If you want to add great sound to your home theater without breaking the bank you’ll be glad to know JBL just announced their $399.95 Cinema 610 5.1 Home Theater and $299.95 Cinema 510 speaker system. Both are 5.1 stereo systems with powered subwoofers and JBL sound. Check out the Cinema 510 and the Cinema 610. Both ship this month.
We’ve all been there, one of your socks, probably from your favorite pair, goes missing. The sock monster strikes again! Sock Snappers is funding on Kickstarter now to help keep your sock pairs together while washing and drying. These ingenious little snaps clip onto your socks and allow the socks to snap together so they won’t be separated. The plastic snaps clip onto your socks, and they remain there without any special tools and are made of soft plastic material so you won’t even feel them while wearing your socks. Before you put them in the laundry basket, snap the…
RedSeat Entertainment recently introduced its new TremorFX Home Theater seats, which are perfect for any home theater setup. These seats vibrate and pulsate to correspond to the movie’s soundtrack. TremorFX seats use audio processors and wireless transmitters to bring the sound from your receiver straight to your seat. An available HDMI-Out jack on your receiver is all that’s needed. The TremorFX seats can even be used for gaming as long as the video game is run through your receiver. I’m a huge movie buff and these chairs look incredibly comfortable and would absolutely enhance my enjoyment of my movies. Now,…
If you like smoked meats, then, well I guess we can be friends. But not everyone has the room for a big wood-fired smoker or the time to tend the fire for a long cooktime. For convenient home smoking and consistently delicious reults, the Masterbuilt 30-inch Electric Digital Stainless Steel Smokehouse might just be the solution for you!
The WiFi signal in our bedroom has been terrible ever since we moved into our new home. Due to where the Verizon FIOS service enters the house, the wireless router is on the opposite side of the house, and I’ve tried many WiFi extenders to no avail. Finally, my brother-in-law recommended the Windsurfer parabolic WiFi reflector, and it works beautifully! The instructions included in the website linked above are very simple, and all you need is some printer paper, aluminum foil, scissors or an X-Acto knife, and either some tape or glue. You download the template from the website linked above,…
Pet tracking devices have been something of a mixed bag in my house. We tested the Spotlite, which worked well even if it was a little bulky, and the Tagg, which single-handedly gave me as many gray hairs in one malfunctioning afternoon as three months of parenthood has managed. Still, the concept is a good one, and more companies are entering the growing pet tracking market. eTrak, which has a great deal of experience in GPS tracking, is debuting their PetTrak product today! It looks and functions similar to the other devices we have tested, a small device attaches to…
Is it time to replace your leaky old showerhead and bring your bathroom into the 21st century? Then you should check out the Kohler Moxie Showerhead + Wireless Speaker. This clever design includes a removable Bluetooth speaker that magnetically inserts into the middle of a 2.5 gpm showerhead with 60 nozzles; its style will look great in any bathroom’s decor. When I was offered the chance to review the Kohler Moxie, there were two things that immediately went through my mind: the first was that I needed to replace the leaking showerhead in our master bathroom anyway, and the second…
Do you lack a green thumb, but like fresh vegetables? Have only a small space in your yard but want a garden? If so, the good folks at Nourishmat have a special package for you! At $64.95 for the base model, the Nourishmat comes with a weed-barrier mat with plant templates for seeds and step-by-step instructions—perfect for beginners! It is ingeniously simple. Using the companion planting technique, the neat little package helps simplify gardening for busy folks or people with limited space. Everything from seeds (82 seedballs with 19 different garden plant types), garden mat staples to plant location and spacing is…
If you’ve ever dabbled in small home improvement projects, wanted to fix a damaged item or just mold something to a desired shape to hold something, Sugru might be just the thing for you. Perhaps falling somewhere between ubiquitous duct tape and super glue, Sugru is a moldable, self-curing rubber that can bond to a variety of surfaces and is electrically insulating, so clever techies can patch broken cable housings in sundry chargers, adapters and the like. Starting at $10 for a pack of 3 to $18 for a pack of 8, Sugru could be a MacGyver-wannabe’s new best friend. Check…
If you’re a wine drinker that occasionally can’t quite finish that great bottle, you’ve probably been confronted by the problem of vino that just isn’t so keeno the next day. Luckily, Coravin is here with a novel new solution. Thanks to the manufacturer’s ingenious invention, it’s argon to the rescue! I recently got a note from a p/r agency that read, in part, “Don’t you hate it when you just can’t drink all of that bottle of great wine and worry that it will go bad before you can finish it?” Wait, what? “Can’t drink all the bottle?” I am…
Petzila is rolling out the PetziConnect, a webcam and treat dispenser designed to let you interact with your pet, even when you’re not home. Hey, it beats dogTV! My dog routinely outsmarts us. He figured out long ago that he gets treats for two reasons: someone’s at the door, and we don’t want him to eat them, or we’re leaving, and we want him to go lay down on his bed and be a good boy. Bribing him when guests are over is easy since we can keep an eye on him, but the problem with the treats+leaving combo is…
This is a bit of a departure from my normal reviews here at Gear Diary, but I’ve come across some interesting and unique products from the commonwealth of Virginia that are worthy of sharing. Read on if you’re interested in nut butters from Reginald’s Original, hickory syrup from Wildwoods, or the latest release from AOL, Early Mountain wines. In my day gig as a food writer, I get lots of sample products to review. In fact, my UPS and Fed Ex guys must think I’m a lonely old drunk since I have to sign for liquor deliveries a few times…
I work out of my house. Well, I guess more accurately, I work in my house, so I usually either meet friends out for lunch somewhere or I eat at home. I don’t have a lot of need to carry a meal anywhere and keep it hot or cold. So when the offer came to check out the Sachi Insulated Food Bags. I figured it might make more sense for my girlfriend to run it through its paces. She’s a kindergarten teacher who takes her lunch to school every day and only has about 15 minutes to eat, so premade…
My son may be small, but he has quite a bit of gear amassed already. Bottles, pacifiers, “soothing vibration” in just about any accessory he can lay or sit on…he’s got quite the stash of baby stuff, all of which is constantly being refined and retooled by manufacturers as design and technology improve. Even items that most people think of as “old-fashioned”, like cloth diapers, have undergone a major revolution and style change. Since disposable diapers are both pricey and not great for the environment, Sarah and I are anxious to try our hand at cloth diapers. However, there’s what…
I didn’t think I would see the day when I wanted to return to having a pair of computer speakers, but a new computer and Logitech’s new Bluetooth Speakers Z600 may change all that. Yes, now that I once again have a MacBook air my MacBook Pro will likely become more of a desktop computer than anything else. Suddenly I want good desktop speakers again. The timing is perfect since Logitech’s new Bluetooth Speakers Z600 are about to hit the market. Tall and thin, the stereo speakers are designed to look good when sitting next to today’s stylish computers. And…
I’m writing this review from Dan’s lake house in Pennsylvania, where Gearfest 2013 is about to kick off. That bit of geographic detail is important for two reasons. First, when I arrived here yesterday, it was the first time in weeks that I had reliable internet service, as I recounted in this post, I’ve been battling the rural Texas connectivity fight and losing badly. No internet has meant very little posting. More to the point in this review, no internet has meant that I had no way to test out the Amped Wireless repeater I’d been sent to review. After all,…
When I first saw the ZAGG Origin 2-in-1 Bluetooth speaker I was intrigued. The Origin looks like a large gray plastic desktop speaker with the ZAGG name proudly displayed on the front. It is, in fact, a large gray plastic desktop speaker with the ZAGG name proudly displayed on the front. But that is only part of the story. Grab the middle portion of the large gray plastic desktop speaker’s back and the ZAGG Origin breaks into two pieces. You see, the ZAGG Origin is both a large desktop speaker and a small portable speaker. When the two pieces are together they…
As a food and drink writer, I get the opportunity to try out a lot of gadgets that purport to make my drinking life easier. Not that I don’t appreciate them, but the drawers of my liquor cabinet are full of things to cool my drinks, tools to aerate and decant wine, strainers, bottle stoppers, collars that fit around bottlenecks to prevent dripping and strainers to filter out the sediment in aged wines. It’s frankly getting to be a bit of a mess in there, and I usually just keep the drawer shut. So I was quite excited to hear…
Wilson Electronics recently featured their electronic/technology products in a specially packaged “21st Century Survival Kit”. Gear Diary has tried Wilson Electronic products before, especially in emergency situations, and I recently tried out the six items in this well-chosen package – a great guide as you shape your own emergency tech kit. This 21st Century Survival Kit considers communication and sustenance ranging from minor snafus to major disasters to help yourself and others while communicating vital information to first responders. “We began thinking about what has changed in technology and society, and how that would affect what we would want to…
I like to try to ride my bike whenever I can in an effort to burn off some of the extra pounds that I put on in my gig as a food writer. I have a Litespeed Titanium road bike that I ride for fitness, but it’s not very practical for in town use, especially since I use Speedplay pedal clips that make it almost impossible to walk in the specialized shoes when you’re not on the bike. So for just getting around town or riding to the YMCA and back (where I then go to a spin class ……
There are several people in my family who have hearing troubles, some more severe than others. For instance, my mom started having degenerative hearing loss when she was in her early 20s, and for as long as I can remember she has worn hearing aids. My daughter, Sarah, has always had problems with certain tones; she has trouble discerning what people are saying if they don’t speak clearly or if they mumble, and she has used the closed caption setting on her TV to watch movies since she was 15 or so. I’ve had Sarah’s hearing tested, and although it’s…