Any alcohol aficionado will attest that ice cubes melting into your cup of 20-year-old Scotch will put a big frown on your face. There’s no reason to chug it just to avoid the disappointment of diluted liquor, though. A very cool concept from designers Seung Hwan Roh, Chan Jae Joh, Yeon Ho Chu and Na Rae Park could chill your drink without the need for ice.

The Chilling Sip Stick is a digital straw that cools your drink as you sip it. The electronic device includes a cooling panel in the front side of the bottom end. As the liquid flows through the cooling panel, it lowers in temperature, making it tastier without watering down your delicious beverage.

The designers don’t offer up much information about how the stick actually works, but they call it “self-rechargeable.” They envision it as a possible marketing tool that corporations can brand with their information and logos to spread brand awareness. No matter how it works, we’re eager to get our hands on a pack of them.

The post Hi-Tech Straw Cools Your Booze Without Watering it Down first appeared on Gajitz.

So you’ve had a no-good, terrible, awful day. The kind of day that only cookies and milk can fix. But holding the cookie in the milk while it’s soaking? Ugh, who has time? Thankfully, someone heard our disgusted sighs and invented the most perfect answer to the lazy cookie dunker: The Dunkin’ Buddy (patent pending). This invention is a “hands-free cookie dunking device” that is “designed not only to save cookies from breaking and getting lost in your cup, but makes multitasking easier.” The inventors suggest that with your hands free from holding your cookies in a glass of milk, you’ll have more time for other hobbies like video games, homework, and working on your computer.

Basically, The Dunkin’ Buddy is a two-piece magnetic tray. The dunking chamber sits inside of your drinking cup and the magnet that holds it there sits on the outside. In theory, you fill the entire drinking vessel with milk and lower the tray into the milk via the exterior magnetic handle. You can then control how much milk comes into contact with your cookies, and the tray is even big enough to dunk two cookies at a time.

We had to do a lot of digging before we could be sure the Dunkin’ Buddy wasn’t an April Fools’ Day prank. Really, if holding your cookies in a glass of milk for a few seconds (up to 30 or more, according to the inventors, depending on cookie type) takes way too much time out of your day, you might actually be too busy to eat cookies and milk right now. Just put down the XBox controller and take a two-handed cookie break, muchacho.

But there are people who see this invention as a useful accessory to their apparently very important cookie eating. Lots of them, in fact. Although the Kickstarter campaign to fund the manufacturing of the Dunkin’ Buddy was unsuccessful, the product has since found a manufacturer and it’s being produced for retail sale. The inventors, Jason Wells and Kiana Machnicz, say that the final product will have a different design than the publicized prototype – but they aren’t revealing it until the product is ready for retail.

The post This is a Gadget for Hands-Free Cookie Dunking, Apparently first appeared on Gajitz.

When you cut into an apple without planning on eating the entire piece of fruit, you’ve got an ethical waste dilemma on your hands. Of course you can discard the uneaten fruit, if you want that on your conscience. Current preservation methods (plastic containers or bags, natural ingredients like lemon juice) have proved disappointing.

Enter Food Huggers, a surprisingly simple way to preserve fresh fruit or veggies. They are silicone caps that seal the open end of the fruit or vegetable, keeping oxygen out and preventing the food from turning brown. Smells can’t penetrate the material, so your whole fridge won’t smell like onion and your cucumber won’t smell like Chinese leftovers. They also reduce refrigerator clutter, as the halved fruit or vegetable lays flat and won’t roll around.

Food Huggers come in four sizes which overlap each other so that there is always a hugger to fit what you need to preserve. You can even put the little silicone caps on open cans of half-eaten soup, veggies or beans to keep them fresh without hassling with aluminum foil.

The post Hug Kitchen Waste Away With Clever Fruit + Veggie Savers first appeared on Gajitz.

Remember when going out to a bar or restaurant with your friends meant actually interacting with them? Since everyone has their heads buried in their iPhones and other mobile gadgets now, face-to-face interaction with other human beings has significantly declined. The Offline Glass is here to make sure you can either drink with your friends or fiddle with your iPhone – but not both.

Designed by Mauricio Perussi, Melissa Pottker and Fischer & Friends, the Offline Glass is basically a beer glass with half a bottom. If you try to set it down normally, it will tip over and spill all of that precious, precious beer. But if you put your iPhone under the missing part of the bottom, it will sit upright and let you both enjoy your libations and interact with the actual humans right in front of you.

There will always be some people who try to get around solutions like this, like by wedging something else into that void space so they can still use their phones. But the design is still a clever one that sends a message to those technophiles who can never seem to put their gadgets down long enough to enjoy the real world around them. The Offline Glass has been field tested in a bar in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and it’s currently in production to reach a wider audience.

The post Glass Forces You to Put Down the Phone +Talk with Friends first appeared on Gajitz.

Imagine taking the cling wrap off of your leftover casserole and washing it off for reuse. Sound gross? It probably does to most people, with the exception of that weird, cheap uncle you have. But with Abeego, doing this is not only clean but keeps your food fresh.

It’s a hemp and cotton fabric that is infused with beeswax and jojoba oil. Abeego is simply folded over the perishable part of your leftovers just as cling wrap or tin foil might be. It’s pliable and attaches when folded at room temperature, then becomes rigid and holds its shape when cooled down.

And unlike most other similar food coverings, it’s reusable indefinitely. Just rinse it out under cold water and Abeego will continue to keep things fresh. The green initiative has successfully reached your leftovers.

The post Reusable Cling-like Wrap Will Have You Asking for Seconds first appeared on Gajitz.