Month: March 2013

Posted on

Clean Bottle

By (author unknown), Cool Tools – June 16, 2010 at 12:27PM

The Clean Bottle is a 22-oz sports water bottle with removable bottom. It is one of those products that seems like a no-brainer the instant you hear about it.

Many athletes put electrolyte/endurance/recovery drinks into their bottles. Some of those bottles inevitably get forgotten in the bottom of a bag, under a car seat, or in a closet where they develop lush colonies of mold and bacteria which are impossible to clean out completely, so the bottle gets tossed. With the Clean Bottle you just unscrew the bottom, scrub the pieces and you’re back in business; no moldy residue left to taint your drink.

I train 6-7 times a week, and while I haven’t forgotten a dirty bottle in my car, I did leave one there on purpose for a week. It molded up as expected but was a cinch to clean out. I’ve been using the bottles for about 3 weeks and so far I’m very happy with them, as are the friends I’ve recommended them too.

At $10.00 each they aren’t cheap, but the savings from not having to replace dirty bottles (as well as keeping that plastic out of landfills) offsets the price.

The bottles are BPA-free.

— Galen Pewtherer

Clean Bottle
$10

Available from REI

Manufactured by Clean Bottle

[Note: You can purchase them directly from Clean Bottle where if you order four you qualify for free shipping, and if you order five they thrown in an extra bottle to boot. — OH]

Posted on

Cellphone Dock Ignition Lock Keeps Your Kid from Texting and Driving and Wrapping the Family Car Around a Tree

By Andrew Liszewski, Gizmodo – March 18, 2013 at 09:06AM

If you absolutely can’t trust your kid to avoid texting while he’s driving the family car, the ORIGOsafe provides a brute-force way to keep them focused on the road. It’s a smartphone dock that prevents a vehicle from actually starting until a phone is inserted, ensuring the distraction remains out of sight. More »

Posted on

Jettison Automatically Ejects External Drives When Your Mac Goes To Sleep

By Shep McAllister, Lifehacker – March 17, 2013 at 02:00PM

Jettison Automatically Ejects External Drives When Your Mac Goes To Sleep OS X: Jettison is a handy Mac utility that runs in the background and automatically unmounts external drives when you put your computer to sleep.

While it’s usually okay to yank out USB drives without ejecting them, you probably shouldn’t get in the habit. OS X still uses write caching on external drives when the system is asleep, so you run the risk of corrupting data if you close your MacBook and pull out an SD card or external hard drive. With Jettison enabled, your computer will force eject all of your drives immediately upon sleeping, and will even remount them automatically when you return.

I constantly forget to unplug everything before closing my computer, so Jettison saves me the trouble of waking the machine up, keying in my login password, and ejecting the drives manually. If you have the same problem, Jettison can solve it for $1.99.

Jettison ($1.99) | Mac App Store

Posted on

FindTheBest Compares Almost Anything Online to Find Your Best Option [Video]

By Adam Dachis, Lifehacker – December 02, 2010 at 02:30PM

FindTheBest is a comparison engine that lets you browse or search for almost anything and provides an unbiased overview of your options so you can choose the right one for you.

In the way travel sites like Hipmunk provide unbiased flight search results, FindTheBest attempts to do that for practically anything on the web. Suppose you’re looking for the best blogging platform and our Hive Five on the subject didn’t quite do it for you. Search for blogging software in FindTheBest and you’ll end up with a page like the following:

FindTheBest Compares Almost Anything Online to Find Your Best Option
(Click to enlarge.)

At first it’s a pretty daunting list of your options, but on the left side of the page you’ll see a list of checkboxes, a cost slider, and other options so you can narrow down your comparison grid based on things that matter to you.

FindTheBest isn’t limited to just technology stuff. You can search and compare just about anything, from pet breeds to vacation spots to the best colleges for a particular course of study. Of course, if you’re shopping for the holidays and want to compare a few products it can definitely handle that as well. FindTheBest is currently in beta and available to use now for free.