Washing Up Brush

When my girlfriend suggested buying a pack of two washing-up brushes from the Lakeland shop on George Street for 5 quid, I scoffed, instructing her that the ones they sell at Sainsbury's were cheaper, and since all brushes I've ever used have been pretty equally shoddy, she would be literally mad to pay more.

Well, here we are weeks and weeks later and I'm eating my hat on a nightly basis, because this is the best washing up brush I've ever used, in fact the best washing up brush I can imagine. They must be pro brushes or something, because even after all this time, there's still no sign of "bristle scribble" where the bristles get all snaggled and matted right on the bottom of the brush.

I'm really pleased by good products, something that really just does the job. I imagine my design training has given me an extra awareness and appreciation of how hard it is to make something that is really, really good, but I've got an idealistic outlook, and that's always made me very aware that most things, products, services, arrangements are so less than ideal.

Of course, it isn't really that hard to make a perfect product, any fool can make a car that goes 250mph, but of course you need £810,000 to buy one. Ideal products can be churned out, but at a cost. Whenever I look at clothes, or furniture, it's almost always the case that the best looking stuff, the most beautiful and well suited stuff is the most expensive.

Now this is obvious I guess, but I don't really understand totally how it works. Ok, a lot of it is down to materials: Good, specialised materials cost more than generic materials, and sturdy things cost more than weak things. But I don't really see why there is such a big quality gap between what is cheap, and what is expensive. I imagine that the difference in production cost between this brush and the sainsbury's brush is not very high, and could be reduced by larger scale production. On balance I can appreciate that sainsbury's spend their money on making their brush look swish and more likely to complement modern kitchens rather than out and out performance, but I don't really see why a good looking brush from the Sainsbury's can't perform as well and as long as the lakeland brush.

What's that about?

Kitchen Gear

Was the grateful beneficiary of a windfall recently, and the first thing I thought about getting was this new vegetable peeler that I'd seen offof the Internet, and then also in Lakeland Plastics, and latterly J.Lew. While I was there, shopping for it, I also saw those chop and throw folding chopping boards and threw caution to the wind, dropped £10 there and then on one of those bad boys.

First up, the Kyocera Perfect Peeler did not disappoint. It is the most technologically advanced vegetable peeler I have ever seen and looks the business. It has a solid ceramic blade that can be configured to be straight, like a proper tatty peeler, or the blade can swivel round to be like a modern speed peeler. I tested it on some gnarly sweet potatoes and it verily whizzed through them, with a nice noise and with very little resistance.

I've never had a ceramic blade before and I was very interested in getting one. I've seen ceramic knives in online shops before, and like the idea of ceramic hardware. It's so futuristic and goes along with carbon fibre composite and aluminium and all that stuff. I just wish I could shave with it. Maybe I could.

Looking at the ceramic knives, I was concerned about their robustness though (and their cost, naturally). I don't have a lot of space for keeping things nice and tidy in the kitchen and would be terribly cross if I chipped my £80 knife as it rolled around with the others. Furthermore, oh dear, the Kyocera ones are also really ugly and look like supermarket knives.

This other thing I got is a Joseph Joseph Chop 2 Pot which is a great idea. It's basically a polyprop chopping board which has a few live hinges made in it which means it stays flat while the handle is raised (for chopping), and can be folded up into a chute for transferring the contents into a pan. Very nice idea, and nice simple design. The downside is that it's natural moulded form seems to be the chute - so it tends to "pop" back into that shape when pressure is removed, like inbetween chops. I think it makes much more sense to have it's natural configuration be flat - A chopping board which can be rolled up, rather than a scoop which can be pressed flat. But it's an interesting object that feels nice in the hand and feels nice in the mind, and seems to have won awards, but like a lot of cool design objects, I wonder if it was really tested in practice by the people who praised it.

Saying that, I like it, and I think it's a shame it doesn't work as flawlessly as it's simplicity might suggest. Maybe it will become more pliable with use. It also doesn't prop up against the wall like the rest of my chopping boards, and keeps on sliding down, making everything fly all over the place. Och.

I bought both of these implements from John Lewis.

Waitrose burgers, and Mabu dishcloths

Who knew I was so into washing-up? I usually use one of those brightly coloured foam dishcloths for mopping the bench and cleaning the table, but I wasn't so happy about that because they don't last long before they start smelling rancid. Or rather, they aren't washable, so once they smell rancid you have to hoy them out, and I resent spending lots of money on disposable things. Or even £1.30 for five.

So I was in the market for a new dishcloth solution (my partner in grime believes that using paper kitchen towel is the solution - but that can't mop). I bought one of these Mabu dishclothes from the Waitrose in Stockbridge. That shop is nice. It's comparitively expensive, but it's got a pretty good range of nobby faddy stuff, and I've never seen it very busy either, unlike the studential pandemonium of Tesco on Broughton Road or the culturally barren wasteland of Asda (you can buy anything you want, as long as it's this). However, we have bought their half pounder beefburgers on two occasions and in both cases more fat dripped, squirted and oozed out of them than I am comfortable with. Just today, I had to stop frying twice to drain the fat from the pan because it was getting too deep and spitting all over. Eventually I resorted to stabbing them all over, like a crazy butcher, through and through with a fork in order to let the grease out - the burgers had started to swell alarmingly. After all that, they weren't even very nice. Didn't taste of much, and it was no fun having scalding hot fat pour over your hand or into your mouth. I recommend Sainsbury's burgers any day.

Anyway, normally we enjoy our burgers with some cheese-style processed dairy plastic slices on top (and a couple of slices of crispy pancetta, which is exceptionally nice, and just as nice to use the second half of the pack with scrambled eggs the next day), but Waitrose don't seem to sell them. It doesn't sell cheese singles. Now this is at once impressive and irritating. On one hand we have a supermarket taking an ethical stance and refusing to sell something that could be used just as effectively as a manufacturing material as as a foodstuff (I am being charitable). On the other hand, it also meant I had to buy some proper cheese for the burgers, which, coupled with the above grease complaint didn't add up to what I had in mind. On the other other hand, the cheese I did buy was some plain Davidstowe Cheddar and it was delicious on it's own. In the burger it tasted rather too much like mustard, onions and ketchup.

The Mabu dishcloths are shit hot though. Made of cellulose (which apparently, I "won't believe"), these are just 8 layers of a fairly open-weave material stiched together to make a nice thick pad, and finished neatly. I really like them, in fact, like the packet says, I "love them". Now I don't know if I would have loved them if I hadn't been prompted by the packaging to do so, and filled in on their features and background, but that's a question for another day. I just know that I love a well made, well specified, simple basic product. Something that my grandma would've recognised and understood, something that can be bleached and wrung and scrubbed and washed and still be functional. Something that doesn't need to be brand new to have value, and doesn't necessarily deteriorate after it's first use. I was thrilled (yes, thrilled) when I saw that the shop had them in packs of three, and then I got a pack of three.

Waitrose sell the Mabu cloths. They also sell those rubbish burgers. They don't sell cheese slices.

This new game, Audiosurf is aces, in a great shareware style. I got it through Valve Software's insidiously amazing delivery mechanism: Steam. It reminds me of an old DOS game I used to play with my brother, in that a spaceship hovered over a scrolling bitmap, and jumped with the spacebar from segment to segment. Like a MORAFF game almost, except not awful. Whatever happened to Moraff? The whole internet is there, like an open book, probably with more than a whole chapter on Moraff, the chatmaster general, and I know that I can't be bothered to look it up at all.

Anyway, this game reads a mp3 of your choosing and creates a swerving, swooping 5-lane highway flying through space, rendered in psychedelic colours, all based on the dynamics of the song. Beats get converted to bumps and notes become cars (coloured blocks really), driving up the road, and you sweep up behind them in your road-going space-ship, going far too fast, and collect them to make contiguously coloured blocks, and score pointz0rz. After the song is finished, the game is all worldly-wise and shows you what everyone else in the world scored on this track, and even emails you when someone beats your highscore, so you can go and whup them.

I think this is a great game. It looks ace, a cross between Megarace, Tempest and Wipeout, with a hefty slice of Rez mixed in, and it only costs £5, which can only be described as skill-a-bill.

Living together in harmony

I got a Revo Radiostation Pico for Christmas, and I have to say it's one of the best presents I've ever had. It plays FM, DAB+ from out the airwaves, and internet radio collected from the wireless network in the flat. It also works as a music streamer for mp3s, and that was the real reason that I wanted it, because it's just about the only device of it's kind that is portable - doesn't require a mains power supply. It's dinky too.

In practice, the battery will last a couple of hours before it needs a charge, but the sound quality and volume is really good considering it's so small, and I was dead pleased to see that it has coaxial L & R line-outs on the back, so I can link it into my hifi properly, without going through headphone sockets or adapters or whathaveyou. Works great. Sound quality through the hifi is a little suspect - not unpleasant or anything, but rather flabby and over-bassy. I haven't really had a proper trial of it though, so it's very possible it's in the ear of the beholder.

I invested in a QNAP TS-209 II NAS (Network Attached Storage) box before Christmas as one of my main goals was to be able to listen to my MP3 music collection without having to turn a big noisy computer on. The QNAP does have a fan in it, which was initially very loud, but I have had it to pieces, and put some bit of padding on all the vibrating bits, and that has damped it significantly. There's something of a whoosh of air still, but not the more intrusive harmonics that it used to have. I'm still not totally happy with it, and might try to move it out into the hall at some point, but that'll need some thinking about the overall network layout in the flat, and what that rejig will cost.

I've put a new 1TB Western Digital Green disk in the NAS, but it is RAIDable, so I would like to get another one soon for security. It's got Twonkymedia built in, and is working great for serving MP3s (though has exposed some rather poor tagging of my collection), but I'm having problems with keeping my main PC connected to it. The laptop seems to be fine, but I can't seem to predict when the main pc will let me connect or not.

I also bought myself an acoustic guitar! It's red!