Granted, solar chargers are just about everywhere these days, but how about one that doesn’t cost upwards of $100 and can still jack in to all of your mobile goodies? Get excited for the FreeLoader Solar Charger, able to soak up the power of the sun and store it for up to 3 months in a pack small enough to fit in your pocket. Whether you’re off the grid completely or just absentminded and in need of a power kick, a solar charger is one step up from an emergency battery since you’ll still not need an outlet when even that winds down — just pray for clear skies.

The lightweight aluminum FreeLoader unfolds to reveal two solar panels and comes with a USB charging cable, plus eleven standard adapters for your major cell phone, digital camera, PDA, GPS, and MP3 gadgets — and if the standard set doesn’t fit your device, there are extra accessories available to fill out your set (like an iPod adapter — now you can take long roadtrips and not worry about running out of tunes after 8 hours). Available for $49.95 from firebox.com, the FreeLoader is a great add to your power arsenal without breaking the bank.

While the world soldiers on to treat and purify our tap water, let’s face it — they’re not doing a real bang-up job. If they were, we’d all still be drinking straight from the faucet instead of mounting water filters and buying bottled H20. But you’ve noticed the difference, don’t like the way that tap water looks or tastes, and have decided to do right by your body and consume the cleanest water possible. Here’s the thing: your hair and skin are just as delicate as the rest of you and would LOVE the same level of TLC.

The Wellness Shower Filter is touting itself as an “anti-aging shower system”, but that’s not the real selling point: it’s that the same sort of system you’ve got hanging from your kitchen sink can now take out all of the harsh toxins from your shower, too — the chlorine, harsh metals and free radicals that dry out your skin and can even cause breakouts. The filter even goes one better by putting a little love back IN to the water — utilizing rare volcanic minerals, water is effectively “softened” and can help contribute to a more hydrating experience by increasing the residual moisture content of your skin and hair. Plus this purified water contributes to reducing the bacteria and fungal growth in your shower, so it may even speed up your bathroom cleaning. At $249 it’s a bit of an investment, but for healthy skin — and maybe a few less bottles of moisturizing lotion in your lifetime — it seems a decent trade off.

Ever get umbrella envy as you’re slushing through soaked sidewalks passed on either side by fully covered pedestrians while your little CVS umbrella drips all over your shoulders? Step up to the “Rolls Royce of umbrellas”, the High Function Solo. Aside from its eye catching design (a wide canopy of black nylon offset by a swipe of green), its well thought out build puts it far ahead of convenience store competitors: the Solo features an automatic open and close button (no more slicing your thumb on dinky latches) that can also be pressed to revert the umbrella if it’s blown inside out, and is built around a carbon WindFlex Frame System with a solid steel shaft and reinforced flexible carbon polymer ligaments (so maybe it can double as a self defense club?). Even the handle is built to last with it’s zinc alloy brushed in nickel to protect against corrosion, and is highly manageable with an extra wide closure strap and convenient clip to keep strapped to your wrist or bag. The Solo sells for $95 over at UncommonGoods; if the price makes you wince, do a quick assessment of how much you’ve thrown away on cheap umbrellas and you may find this one a worthwhile investment.

Home ownership, while wonderful, certainly comes with some drawbacks — like maintenance. While staining the deck on my old house one sweaty summer afternoon, I started thinking about all of the hands-on upkeep around a house that can suck the will to live right out of you: cleaning the gutters, painting/staining the exteriors, and, my least favorite ever, mowing the lawn. Sure, you can hire the neighbor kid to wrangle the lawn for you, but when you’re throwing a $20 bill at him every week the expense of this outsourced luxury starts ticking up.

Which is what makes Robomow so great — sure, it’s a bit of an investment off the bat, but imagine this new residential utopia where you never again have to push a mower around for hours, wrestle with a bag of clippings, drip gas all over your shoes or waste a beautiful weekend afternoon trying to tame the wilds of your yard. Now you can leave all the grunt work to a robot; with a wire laid around the outer edges of your lawn, the robotic mower jumps to life with a press of the green “Go” button and travels the grass in a systematic criss-cross pattern covering the lawn several times from side to side to ensure that the entire yard is uniformly clipped. The Robomow features a battery powered 3 blade cutting system with a triple-chamber mulching system, working twice as fast as a typical gas mower, that cuts grass into very small clippings that are buried into the roots of your lawn where they decompose and act like a natural fertilizer. If you’re ready to pick up one of the higher end models with a charging station, you can even set a weekly program for the mower and, whether you’re home or not, the Robomow will diligently get to work at the appointed day and time then automatically return to the charging station when finished.

Robomow has been featured on a slew of programs with plenty of videos and interviews available on the Robomow online store website at robomowerusa.com. Here’s a quick video that shows the Robomow zipping across the lawn — and only the lawn.

With four mower models available, you can choose which version is best for you — the site provides a chart with lawn size estimates to help determine which mower model fits your lawn — and prices from $999 to $1799 with free shipping. Granted, it’s a bit of a jump in price from your standard upright mower, but when you consider the longterm costs and quality time earned by sidestepping this annoying chore, you can see why it’s the best selling robotic lawnmower around.

Viva la bottle revolution! I admit I’ve been a Nalgene loyalist for awhile now — sometimes you just can’t help but buy into the hype, and the bottles certainly did fare better than standard sports bottles when it came to preserving taste. But SIGG? SIGG just slam-dunked the market and earned another champion; so long Nalgene, hello sweet SIGG!

What’s the difference? I’m no scientist so the 100 years of Swiss quality and craftsmanship is a little “wizard in a bottle” to me, but their eco-friendly reusable products do away with the plastic (did you know that Americans add over 30 million petroleum-based plastic bottles to our landfills EVERYDAY? horrific!) and offer specially lined aluminum and stainless steel bottles ready to go wherever you do — hiking, biking, camping, the stadium for a tailgate, on the subway, wherever. Even the bottle tops are a stroke of genius with subtle “why didn’t someone else think of that?” add-ons like a loop for easy carrying and a twist-stop on the sports bottle that traps liquid til you purposely unlock the sipper.

Not convinced there could be a difference? Take your favorite drinking bottle, fill it with filtered water, and leave it on the window ledge for a day — then take a swig and you might be surprised to find a peculiar, slightly plastic, aftertaste. That’s where SIGG rises above; with fully opaque and brilliantly designed exteriors, your hot and cold fluids are kept perfectly protected, and easily cleaned with soap and water (or baking soda and vinegar for your more stubborn goods).

Here are a few of our favorite things — do your holiday list lovelies a favor and upgrade them this season to a wonderful new travel bottle, available in 144 designs and 22 interchangeable lids directly from mysigg.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Growing up, a true hallmark of the holiday season was finding that my mother had gone through the dining area and changed all of our standard bulbs to red and green novelty bulbs from Target. Because nothing quite says Christmas like not being able to distinguish the true color of your food. Apparently the charm of colored lighting is still in demand, and is taking on a new environmentally-aware guise.

The Multi-Color LED Lightbulb replaces your standard lightbulb and ups the ante with adjustable color and brightness levels — it even has 4 transitional effects if you’re into strobing lights. With the included IR remote, you can turn the bulb on/off and select any of the 16 available colors for immediate mood lighting. The light is generated via a 5 Watt LED and can be yours from ThinkGeek for $49.99. If you’ve been holding off on switching out your old-school bulbs for an eco-friendly update, this’ll give you some options that’ll make your friends green… or blue…. or pink… you pick, you’ve got the remote!

A pen is a pen is a pen, right? So you’d think, but let’s face it, we’ve all got a preference — ball point, fine, feather-tip, preferably something that hasn’t run out of ink, won’t bleed all over your fingers, and, if you’re a lefty, doesn’t end up smudged all along the side of your hand. But what if there was an inkless pen that never ran out on you or bled all over?

Now this is cool, and is one of those centuries-old technologies that have crept back in to ease our modern life — get ready to throw out that pen caddy full of half dead/half chewed pens. Back in ye olde medieval times (think Renaissance Festival, but less drunk), artists and scholars like da Vinci and Rembrandt often used a metal stylus to draw on specially prepared paper leaving a light-black mark that didn’t rub off or fade. The trick, now fitted in a stainless steel 8cm long pen, is a solid metal nib of metal alloy that leaves a mark on most types of paper; you may have some trouble with glossy and coated surfaces, but this thing works like a charm on your standard office and notebook papers. And since there’s no ink, there’s nothing to dry out, so the pen will work just as well in 25 years as it does today, provided you don’t go and lose it.

Delivered in its own metal presentation tin, the Metal Pen is a fabulous gift (for yourself too!) and, when you think about the hundreds of dollars you’ll spend over time on crappy plastic tossaways, it’s a real deal at $29.98.

This year’s ispo BrandNew award winner, the Easy-Glider, is a very cool motorized twist on the old Bronze Age horse drawn chariot design. A bunch of tree hugging do-gooders out of Switzerland are the masterminds behind this new eco friendly form of personal mobility which can take you up to 13 miles on a single charge.

Easy-Glider can be used as a stand alone hauler that will pull you on a set of rollerblades or a skateboard at speeds up to 12 MPH. For those of you who are not so athletically inclined, you can simply clip on the optional trailer and enjoy the ride.

This is really quite an engineering achievement and a nice step in the right direction towards eco friendly personal mobility but I worry that this kind of technology is going to be a cancer on already lazy Americans. Are we to the point that we can’t pump our legs for a nice trip on our rollerblades or simply kick a foot to glide along on a skateboard?

Sweet video clip after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever traveled off the resort map, you’re probably familiar with all of the tabs and tinctures available to help purify water when traveling abroad. Smart, effective… and tastes like metal, mostly. SteriPEN comes to the rescue with its genius SteriPEN Adventurer Handheld Water Purifier that disinfects without adding chemicals to your drinking water. Employing UV light and powered by two AA batteries, the SteriPEN sterilizes water in under a minute by simply stirring the wand in a glass. That’s it. The trick? UV light — divided into 3 ranges to cover the spectrum — destroys DNA immediately, rendering all of those nasty viruses, bacteria and protozoa helpless in the face of your resourcefulness. The stick even comes with a built in timer that will let you know when the water’s safe to drink, eliminating any potentially disastrous guesswork. This could also be a great tool to pack along on camping or hiking trips if you’re suspect of the water coming from the public taps. For $129, this bargain’s a no-brainer for frequent travelers.
[via Cool Hunting]

The good folks over at method let us test drive their omop wood for good starter kit this week, a product that promised to retool the 5 second rule. With a house full of heavily trafficked wooden floors and an elderly dog obsessed with licking them, I liked the idea of a cleaning solution that’s safer than a lot of pine-this and disinfectant-that commercial products out there. I hadn’t anticipated, of course, that they meant business about the 5 second thing: the ergonomic omop comes with a user manual that includes recipes for you to literally eat dinner off your floor — “sauteed thyme chicken breast atop a bed of dark wood” and “grilled filet of teriyaki salmon on polished cement”.

I’m not sure I’ll take it that far, but I confess I’m smitten. The mop comes to life out of the box as four curved pieces easily click together and afix to a microfiber mop pad (or a compostable sweeping cloth for touchups). Now forget everything you ever knew about mopping, like buckets full of cloudy water, mixing cleaning solutions, and wringing out ugly cloth octopi. Just squirt the non-toxic floor cleaner directly onto your floor, glide the mop over the surface, and let it dry. That’s it. And forget that pine or lemon stink from big brand products that linger for far too long; the non-toxic, biodegradable cleaner has a mellow almond scent — it may make you hungry, but it won’t give you those chemical headaches. When it’s time to clean the mop, simply rinse the pad and let it dry.

method just earned another loyal customer — the floors look 10x better, the dog is happily licking away in the corner (she’s 12 years old, I stopped trying to make her normal a long time ago), and there’s a hint of satisfaction in the air knowing that there are healthy, responsible, and accessible alternatives out there to some of the toxic products we use every day. Give it a try yourself: the starter kit delivers at $30 (there’s another kit that works on all floor surfaces). If you’re not hooked, you can always re-gift it to your earth-loving aunt next Christmas.