Stuff Geeks Want

Snowpeak makes excellent gear for campers, and cutlery is no exception. While ultra light-weight titanium sporks are cool and all, we prefer to chow down with the Backpacking Chopsticks, which will also impress the waitress at your neighborhood sushi bar.

These chopsticks are cool for multiple reasons:

• the wooden ends unscrew and are stored in the hollow aluminum handle when not in use
  
• the wooden ends are made from recycled white ash baseball bats
• they only weigh 1 oz.
• a carrying pouch is included

The only downside is that Snowpeak can’t seem to keep up with demand, as the chopsticks are out of stock everywhere at the moment, including direct from the manufacturer.

But when they are in stock, you can find them for about $25-$30 from REI.com or ThinkGeek (search for “chopsticks” at either place).

Nothing else improves your chances of survival more than a lighter. Capable of creating warmth, light, and a means for safely preparing food, fire is always taken for granted—until you really need it.

Be prepared with the Windmill Delta Shockproof Lighter. This lighter can keep a flame even against the strongest of winds, it’s waterproof when closed, and extra rugged to ensure no damage if dropped down the side of a mountain.

It’s also the choice of Survivorman’s Les Stroud and costs less than similar lighters, like Brunton’s Helios Stormproof Lighter (SRP: $84.40, $52.11 from Amazon).

The Windmill Delta Shockproof Lighter comes in four colors. We’ve scoped out the lowest prices so you don’t have to:

• Smoke Green: $39.24 (Knife Depot via Amazon)
• Black: $39.99 (Think Geek, search for “Delta Lighter”)
• Matte Green: $48.60 (OutdoorPros)
• Blaze Orange: $46.68 (Ambient Weather via Amazon)

We’ve previously featured P3′s Kill A Watt, an affordable gadget (around $25) for letting you measure how much electricity a device in your home is drawing.

While you could plug a power strip into the basic Kill A Watt and figure out how much current the whole kit-n-caboodle is drawing, a better choice would be to spring for the Kill A Watt PS, which features 8 outlets (including 2 for wide transformers) and the ability to tell you what each outlet—or all of them—are drawing.

It can even clue you in to the specifics of current leakage, or the amount of electricity a device is still consuming even when it’s “off”.

With a suggested retail price of around $100 the Kill A Watt PS doesn’t come cheap, but the retail wizard at Buy.com has it for $62.99.

Like the Kill A Watt, the Kill A Watt PS can’t automatically tell you how much your electricity usage is costing you, you’ll have to figure that out later by multiplying the watts used by what your electric company charges you.

Which is a bit of a shame, since the original Kill A Watt’s big brother, the Kill A Watt EZ, can calculate cost ($39.95 from BrandsPlace or $39.99 from NewEgg).

If you have ever found yourself with a dead car battery, you know what a chore getting a jump start can be at times.

But if you had Duracell’s DPP-600HD Powerpack 600 in your trunk, you wouldn’t have to worry.

This mega-battery-to-go packs 28 amp-hours, enough juice to jump your car or provide up to 600 watts of power to electronics. What can you do with 600 watts?

• charge your cell phone for up to 35 hours
• power a laptop for up to 7 hours
• drive a 13-inch color TV for 5.5 hours
• even juice a small jigsaw for about 20 minutes

This amount of power makes the Powerpack 600 not just handy for your car, but also your campsite or area of your home or garden where a power receptacle isn’t handy.

Did we mention it also has an AM/FM clock radio and emergency light? It’s also surprisingly small: just 16.5″x11″ around its base.

Pick one up from Amazon for $109.99 and take advantage of the free shipping, important since this beast weighs about 25 pounds.

If you don’t need all that juice, you can spring for the more affordable Duracell DPP-300EP Powerpack 300 ($74.99), which delivers half the power in a smaller package. It also trades the jumper cables for an air compressor, a feature we wish they could have put in the Powerpack 600, as well.

Electricity is only getting more expensive, making conservation more important than ever. It’s easy to calculate the savings you net going from a 60W incandescent to a 13W compact fluorescent bulb, but what about all that other stuff that draws current in your house?

You can find out exactly how much juice those appliances are sucking with a P3 Kill A Watt Electricity Load Meter and Monitor. Simply plug the device you want to monitor into the Kill A Watt and it goes to work, displaying the current and total watts, volts, amps, and other metrics.

To calculate the cost of running a device, just multiply the wattage it draws in a day (week, month, whatever) by what your electric company charges you.

The Kill A Watt is especially useful for figuring out just how much electricity your entertainment center draws when it’s turned “off”. Just plug the surge protector into the Kill A Watt and watch the numbers climb even though all your gear is off. Then you can figure out if unplugging your setup at the source (as is recommended) is really worth the hassle.

Prices for the Kill A Watt are all over the map, with some places selling it for as much as $40. Pick one up from NewEgg for the bargain price of $17.99 plus $5.99 shipping. Enter promo code EMCAFBFBE at check-out to save another $3 (you’ll need to sign up for the NewEgg newsletter if you’re not already to take advantage of the discount). Or go the Amazon route for $20.87 with the possibility of free shipping if your order tops $25 or you’re an Amazon Prime customer.

Grilling in the dark can be a chore. Even if you have ample overhead light, the big hood means you’re probably still casting a shadow over your food when you go to flip it or check on it.

Lights that clamp to the hood are one solution, but we prefer this Magnetic BBQ Light that sticks to the actual tool itself, focusing bright light right where it’s most needed.

At less than $15, each one pays for itself with every perfect steak you save from overcooking.

If I had to pick only one great thing about Crocodile Dundee, it would be that scene where our hero has a switchblade pulled on him and says “That’s not a knife… That’s is a knife!” as he brandishes his Bowie knife.

Twenty-two years ago LED flashlights were unheard of, but had they been you can rest assured Dundee would be toting The Big Kahuna. Three D-cell batteries power 95 LED bulbs, practically giving you a mini sun in your hand (minus the heat, since LEDs don’t really make any).

Reviews are overwhelmingly positive for The Big Kahuna, so your $36.99 + shipping will be well spent, even if its aluminum construction isn’t quite up to the bomb-proof standards of Maglites.

If 95 LEDs sounds like overkill to you, go for the 28 LED Giant Light for $11.99 + shipping (uses 3 AAA batteries), or the most modest (but still extremely bright) 9 LED flashlight for a mere $3.95 + shipping.

You know you should keep your tires properly inflated to improve their longevity and your vehicles fuel efficiency, but what a hassle, right? You either have to tangle with an unruly setup at a gas station (have your quarters ready) or you can purchase a home air compressor and lug that out when you need it.

But the AirPro is different. It resembles a cordless drill and makes it easy to put air wherever you need it.

Like budget air compressors (those without their own tanks), the AirPro is a little on the slow side quite noisy. The AirPro also costs about twice what a budget air compressor would set you back from Sears, but its convenience and flexibility should help you justify the price. After all, it doesn’t how cheap something is if you never use it.

Pick up an AirPro for
$69.95 (+ $12.99 shipping) at Brookstone.

Photographers know their lens is their lifeline: a sub-par piece of glass will create sub-par photos, and dust or dirt on the lens will result in undesirable artifacts or blurring.

Nikon’s Lens Pen Cleaning System won’t upgrade your lens, but it will help you keep dust and dirt off of it. The tiny, self-contained apparatus features a super-soft brush for on-the-go dusting and a tiny polishing disk for removing smudges.

Prices fluctuate in the $8-$10 range, but Amazon is currently stocking it for less than $6, making this purchase a no-brainer.

One day, robots will rule the world and we’ll all be toast (unless Arnold is reincarnated as a Leatherman). But until then, we’ll happily employ them to do our menial bidding, like cleaning our gutters.

While iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner and Scuba floor washer steal all the attention in the consumer space, its the adorably named Looj that will get any geek’s heart racing (even if it’s not really a robot).

Just drop the Looj in your gutter and watch it go. The Looj’s handle doubles as a control for driving the unit back and forth (the body detaches from the handle but remains connected by a 75-foot cable).

iRobot says the 500 RPM 3-stage auger is good enough to blast any debris out of your gutters, as long as gutter is at least 3-1/4″ wide and 2-1/4″ tall from below the gutter straps. Otherwise it won’t fit, and the Looj will convert into the Frooba, an evil robot bent on frustrating you.

Some other specs, because you’re a geek and want to know these things: it takes 15 hours to charge and one charge lasts 30-45 minutes, which is good for about 250 linear feet of gutter cleaning. The downside: iRobot chose to go with a charging method straight out of the ’80s, which requires you to stop the charging ater 15 hours, there’s no automatic cut-off. Blimey!

Looj 120 (with belt-clip) costs $99.99, while Look 130 (with holster) will set you back $129.99. There’s also a 150 model, that includes an extra battery and auger, but no one seems to be selling it yet.