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App Magnets – $12.95
If you’re pining for apps, but can’t afford them expensive smart phones, then take heart: you can still get organized with this clever set of App Magnets – that’s right, they’re square refrigerator magnets, shaped like our favorite apps.Link
There are a lot of houses under foreclosure in Fresno, California, and many have cement ponds swimming pools that are currently empty. Instead of letting all that surface go to waste, skateboarders use the pools to test their skills, as we see in the short documentary Cannonball: Skating the Recession Pools by vimeo user California is a place. NSFW language. Link
Oh, Snap! Mousetrap Cheese Board and Slicer – $17.95
How do you lure people to come to your next wine and cheese party? Why, the same way you’d trap critters: with a mousetrap. Actually, it’s a beechwood cheese board and stainless steel slicer made to look like a giant mousetrap.
Link | More Fun Party Supplies from the NeatoShop
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Sculptor and engineer Stefan Bennedahl created a hook called the Clever Hook that truly lives up to its brainy name:
Neatly packed into a translucent acrylic housing, the wall-mounted Clever Hook has a self-grabbing mechanism that holds up to 40 lbs. When you hang a towel or jacket on the lower “arm” of the mechanism, the weight of the item automatically causes the top “arm” to come down and pinch the item in place; the heavier the item, the tighter the grab. To remove, slightly lift up the item, and the top arm will retract.
The Clever Hook makes it easy to hang things like towels that tend to fall off hooks, as well as items like jackets and coats.
Ms Food Face Kid’s Dinner Plate – $11.95
Got a fussy eater? Make meal time fun for toddlers with the Food Face and Ms Food Face Kid’s Dinner Plate from the NeatoShop. The heavy-duty high-fire ceramic plate has a blank face that your kids can decorate with their food (before eating ‘em, of course).
Every time I read of a home invasion robbery, or an in-the-window abduction of a sleeping child, I feel angry and also frustrated. Why should we be so vulnerable in our homes? I’m annoyed with architects. Why aren’t they designing homes in which we can at least relax and feel safe?
If architects won’t do their job, I’ll volunteer to step in and do it for them. Here’s an inverted, upside down single-family home. Do you see a problem with this? Do we really need windows on the first floor? Burglars, rapists and child abductors will not find it easy to get in! The tapered walls on the building shown on the left could even be coated with grease. Not shown are support pillars, embedded deep into the subsoil, that support the building and also afford space for a small basement. In case of fire, occupants either exit from the front door or jump from second-story windows into soft, deeply-tilled soil covered with ice plant or similar soft bedding plants. Note how bushes, potential hiding places, are few and kept trimmed small.
If living in an upside down home seems restricting or strange, there are other design solutions that can at least minimize one’s interaction with strangers, especially ones who might have criminal intent. Just as gas stations and mini-marts provide slide-out trays and bullet-proof glass to protect their employee-attendants at night, so can a Home Solicitor Interrogation Room be added to a single-family residence. A plus feature, not shown in the illustration, is the electronically-lockable front door. The resident, safe inside the home, is able to lock a criminal or criminals inside the tiny entry room, creating a holding cell until police arrive.
Another type of holding cell can be located underground directly in front of a fake front door. The real front door is located elsewhere, its location known only to friends and family. If the resident doesn’t like the looks of a person, he or she presses a button causing the porch to collapse into the cell below. Not shown is the ample padding that lines in the floor and wall of the brick-lined holding cell.
A deceptively simple yet effective design is the Home Perimeter Dog Run. Rather than setting an alarm when leaving the home for the day, or when retiring to sleep at night, the resident unlocks an interior gate, giving the dog full run of the entire balcony. Dogs are very sensitive to sounds and vibrations, especially those made by strangers. Should a criminally-inclined stranger step anywhere on the metal walkway, a large dog would leap out of its house and attack.
I worked on the problem of home invasion over several decades. The solutions that are shown above, drawn in the mid-1980s, seem silly today, but that was before there existed sophisticated home security systems with night-vision cameras, body heat detectors, and web cams.
A Swimming Moat would offer an opportunity for residents to relax in their pool, do laps or invite friends and neighbors over for a pool party. But at night, or when homeowners are away from home, the pool becomes a moat. Drawbridges are raised. Unauthorized entry is effectively discouraged, since burglars do not wish to contemplate climbing slippery walls in wet running shoes, balancing delicate electronic appliances overhead. Posted signs suggest the added possibility of serious electric shock. The sign would be false. If it were not, cats, dogs and squirrels – or drunk revelers who climbed the fence – would be electrocuted.
My favorite solution is the Underground Bedroom. The bedroom, located anywhere on the property, is approached through a secret passageway. In this example, residents enter at night through the door of a stacked washer-dryer machine (fake) and crawl down a sloped ramp. The bedroom is stocked with food, television, computer, VCR, phone and a very small toilet. This room is the quietest in the house.
Psycho
Shower Curtain - $15.95
Unless you've got this in awesome bathtub carved from a single slab of quartz, I'm guessing that you're taking showers in a regular ol' bathtub and you probably need a shower curtain every now and then.
May we offer our selection of really neat shower curtains to make your morning shower that much more awesome? From the NeatoShop:
 Jolly Rogers Shower Curtain |
Link: Shower Curtains from the NeatoShop
Flipper Guitar Spatula – $9.95
50% Rock, 50% Roll, 100% Silicone Spatula. Behold, the Flipper Guitar Spatula from our friends Gama-Go, available from the NeatoShop: Link
And please remember, don’t flip the bird like old cranky rockers. Flip your omelet with the Flipper Guitar Spatula instead.
Gin
and Titonic Ice Tray - $6.95
It's going to be a scorcher this summer, so be sure to get yourself some ice cubes. These unusual ice cube trays from the NeatoShop make for great gifts and ice breakers at BBQ parties:
Cold
Blooded Ice Tray makes ice cubes shaped like vampire fangs! $7.95
See many more cool ice trays over at the NeatoShop: Link
Alessandro Loschiavo Design created this column of shelves called "Levita" made to look like fluttering papers:
The shaped rod frame supports a series of hammered sheet metal planes,
whose distance one from another grows the higher up one goes. The effect obtained is like the imaginary levitation of a series of paper sheets, beginning from an A4 ream resting on the floor, through an entirety of thin vertical lines.
Previously on Neatorama: Walking Family of Tables by Alessandro Loschiavo
Babushkups – $17.45
This one is just so danged cute! My favorite new item from the NeatoShop doesn’t flash, dance or jingle, but it’s actually quite neat: the Babushkups is a set of 3 glasses or tumblers that save shelf space by nesting. Each is painted with a folklorish homage to a babushka doll or Russian nesting doll.
See also: M-Cups Matryoshka Russian Nesting Doll Measuring Cups
Have you ever considered putting a little Star Wars in your kitchen? How about a lot? Over at NeatoGeek, Jill has quite a collection of Star Wars-themed kitchen accessories and gadgets that might make your favorite chef smile -and then pull out a light saber to toast your marshmallows for you! Link
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Chakras are centers of energy and consciousness within the human body according to various Hindu traditions. There are six basic, physical chakras as well as a higher, spiritual one. This chair, designed by Karim Rashid, is made to accommodate those pressure points.
If you want thick and beautiful lawn, don’t reach for the fertilizer – go to the fridge and get some milk instead!
David Wetzel, a former steel executive, told a conference of farmers in Linn that when he started a second career as a dairy farmer in 2002, he doused parts of his 320-acre farm with skim milk, which was a byproduct of his farm’s specialty butters and cheeses.
He soon discovered that his cattle preferred those fields. He called in an expert to figure out what was going on, and the result was a bit staggering: His milk-fed land yielded 1,100 more pounds of grass per acre than untreated land. [...]
Wetzel said he began making butters and cheeses that required only the fats from the milk that his cows produced, which left behind large quantities of skim milk as a waste product. To dispose of it, he would drive up and down a portion of his pasture with milk pouring out of a tank. He dumped up to 600 gallons of skim milk on the field every other day.
"I came from a background that has nothing to do with farming," Wetzel said. "So I don’t know the do’s and don’ts. I don’t have any relatives that would say, ‘You can’t do that.’ So I just kind of did what felt right."
One day, he noticed that his cows favored that patch of field. The grass felt more supple and looked healthier and more dense in that area.
Recycled Bike Chain Bottle Opener – $9.95
Back in 1991, Graham Bergh got a flat tire while biking to work. Rather than throwing it away, he decided to use the inner tube as a cradle for his stereo speakers. That gave him the idea of creating a company that specializes in recycling bicycle parts into neat gadgets, like the recycled bike chain bottle opener above.
Take a look at more of what Graham’s company Resource Revival, makes over at the NeatoShop: Link
Photos by Zeon Santos.
Last week, my boyfriend and I went to the San Diego County Fair, previously known as the Del Mar Fair. We came with hopes of gorging ourselves on fried food and petting the myriads of livestock that are there to be judged. We left with sore bellies, hands that were surprisingly (and disappointingly) clean of animal germs and a full photo story of our day at the fair.
This year’s theme, “Taste The Fun,” left me eager to visit. After all, the best part of these events is a chance to try all the fried goods your belly can handle. Even better, because we went on a Tuesday, most vendors were offering a “Taste of the Fair” deal where one select item would only be $2.
I was eager to see what $2 deals most of the booths offered, but as we discovered, most of the deals were pretty bogus. You could buy half of a cinnamon roll that would ordinarily cost $4 for $2. Or you could get cotton candy, which was normally $2.50.
I have to admit, Mr. Tomato here had me disappointed by the time we walked halfway up the main drag.
Some of the places were even worse, offering $2 “tastes” that were literally a single bite of one of their dishes. I guess they thought it was a fair buy when they were already charging $14 for a basket of fried clams.
Regardless of the price though, the food is still one of the main attractions and these places were raking in the dough, particularly those places that offer more non-traditional fare, such as fried Snickers, Twinkies, etc. This place had a massive line all day. I think the light-up sign helped.
Surprisingly, the Heart Attack Cafe wasn’t that busy, but I suppose that was more due to its bad location than its lack of trendy foods. After all, it was the only place in the fairgrounds serving both deep fried butter and chocolate-covered bacon. The place sounded like a Neatorama post.
This was one of the two booths I finally chose to eat from. I’ve been dying to try deep-fried avacados for years and they were the only place selling them. While I was there, I also took a chance on the deep-fried s’mores. I do not regret telling you that I declined to try the Krispy Kreme custard donut chicken sandwich, which seems beyond revolting to me, despite its journalistic appeal. Have any of you tried it?
Baldi, an Italian company known for manufacturing luxurious home furnishings, made this bathtub. It was carved out of an enormous block of quartz found in Brazil. The tub will set you back over million dollars if you want to own your own:
The huge tub, 2 metres in length and 55cm in height was previously shown in Milan at I Saloni in April 2010 and is carved from a single enormous block of the purest white rock crystal, quarried in the Amazon region of Brazil. The block was discovered in 2006 when Paolo Baldi, father of the company’s current CEO Luca Baldi, learned of the existence of this ten-ton block of flawless crystal and had it extracted and transported to Italy intact.
This incredible bathtub is the second to be made from the immense block. The original was shown at Salone del Mobile in 2008 and immediately snapped up by a Russian magnate, but the tub featured in the Harrods window is by no means a replica of the first. Each is unique, though both were sculpted with diamond cuts and left partially rough to expose the natural beauty of the crystal. If you are thinking of snapping up this incredible tub, your pockets may have to be as deep as the quarries it is excavated from as it comes in at £530,000.
Link via Gizmodo | Photo: Luca Bojola
If you’ve ever fiddled with electronics, then you’ll recognize the photo above as resembling the classic Simpsons 260 multimeter. But rather than measuring currents, the oversized device is actually a clock!
Alan Parekh of Hacked Gadgets created this awesome clock that keeps time and outputs a calculated current to each meter to display the "current" time (get it?).
Check it out (with video clip of the clock in action): Link – Thanks Alan!
Designers Rui Pereira and Hafsteinn Juliusson, have created a collection of dining plates for HAF, that reminds us of the fundamental values of healthy eating.
You already have parents and/or kids telling you how to eat healthy. Now there are dishes that will nag you too?
Link – Via Coudal Partners
The following is an article from The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
Some things we use all the time seem like they’ve been around forever. They haven’t. Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader looks at how a few items came to be parts of our world.
BAND-AIDS (1921)
In 1921, Earle Dickson, and employee of Johnson & Johnson, married a woman who kept injuring herself in the kitchen.
* As he repeatedly bandaged her cuts and burns with gauze and adhesive tape, he became frustrated; the clumsy bandages kept falling off. So he decide to create something “that would stay in place, be easily applied, and still retain its sterility.” He stuck some gauze in the center of a piece of adhesive tape, and covered the whole thing with crinoline to keep it sterile. It worked.
* He made up a batch for his wife and took a few in to show his co-workers. The company’s owner, James Johnson, heard about it and asked for a demonstration-which convinced him to begin manufacturing the product.
* By the ’80, over 100 billion Band-Aids had been sold. Dickson, who became an exec at J&J, was amply rewarded for his efforts.
IVORY SOAP (1879)
(Image credit: Flickr user Stewf)
Harley Procter and his cousin, chemist James Gammble, came up with a special new soap in 1878. It was smooth and fragrant and produced a consistant lather… but it wasn’t Ivory-it was called White Soap-and it didn’t float.
* One day in 1879, the man operating Procter & Gamble’s soap mixing machine forgot to turn it off when he went to lunch. On returning, he discovered that so much air had been whipped into the soap that it actually floated.
* For some reason, the batch wasn’t discarded-it was made into bars and shipped out with the other White Soap. Soon, to their surprise, P&G was getting letters demanding more of “that soap that floats.” So they started putting extra air into every bar.
* Now that they had a unique product, they needed a unique name. And they found it in the Bible. Procter was reading the 45th Psalm-which say: “All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces…”-when it hit him that ivory was just the word he was looking for.
* In October 1879, the first bar of Ivory Soap was sold.
VELCRO (1957)
A young Swiss inventor named George De Mestrel went for a hike one day in 1948. When he returned, he was annoyed to find burrs stuck to his clothes. But his annoyance turned to fascination. Why, he wondered, wouldn’t it be possible to create synthetic burrs that could be used as fasteners?
* Most people scoffed at the idea, but a French weaver took him seriously. Using a small loom, the weaver hand-wove two cotton strips that stuck together when they touched. The secret: one strip had hooks, the other had loops.
* But De Mestrel had to figure out how to mass-produce it… and he needed tougher material than cotton, which quickly wore out.
* Years passed; De Mestrel experimented constantly. Finally he found a suitable material-nylon, which, it turned out, became very hard when treated with infrared light.
* Now he knew how to make loops by machine-but he still couldn’;t figure out how to mass-produce the hooks.
* Finally a solution hit him. He bought a pair of barber’s clippers and took then to a weaver. With the clippers, he demonstrated his idea-a loom that snipped loops as it wove them, creating little nylon hooks. He worked onthe project for a year-and when it was finally completed, Velco (“Vel” for velvet, “cro” for crochet) was born. The product had taken a decade to perfect. Image credit: Flickr user Janice Yuvallos.
POP-UP ELECTRIC TOASTER
(Image source: The Cyber Toaster Museum)
The first electric toasters, which appeared around 1900, were primitively constructed heating coils that were terrible fire hazards. However, they were a luxury-it was the first time in history that people didn’t need to fire up a stove just to make a piece of toast.
* There was a built-in problem, though-the bread had to be constantly watched or it would burn to a crisp.
* In 1919, Charles Strite, a Minnesota factory worker, got sick of the burnt toast in the company cafeteria. So, in his spare time, he designed and patented the first pop-up toaster. Then he went into business manufacturing them. It took years to work out the bugs, but by 1926, Strite’s “Toastmasters” were relatively fireproof.
* A few years late, a New York businessman purchased Strite’s company and invested heavily in advertising-which proved to be the key ingredient in making the toaster a common household appliance. Every home “had to have one” …and now they do.
________________________________
The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!
This was the winner over at Craftster’s current challenge to totally revamp a board game – and user KandeeCorner did just that by turning her garden to look like Candyland!
Each little micro garden matches the board game (more or less). They have a theme, smell, color and -where I could a taste made with interspersing herbs (lemon balm in the yellow garden), Licorice in the purple one, etc.
Link – via uniqueunusualandinterestingart
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
These Seletti “Palace” modular dinnerware pieces can be stacked to build a Florentine street scene. They add panache to any tablescape and they’d look great stacked anywhere in the house, not only in the kitchen.
Each Florentine-inspired “building” is comprised of six individual pieces, plus a serving dish as the roof. Even the interior of each dish has “architectural” detailing.
Link – Via Mr. Peacock
I must say I don’t always understand the purpose of certain furniture designs. My best guess is, much like the models who walk down the runway in ridiculous outfits, they are simply meant to serve as inspiration for the more mundane creations they spawn for the regular folk. Regardless, this is an interesting twist… a chair that’s useless by itself, but perfectly designed to integrate (and aesthetically enhance) any gross and uncomfortable chair you have lying around.
Titled the ‘Chair Dress’ by Design Studio Maezm, the actual product in this case cannot even be sat upon without bending too the floor – its soft frame and sofa-style is not sufficient to hold up your weight. However, the chair you place it over as a cover can (hopefully) pick up the extra pounds … and the ‘dressing’ has some basic structural rigidity from its thickness and shape.
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There’s a growing market in luxury mattresses. The most expensive made in the United States is the Palais Royale by E.S. Kluft & Co., which costs $33,000. It contains 10 pounds of cashmere and its coils are tied together by hand with Italian twine. The price only goes up for higher-end, imported European models:
At $69,500—roughly the price of a Porsche Cayenne S hybrid SUV—there’s the Vividus king-size mattress set from Hästens Sängar AB, of Sweden. Hästens says it takes 160 hours to assemble this mattress entirely by hand, which has a Swedish-pine frame with thick layers of horsehair, cotton, flax and wool inside. The company says since introducing the mattress in 2006, it has sold 250 of them world-wide.
There’s an arms race under way in the world of luxury mattresses that jittery economists and sluggish home sales seem unable to stop. Even at the middle-to-upper-middle tiers, mattress prices are creeping up as companies cater to mainstream demand for luxurious sleep.
Voon. At the link, you can view a cross section of the Palais Royale.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user aralbalkan used under Creative Commons license
British custom furniture maker David Fletcher makes capstan tables — tables that expand and contract radially. They’re handy in confined spaces, such as yachts. When the transformation is complete, the surfaces look quite seamless.
Big Daddy Tumbler and Dad’s Root Beer Tumbler
Need ideas for some cool Father’s Day gift? Your old man would surely appreciate these: the Big Daddy Tumbler (from San Francisco’s Speakeasy Ales & Lagers brewery) and Dad’s Root Beer Tumbler, glasses made by the artisan company BottleHood by "upcycling" beer and soda bottles.
For more nifty Father’s Day gift ideas, check out the NeatoShop: Link
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Psst! Want to live in your house without paying a dime in mortgage? Thanks to the US housing crisis, now you can – at least for a year or two.
More and more struggling homeowners are doing their own mortgage modification: they simply stop paying, and continue to live in their homes while the foreclosure process drags out for a long, long time:
“Instead of the house dragging us down, it’s become a life raft,” said Mr. Pemberton, who stopped paying the mortgage on their house here last summer. “It’s really been a blessing.”
A growing number of the people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of homemade mortgage modification, one that brings their payments all the way down to zero. They use the money they save to get back on their feet or just get by.
This type of modification does not beg for a lender’s permission but is delivered as an ultimatum: Force me out if you can. Any moral qualms are overshadowed by a conviction that the banks created the crisis by snookering homeowners with loans that got them in over their heads.
David Streitfeld of The New York Times explains why some homeowners are in foreclosure, and loving it: Link
For just $75 million and change, this 30-bedroom, 23-bath home near Orlando, Florida could be yours. It comes with a children’s theater, a roller rink, a baseball field, two tennis courts, three swimming pools, 11 kitchens, and a 20-car garage, and each of the 23 bathrooms has a fabulous view and a Jacuzzi. Who owns such a palace? A time-share mogul. He and his Florida beauty-queen wife, who employ a team of five nannies to take care of their kids, call the house "Versailles." According to The Telegraph, they’ve already had some interest from potential buyers in Russia and Asia, despite the fact that the house isn’t finished and will require another $25 million in construction costs before anyone can move it.
Local estate agent Kelly Price said “Versailles will probably be a house that will appeal to the uber-wealthy that don’t ever think about the issues of money.
“It might be a second or third. For all we know, it could be a seventh or eighth home.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
This dust bunny is one of the many household creatures that bedevil Christoph Niemann in this funny photo essay. You’ve probably seen some of them in your home, too! Link -via Boing Boing
A beautiful 1927 colonial-style waterfront home with 5 bedrooms, 3 and a half baths, and a ton of history behind it in Long Island can be yours for as little as $1,150,000. The home has had many owners, some more notorious than others.
The home gained its notoriety when Ronald DeFeos killed six family members while they were sleeping in 1974 and subsequent owners George and Kathleen Lutz claimed to be haunted for 28 days, which were detailed in the book “The Amityville Horror” (on the cover: “This book will scare the hell out of you”—Kansas City Star). However, James Cromarty, who lived in the house after the Lutzes were foreclosed upon, “Nothing weird ever happened, except for people coming by because of the book and the movie.”
Link to story. Link to listing. -via YesButNoButYes
