tech talk:
Gadgets & Gizmos

Carl.Lorimer, 2011-05

More Important Than the Printing Press

For a tiny nation in the middle of nowhere, New Zealand has certainly held its own. Edmund Hillary conquered the top of the world, AJ Hackett gave us bungee jumping and now the plucky Kiwis are at it again. Ian Williams and Anders Warn are two names that will be heralded through the ages for finally perfecting the all-in-one home beer factory. The WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery is a sexy, stainless steel machine that produces pints of home-brewed beer in only seven days. After a few simple procedures to start the process, all that is required of the operator is to occasionally check the pressure and the divine apparatus takes care of the rest. Move over Gutenberg.

Price: RMB 29,500. Web: www.williamswarn.com

Pyre-mania

Every year around this time, many males suffer from an obsession psychologists diagnose as ‘grill season’. Primary symptoms include the crippling inability to talk about anything but meat and the barbequing thereof. Suggested treatment includes purchasing a shiny new ‘grilling system’, sitting back and enjoying the delicious results. Named after a Viking castle, the Fyrkat is a stylish conical charcoal grill from Bodum that provides everything one needs to properly char meat, without getting too carried away. It’s both easy to cook with (including rotisserie) and simple to clean – not to mention it comes in a choice of three fetching colours and black.

Price: RMB 1,310. Web: www.connox.com

Spool Tool

It seems like only yesterday when we spent long hours taping love songs off the radio, only to be summarily rejected the next day by a crush who failed to see the value in a mix-tape full of heart-felt pop. The last documented sighting of a cassette player was in 1997, but in many cases the tapes still survive in long forgotten corners of our past. The Cassette Mate, a genius piece of Japanese wizardry, drags the medium into the 21st century by easily digitising cassettes into MP3s. You always knew there was a reason why you didn’t throw out that 80-tape set of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare!

Price: RMB 235. Web: www.thanko.jp

Digital Slab

RIM, the Canadian makers of the biz-essential BlackBerry, recently tossed their hat into the tablet ring with the release of the 7” PlayBook. Financiers have been anticipatorily drooling over this baby, hoping to play Brick Breaker in sharp, glorious colour in between dreaming up financial products with no basis in reality. Its small size makes it much easier to roam with than an iPad, and the three micro-ports, Flash-capability and bridging ability with BB mobiles are added bonuses. China Mobile, the official partner of BlackBerry in the country, should start carrying them soon, or pick one up at your local electronics bazaar.

Price: Starting at RMB 3,260

VIDEO GAME OF THE MONTH

Portal 2 – Mac, PS3, Xbox360, PC

When Valve released their award-winning The Orange Box what seems like ages ago, the surprise hit of its five bundled games was the first-person puzzle-platformer Portal (try saying that five times fast). Players ran around a quirky science facility attempting to navigate levels of puzzles using only teleportation and one’s brain, while being increasingly terrorised by GLaDOS, a computer system gone mad. Four years later in the real world, hundreds of years later within the game, the sequel continues the story where the original left off – the Aperture Science Facility you never quite escaped, now overrun by nature and decay. Once again you’ll be tasked to use your noggin and portal-creating gun to escape the evil designs of the repaired AI. Although the original game suffered from all too brief game play, with both single player and cooperative modes, Portal 2 is five times longer. It’s also notable that in this day and age where bloody video games are king, this game doesn’t even give you the option of killing anyone.