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Class up how you serve boxed wine

Wine snobbery aside, there’s nothing wrong with boxed wine, but you have to admit those boxes aren’t the classiest items to grace your party buffet.  These shiny, wood-grain spheres can hold up to 3 liters of wine, and they look much nicer than any cardboard box.  The Wine Dispensing Sphere can be used with the plastic bag from the box, or you can use the included 3-liter plastic bag for your own wine.  There’s also a gel pack to keep the wine chilled.

The Wine Dispensing Sphere is made of wood-grained plastic.  It measures 8″ in diameter by 9″ tall and holds 101.44 fluid ounces.  The Dispensing Sphere is $65, and a set of two replacement bags is $8.00.  Purchase at UncommonGoods.

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Class up how you serve boxed wine originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on May 4, 2018 at 4:30 pm.

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Easily clean pet hair off of carpet with the OXO Good Grips Furlifter Carpet Rake

Pets shed a lot. Enough to make you think you could make a completely new Fido with all that fur, right? And cleaning up all that fur is the pits. It’s worse if your home has a lot of carpeting because that means you have to pull out the vacuum. If you dread this torturous task, you may want to try the Oxo Good Grips Furlifter Carpet Rake.

The Furlifter Carpet Rake is a double-sided microfiber brush that you pull across your carpet to pick up pet hair. To clean it, you pull the brush into its bin then push it out. No refills required! It stores in an upright position when retracted into its bin. Reviewers on Amazon have said that it works really well, but needs to be cleaned often, has a short handle, and you have to scoop the fur out of the bin instead of being able to just dump it out. The Oxo Good Grips Furlifter Carpet Rake is available through Amazon for $32.59.

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Easily clean pet hair off of carpet with the OXO Good Grips Furlifter Carpet Rake originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on May 3, 2018 at 11:00 am.

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IKEA is offering a connected home lighting kit and accessories

If you want to introduce an internet-connected home lighting kit for a reasonable price, and you don’t care about color-changing bulbs, you need to check out the Tradfri kit from IKEA.  Of course, these lights come with a smartphone app (Android Kitkat 4.4 or Lollipop 5.0 or Apple iOS 8 or later), and it’s Apple HomeKit compatible, but this kit also comes with a remote control so all members of the family can easily control the lights.

The kit includes a gateway, the previously-mentioned remote control, and two E26 standard-base LED white-spectrum light bulbs.  The included bulbs have 980 Lumen luminous flux at 2700K color temperature.  You’ll use the Tradfri app to create and control lighting groups for your home.  There are other bulbs that can be added to your home kit, including chandlier-base bulbs ($14.99), GU10 bulbs ($19.99), and 950 lumen clear-topped or 980 lumen frosted-top E26 ($17.99) bulbs.  IKEA doesn’t specify a maximum number of bulbs or lighting groups that you can add to your gateway.

The Tradfri Gateway Kit with two bulbs and a remote control is $79.99 at IKEA, with additional bulbs priced as shown above.  IKEA also offers dimming kits, motion-sensor kits, and other accessories for the Tradfri system.  The kit is available at IKEA stores or at the IKEA website.

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IKEA is offering a connected home lighting kit and accessories originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on April 30, 2018 at 8:00 am.

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Easily crack the top off soft- or hard-boiled eggs

I only eat hard-boiled eggs, but I’ve always loved the dishes and the style of eating soft-cooked eggs still in the shell while they are cradled in an egg cup.  I periodically think about getting some nice egg cups and setting my peeled hard-boiled egg in one while I eat breakfast.  But I’m going off on a tangent…  I really wanted to tell you about how you can easily crack and remove the top of the shell if you do eat soft-boiled eggs in the shell from an egg cup.  Instead of using your knife and tapping around the egg’s shell to crack and remove the top, you can just use the Rösle Stainless Steel Egg Topper with Silicone Handle to remove it with one movement.

Just set the Rösle over the top of the egg, pull back the handle and release.  The spring mechanism causes vibrations, and the sharp edge in the dome perfectly cuts the shell, so you can just lift it away.  It works to open both soft- and hard-boiled eggs.  

The Rösle Stainless Steel Egg Topper with Silicone Handle is $16.95 at Amazon. 

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Easily crack the top off soft- or hard-boiled eggs originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on April 24, 2018 at 8:00 am.

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Aicook Blender, 15-Piece Smoothie Blender Mixer review


What is it?

The Aicook 15-Piece Blender is a portable blender that is designed to blend fruits, and vegetables, and many other ingredients that are used to create smoothies or health drinks, etc.

What’s in the box


Package contents:

1 x High torque power (Base unit)
1 x Stainless steel flat blade
1 x Stainless steel cross blade
1 x Tall Cup
2 x Short Cup
1 x Shake and take Cup
1 x Sip & seal lid
2 x Stay fresh re-sealable lid
2 x Handled lip ring
1 x Recipe guide
1 x Instruction manual
1 x Service card attachment

Design and features

The first thing that I noticed about Aicook Blender is its similarity to the Nutribullet Blender. The base unit is the same in size (circumference), height, and weight, and almost identical in design.
The cups are also very similar and of the same material, but my Nutribullet did not come with a stainless steel flat blade. The blades and housing are almost identical as well, with the exception of their weight and how solid they feel. The Aicook blades and housings feel much lighter and not as well built.

On to testing:

In my household, eating healthy is an everyday endeavor, so ingredients are always readily available. We started with the cross blade and a fruit combination of watermelons, and bananas, and within seconds the Aicook pulverized the fruit into a just about perfect drink, and it did so in a third of the time that it takes the Nutribullet to do the same job.

This was really exciting since it did the job in about 30 seconds and there was no undesired pulp to strain. We tried the same blend again with additional fruit and milk to make a milkshake, but since there is only one speed, we were unable to get the thick milkshake texture. It was either it needed to be blended more because chunks of fruit still remained, or a few seconds later, it was complete liquid.

Nevertheless, we were very happy with the way it blended our health drink mixtures.

We use a lot of almond products in our health food creations, and in many cases, we use the Nutribullet to blend almond nuts into a flour type mix, that we then use to make various dishes.

Since this was a test, we used just a small amount of almonds with the flat blade.


We blended them for about 30 seconds, and we could see the almonds being blended into a nice texture, of what we call our version of almond flour or meal. After checking the texture, we blended for 30 more seconds and it was just about done with the exception for a few almonds.

We were very happy with the mixture and we figured that it only needed about 15 more seconds of blending. We put it back on and started to blend but in about 10 seconds we heard a pop and there was a strong smell of burning rubber. Lo and behold, when we took off the cup, the rubber gear (or what seems to possibly be some composition of rubber and/or plastic) that engages to perform the blending had broken apart. This was very disappointing since otherwise, the blender performed amazingly well and handled tasks much faster than the Nutribullet.


Based on this issue, we decided not to risk any further testing.

What I like

Despite the failure of the flat blade and its housing, I really like this blender. It works at a great speed that does the blending job very quickly, and it blends to liquid form very quickly and effectively. The base unit is solid, and the set comes with all of the accessories that anyone would need.

What needs to be improved

The only complaint that I have about this blender, and it is a major one, is the quality of the blades and their supporting housings. Not only does the quality need to be better, but if it is the case that the part I received was simply defective and not a good representation of the usual quality, then the quality control needs to be much better. And, since the blender is capable of such great speeds, the ability to have a speed selector would be a plus.

Final Thoughts

The Aicook Blender has all of the potential to be a great product, and at its price point it is very competitive. While the base unit is well built, it seems that they skimped on the build quality of some of the other parts, possibly to keep the cost down. While I had the unfortunate experience of the equipment failure, I still like this blender and I may purchase a replacement flat blade (if available), and try it again.

Price: $65.99
Where to buy: Amazon
Source: The sample for this review was provided by Aicook.

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Aicook Blender, 15-Piece Smoothie Blender Mixer review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on April 18, 2018 at 10:00 am.

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