Author: dni

Useless Umbra Compact Dish Rack

This Umbra Compact Dish Rack is perhaps the most useless kitchen item I have ever purchased. One website claims “This self-draining compact dish rack from Umbra is a modern essential, especially well-suited to small kitchens with limited counter space.” Ha!

It is indeed an attracive and compact bit of folding plastic – that looks a little bit like translucent fish bones. And it is at a nice angle for draining. The problem is that dishes don’t stand up in it, as advertised, rendering it entirely useless for its stated purpose. Avoid.

David Pogue Likes Tiger


From Apple, a Tiger to Put in Your Mac

NYTimes’ David Pogue likes 2 features of “Tiger” enough to give it the tumbs up.

On Spotlight:

But with apologies to Mac-bashers everywhere, Spotlight changes everything. Tiger is the classiest version of Mac OS X ever and, by many measures, the most secure, stable and satisfying consumer operating system prowling the earth.

On iChat AV:

Mac OS X’s built-in programs have been upgraded, too. Of these, iChat AV, which permits free audio and video phone calls over the Internet, is the most spectacular. Up to 10 people can join a single audio conversation. And as long as one of the participants has a G5 Macintosh, four Tigered people with fast Internet connections can have a full-screen video chat. Your three partners, wherever they happen to be in the world, appear on three vertical panels, gorgeously reflected on a shiny black table surface. It may remind you of the flat, spinning panels that imprisoned the trio of villains at the end of “Superman II.” But it’s a jaw-dropping visual stunt that can bring distant collaborators face-to-face without plane tickets

On the other 198 features:

The rest of the 200 features don’t fall into any one visionary category; they’re an assortment of tweaks and upgrades that pile up like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan

Watching his little funny video stories is usally worth the trip, too. If we could only figure out why the NYTimes doesn’t use QuickTime to let you see them…