Big things come in small packages, they say.

“They” must certainly have a Roku 3 Streaming Media Player. It’s Spot Cool Stuff’s new favorite way to watch streaming videos and on-demand television — and cost-effective too.

It works like this: You connect the little Roku 3 box to the internet, either through an Ethernet cable or wifi. Then you hook the box up to your HD television^† via an HDMI cable. And — voilà — you are ready to watch television (and listen to music and play games . . . more on that in a moment).

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When Kia offered us the opportunity to test drive a 2013 Kia Sportage we were initially hesitant. Our blog, after all, is called Spot Cool Stuff. It’s not Spot Ordinary Stuff or Spot Reasonably-Well-Made-Low-End Stuff — “ordinary,” “reasonable” and “low end” all being terms we associated with Kia.

Yet the car company kept insisting that we give the Sportage a try (no strings attached). And, around this same time, it happened that we needed a larger vehicle for a family Spring Break trip we had planned to the Catskills region of New York state.

So that’s how it came to be that the editor of this website, his two children — an animal-loving 9-year-old girl and a studiously observant 7-month-old baby boy — together with their beautiful mother, piled into a Kia Sportage for an all-American family road trip.

What the whole group of us soon discovered is that the Kia Sportage is anything but ordinary. It certainly wasn’t low end. But it isn’t quite the perfect family road trip vehicle either. Our week-long test drive review:

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The computer mouse has been around for nearly as long as the computer has — the first trackball was invented as part of a secret U.S. government military project back in 1952!

Since then, there have been many variants of the mouse, with most new iterations better than the last. We’ve written before about the surprisingly well-designed Microsoft Arc Mouse. And we love (and always travel with) an Apple Magic Mouse. But somehow every mouse we’ve used also has something about it that doesn’t feel quite right. We couldn’t figure out what exactly that something was until we tried the Evoluent VerticalMouse 4.

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Over the last few decades, baby strollers have developed hipper designs and incorporated more rugged frames and lighter weight materials. But baby stroller technology (such as it is) has remained essentially the same as it was at the turn of the century — the 19th century.

Happily, the humble stroller now is starting to become a little less humble. (And just in time for Spot Cool Stuff’s first baby, too!) A handful of new stroller start-ups are recognizing that today’s mobile and tech-savvy parents want those qualities reflected in their strollers.

We’ll be publishing a post later on new stroller concept designs, some of which might make it into development and some not. For the moment, though, we are focusing on high-tech strollers currently on the market. Spot Cool Stuff’s top choice among those: the 4moms Origami.

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After nearly two decades of flat lining, the technology for washing and drying clothes has made substantial, incremental improvements in the last few years.

The marketing of clothes washers and driers? Not so much. The average advertizement still consists of a supermodel masquerading as a housewife who becomes unrealistically upset at the ketchup stain on her blouse — and then unrealistically happy after her washer supposedly removed it.

Leave it to GE, an innovator in home appliance technology, to be an innovator on the marketing front too. For their new High Efficiency Top Load Washer and Dryer, the company launched the cool new campaign: Stunning Feats of Laundry.

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