’ll be saving per year. The trick is increased water pressure, which breaks up food more efficiently. This new wash system and a soft-start motor help reduce noise, providing for the quietest operation of any of the manufacturer’s dishwashers. The appliances are Energy Star qualified and have a yearly energy usage of 299 kWh (GU2800) and 301 kWh (GU3600). Other features include a new nozzle configuration that delivers a fan of water to clean from all angles and cleaning power that adjusts to soil levels. 800.253.3977. Available at national retailers this fall starting at $699. Whirlpool.

My favorite coffee maker brand Jura-Capresso just announced their new eco-friendly ENA line of super-automatic coffee centers that combine best-ever coffee taste with a new focus on energy efficiency. The three new ENA models offer a true bean-to-cup experience, with single button operation and environmentally friendly features to save energy. The Swiss-made collection also offers high style, exciting new color choices and advanced features at entry-level prices.

When turning the ENA off, the patent-pending Smart Zero Energy Button lets the machine finish any beverage already in progress and then completely disconnects from the electrical outlet, using no energy whatsoever. For additional energy savings, the machine can be switched to Energy Save Standby Mode in situations where it is used infrequently. This reduces power consumption up to 40 percent.

The ENA models are the first in the Jura-Capresso line to feature a see-through bean chamber visible on top of the machine, romancing the beauty of fresh coffee beans. A built-in five-level conical burr grinder grinds the beans right before brewing for optimal taste. This high-performance grinder can be adjusted for regular or oily beans from fine to coarse simply by turning the chrome adjustment ring while the grinder is running. ENA machines can also brew pre-ground coffee to cater to those who prefer decaffeinated or other specialty coffee blends.

Because fresh, pure water is an essential element of great coffee taste, the new ENA models feature the CLEARYL Plus Water Filter that removes impurities and reduces scale deposits in heating elements. This filter can transform hard tap water into water that is pH-neutral balanced so it will not disrupt coffee flavor.

“ENA” means “number one” in Greek, for the number one choice for anyone who wants the ultimate in a compact model. The line includes the ENA 3 in Ristretto Black and Blossom White; the ENA 4 in rich metallic Platinum with Ristretto Black accents; and the ENA 5 with Chrome and rich metallic Platinum with either Ristretto Black, Blossom White or Coffee Cherry Red accents.

The Jura-Capresso ENA collection has an actual retail price range from $899 to $1,199 and will be sold at specialty and online retailers. Jura-Capresso.

Do you boil a lot of water to make tea and other hot drinks? Do yourself a favor and start saving money on every cup with Jura-Capresso’s cordless H2O Plus glass water kettle. Not only does it boil water ten times faster than a tea kettle on a stovetop, but it uses much less energy to boot. The H20 boils water fast, quietly and safe…then shuts off automatically. A gleaming stainless steel dome which is easy to clean covers the concealed heating element. The German-made SCHOTT heat resistant glass has ounce and cup markings for easy filling. $60. Jura-Capresso.

Google the Intertubes for “Going Green” and you’ll be swamped with articles extolling the miracle of eco-friendly illumination known as the compact fluorescent lamp, or CFL. “New Compact Fluorescents Finally Look As Good As Incandescent Light!” they’ll jibber. “Replacing Your Home Lighting With CFLs Will Make Dolphins Like You” they’ll jabber.

Bullshit, I say.

The “new” compact fluorescents are nothing but the same junk that’s been hurting our eyes and making us all look like the walking dead in offices for years. So they now make them shaped like a real light bulb — who gives a rat’s? They still throw the kind of harsh, flickering, unnatural light that makes everything look terrible. Like a gas station men’s room bathroom at 3AM. You ever look at yourself in a bathroom mirror lit with fluorescents? You want this in your HOME?! Hell no. You think Laurie David’s got CFLs at her house? Not a chance.

And you know what else? Forget vanity. I have a better reason for you to shun CFLs like lepers. Mercury. In every single serving of CFL, you get a heaping helping of MERCURY to do who the hell knows what to you and your family. Read the fine print on these so-called “eco-friendly” bulbs:

“Fluorescent lamps contain mercury. Mercury at atmospheric pressure is a silver colored liquid that tends to form balls. Mercury is a hazardous substance. When one lamp is broken, the best thing to do is to wear chemical resistant glove to clean it up. The gloves can be vinyl, rubber, PVC, or neoprene. The gloves you buy in the supermarket for household cleaning are sufficient. The gloves protect your skin from absorbing mercury and from getting cut by the glass. The remains of one lamp can be disposed as normal waste since the amount of mercury is small. However, for future reference, when large quantities of lamps are being disposed you must follow your state and the federal regulation for disposing of mercury-containing lamps.”

That’s from the web site of frickin’ GE, one of the biggest pushers of CFLs. And when your bulbs burn out, don’t even think about tossing them in the trash. The fine print says you need to take them back to where you bought them and they’ll recycle them for you. Uh-huh. I tested this by taking some CFLs back to Home Depot and told them I was returning them for safe recycling — you never saw a more slack-jawed, bewildered stare in your life. These people have no idea they’re supposed to take CFLs back and get them to the right (?) authorities who will somehow dispose of the mercury so it won’t leech back into the environment and poison even more kids. I asked the guy what he was going to do with the dead bulbs I gave him, and he said, “I don’t know, I guess throw them in the dumpster out back.” The less you know, the happier you are, especially if you wear a fucking orange smock all day.

If you told Kafka about this stuff, he’d laugh and say, “Naww, you’re makin’ this shit up. Not a chance. Nobody’s that stupid to push such a dangerous product as being good for the environment.”

So repeat after me: JUST SAY NO TO COMPACT FLUORESCENTS. Affordable LED bulbs will be here in a year or two, with excellent light and zero environmental baggage. The good old incandescent bulb can carry us a few more guilt-free years. You’re doing more for the planet by staying away from CFLs than you would be using the evil things. And the people who are pushing them are going straight to hell. Trust me. I know about such things.

Seagate FreeAgent Pro 1TB

I’m going to spare you my usual Grandpa Simpson “when I was a boy, dang nabbit” jibber about how my first PC had no hard drive at all, just a pair of floppy disk drives, and DAMMIT THAT WAS ENOUGH cough cough hack hack. I pitch this rant at any young ‘un within earshot whenever hard drive storage hits a new milestone, which it has yet again with the latest terabyte drives.

Think about that for a moment. A freakin’ terabyte. That’s a thousand gigabytes, sonny. Fine, so five years from now we’ll read this back and laugh ourselves silly because AT&T’s giving away free 1TB iPhones with a 2-year contract. But circa Q1 ’08, a terabyte hard drive is pure, hardcore geektastic. The biggest hard drive you can buy.

I’ve been rolling my own DIY external drives for awhile now using Vantec external drive enclosures from Newegg, which have worked flawlessly in my various computer systems over the years. You can usually save a few bucks by going this route but not everyone’s a geek like that. And quite frankly, I’d much rather be able to buy a ready-built external from the big boys if it was just as rock-solid and good looking as the DIY drives I’ve put together.

Seagate’s FreeAgent Pros have been the high-end external drives of choice since they hit the market. Visually, they’re way cooler than anything you or I can build. The enclosure design blows away anything else out there, hands down — the black aluminum FreeAgent Pro has a 2001: A Space Odyssey upright monolith thing going on that all but makes a silent mockery of whatever other external drives you’re currently hiding under your desk.

And now you can get this sucker with a 1TB Seagate drive inside. Really, just get one. It’s that simple. This is not a hand-wringer, a data-miner, a decision you need to obsessively research. Just get one, plug it into your PC or Mac, and be done with it. You’re not going to do better than this Seagate, I don’t care who you are and what parts you manage to scrounge together. At the end of the day it will cost the same or more, it will waste your time slapping it together, and it will look like, well, like a generic external drive instead of a FreeAgent Pro. Been there, done that. Now I use FAPs.

PC users will enjoy the easy-to-set-up backup software Seagate includes with the FreeAgent Pro — it works well, and is a good choice for someone new to the concept of external backup storage. Mac users like me don’t get any software freebies from Seagate — we just format the drive for OSX and use it with Time Machine, where it will sit there silently henceforth and free us up from ever having to worry about backing up our data again.

The FreeAgent Pro comes with three connection options, in ascending order of data speed — USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and eSATA. I’m guessing most of you don’t have an eSATA connection on your laptop or desktop computer, so use FireWire to connect the Seagate to your system — USB 2.0 is okay in pinch, but I find it inconsistent from system to system, and it’s definitely not recommended for any sustained throughput duty like video capture, etc. For straight backup drive duty USB 2.0 is more than adequate, but if you’ve got a free FireWire port on your computer, I recommend going that route instead. You’ll get faster data movement and a more reliable connection.

I’m not going to bore you with a bunch of unpacking photo porn (seriously, nothing creeps me out more than three dozen badly-lit Flickr pics of a gadget in the various stages of unboxing — what is WRONG WITH YOU STUPID KIDS?! 40 unboxing shots isn’t a substitute for actual hands-on expertise when reviewing a consumer electronics product. Or maybe I’m being Grandpa Simpson here.) Nor am I going to waste your time with a bunch of artificial hard drive benchmark tests that have zero real-world relevance beyond making you feel psychologically better about buying that Hitachi drive instead of the WD because someone you never met and whose expertise you haven’t a clue about set up both drives to perform a particular task that bears no relation to anything you or I will ever ask our hard drives to do. But we both know you’re above all that.

Interestingly, Seagate sells the same drive for the same price (though minus the eSATA option) as the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus. Makes sense since Seagate now owns Maxtor. The OneTouch is an upright slab too but not heavy black aluminum like the FreeAgent Pro, more of a brushed aluminum and black plastic offset wedge. Inside is exactly the same Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s hard drive that’s inside the FreeAgent Pro. I know because I cracked them both open and eyeballed the drives myself. Call me Cyber Columbo. Oh, and just one more thing — the AC adapters that come with these two external drives are identical as well, as is power draw. So if for some reason the black slab isn’t your thing and you’d rather have a more conventional looking 1TB external drive, you can have the same burger in a different bag with the OneTouch 4 Plus.

Some products are right for most people, and some products are only right for a select few, so I usually target my recommendations and couch them with caveats. But rarely is a product a must-have for anyone who’s reading these words on a computer screen, which means you own a computer, which most likely means you have no backup drive, just your main drive slowly running down the sand grains in the hourglass until it decides one day, when you need it the most, to crash and die and instantly delete all your photos, documents, and music. So listen to me here: buy this Seagate 1TB external drive. Don’t argue with me, just do it. Right now. Right this second. Here’s the link where I buy all my stuff. It’s the best money you’ll ever spend on your computer, and you won’t have to worry about your data for many, many years. Do you know how many people — good, honest, innocent people who’ve been good and supportive to me — I would’ve gladly killed with my bare hands to have a 1TB backup drive of this quality just a year ago? Didn’t exist yet. Now it does. I can’t tell you how much better I feel about everything in my life now, with a terabyte monster drive watching my back 365/24/7. Nothing bad will ever happen to me again, nor to you.