spotcoolstuff      tech

On a recent trip to Asia, Spot Cool Stuff met a fellow traveler who took “audio photographs” instead of your typical visuals ones. She took snippets of sound — bicycles bells chiming in Dhaka, birds chirping in a Thai rain forest, street vendors hawking their wares in Calcutta — as reminders of where she’d been. The sound quality of her recordings was stunning. And being the gadget-heads we are we had to know how she achieved such a professional sound while also traveling light. Her answer:

The H2 portable stereo recorder from Zoom.

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We were very skeptical that the Looj would be able to get our gutters anything close to clean. Household robotic machines, after all, are best at routine tasks like making coffee or grinding the beans to put into the coffee maker. Cleaning our gutters is anything but predictable. There aren’t only loose leaves up there but packed pine needles, twigs, rodents (both alive and not), sticks, mud, Frisbees and an old set of our car keys.

Enter the Looj, a miniature light-weight tank-like device fronted by a bristle capable of rotating at 500 RPM. The Looj’s handle doubles as the remote control. So cleaning your gutters is, theoretically, simply a matter of climbing up a ladder to your roof (the Looj comes with a belt clip so you can use both hands to climb), placing the device in the gutter, detaching the handle and using the remote control to send your Looj back and forth. This is also how it worked for us in reality — mostly.

The Looj is excellent at anything loose no matter the size. It had a harder time completely cleaning out anything that was packed down, especially mud. It did clear out some of the mud, enough to allow for the free flow of water (which is the point of cleaning the gutters, no?), but not as much as we would have doing the job by hand.

Then again, using the Looj is much faster than cleaning by hand. The ideal solution would be to use a Looj to clean your gutters more often than you would by hand, preventing anything from getting packed down to begin with. Now if only they’d back a robot to clean our windows.

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Spot Cool Stuff loves multipurpose gadgets. And LG has come up with an awesome one. First, it’s a portable DVD player with a 3 1/2 hour battery life and a clear 8″ screen. As well as playing all DVD formats (DVD±R/DVD±RW) the LG DP889 will play MP3s and all manner of audio CDs. Second, it’s a snazzy-looking digital photo frame capable of holding hold up to 250 photos loaded via a USB cord or SD card. The DP889 comes with a built-in stand to prop it up on your shelf and multiple settings for displaying photos.

So, use this device to watch a movie on your next long plane ride. Or, to display photos of your family back home. Or, to display photos of your family on your next long plane ride. Priced around $200.

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Confession: We’ve never liked GPS road navigation devices. The in-dash variety built into many cars these days are fantastic. But the add-on GPS units are clunky, with difficult-to-see screens and annoying user interface. (With apologies to Garmin, the usability of their products is especially sub-optimal to us). So it is with great delight that there’s finally a road navigation system we can recommend: the Navigon 2100 Max. Its best feature, easily, is the clear 4.3 inch touchscreen. The text-to-speech driving directions also work remarkably well. And the sleek profile (.7 inches, 1.8cm) means this unit is anything but clunky. $299 list, but click here to check for a discounted price.

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Before Spot Cool Stuff headed for a month-long stay with the family on the coast we picked up a the new version of Amazon’s Kindle electronic reading device. We are big readers. Instead of packing a small library of bulky novels (and one travel guidebook) we loaded our Kindle with all our literature. The Kindle, we soon found, was also able to replace our need to buy paper newspapers.

As we write this review it is a month later and we find ourselves on an airplane headed home. What we learned about the Kindle during that time was this: It is really cool. (Hence the review here and not on Spot Mediocre Stuff). In fact, the Kindle has reach that highest Parthenon of devices we consider a must-have. But before you shell out $350 on your own Kindle you should know that it does comes with a few downsides along with its superlatives. Read on for more . . .

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