Good Hats with Even Better Names from Nobis

My travel wardrobe changes a lot depending on the kind of trip it is, but I always carry a couple hats along, including some kind of baseball hat or cap. The people at Nobis let me try out something from their spring line though and I’m waltzing around a city in Mexico with Oliver Closeoff.

Yes, all their hats have names, and great ones too. Oliver is pictured above. After the jump you can see pics of two for women: Colette Iday and Iriel Hassle. A few gems from the men’s line are Mack Aroni and Watson Yurface. I love a company that doesn’t take its “designer wear” too seriously.

Fortunately, the gimmick is backed up by quality workmanship. Many of these hats look like nothing you’ve seen in the stores (in a good way) and they’re built to last.

See the full Nobis Hats review on the new PracticalTravelGear.com.

Wireless iPod Speaker from Cy Fi

Whenever I hear the words “wireless” and “speaker” together, two bad visions come to mind. One is the set of Advent wireless stereo speakers in my daughter’s playroom: if you even look at them funny, they lose the signal and sound like crap. The other vision is a party I was at a few years ago where the host spent half the night moving around a set of those all-weather wireless speakers like you see in the Skymall catalog because the sound kept cutting out or getting distorted.

Fortunately this cy*fi speaker is a different story: it promises “CD-quality” sound while broadcasting tunes from your iPod and my skepticism was dashed as soon as I fired it up. When I compared the sound on this nifty 4-ounce device to a couple heavier ones that plug in, the cy*fi actually sounded better, even when the transmitter was on the other side of the room or I was moving around the room with my iPod.

...continued after the jump

Keen Recycled Materials Harvest Grand Bag

Now that the Earth Day media (and blogger) bandwagon is done for a year, you will see the predictable drop-off in stories about green travel and eco-friendly gear. The world keeps turning and deteriorating though, so we'll keep talking about what does and doesn't help the planet when you are on the move.

I've been trying out one of these cool recycled materials bags from the Keen Harvest collection. The "harvest" name refers to what these totes are made out of: recycled rice paper and "brown haul bag paper." This one is the Harvest Grand, a simple shoulder tote that's like a narrow messenger bag. Inside the flap there's a zippered front pocket, a small interior zippered pocket, a place for a phone/notebook and some pens, and the main compartment.

Continue...

Portable iPod Speakers that Really Crank

I've tried out quite a few portable speaker contraptions for an iPod or MP3 player and most of them weren't even worth mentioning on here, especially when it came to sound quality. The Altec Lansing Orbit speaker is pretty decent and is easy to pack, but with only one speaker you're obviously not getting stereo sound.

This iHome2go IH13 combination water-resistant case and speakers is better than most because it has real speakers that crank out the sound. Real bass! Real cymbals crashing! It sounds as good as most computer speakers in a small room and pumps out enough volume to fill a big living room or work for a backyard barbecue.

Plus the design is pretty inventive. Basically this is a zippered case that keeps your iPod dry (there's a special foam encasement for the Nano) and you can control volume and track forward/backward on the front of the case without opening it. It comes with a strap allowing you to carry it and there's a connection cord for non-Apple music players.

There's one big drawback however: weight. This puppy is heavy, as in barely less then two pounds. If you're hopping into a car or stuffing a light rolling suitcase full of clothes it might not matter, but if you're a backpacker or a carry-on traveler, that might provoke some serious pondering. The other drawback is that this is a wasteful, 4-AA-battery-sucking, landfill-soiling machine the way it comes packaged. It's $40, which is certainly a fair value, but then you find out the AC adapter is $22. Seriously! The adapter is more than half as much as the whole damn stereo system. There's a combination package on their website for $50, but only in pink or green camouflage. For the Army men and women I guess...

No problem though. The connection on the back is (for once) the same one used by most standard electrical devices with an adapter, such as that cordless phone you have in the basement, so just dig up another adapter and spend $22 on iTunes instead. When the AC adapter is plugged in, your iPod will charge as well. There's a warning in the instructions that you must use their adapter, but last time I checked they all let through the same voltage.

The iHome IH13 portable speaker system is anywhere from $32 to $40 at retail depending on where you get it, including at Amazon. I got mine by trading in some "No Hassle Miles" from my Capital One credit card though, so look for it in whatever mileage/points program you use.

Rocking iPhone/iPod Devices for your Home, Office & More at iHome!

Cute Portable Digital Picture Frame From Royal

Bring your favorite pictures along for ten bucks or less!

Over the years, as a traveling dad, I have found it extremely useful to pack plenty of diversions for the kid or kids tagging along. I haven't sprung for a Sony PSP or a Nintendo DS because I know how addictive they can be even for adults. But I share my iPod classic with my daughter so she can watch cartoons and listen to her favorite tunes. And often I'll pick up a cheap gadget to bring on a trip, something that has the flash of the new.

This little 1.4-inch digital picture frame from Royal is a toy in terms of specs, but at a retail price of $7 to $10, it's a great value. My daughter loves it and she can't wait to hook it onto her backpack the next time we take off, bringing photos of all her friends and grandparents along for the ride.

Set-up was dead easy. There's a mini CD that installs the program on your computer. Then you plug in the device, select the photos you want, and sync it up. The photo frame gets the time and date from your computer and charges up via the USB cord. Your photo library is presented in the software in the normal folder system. When you select a photo the software puts a cropping box over it (which you can move around) to size it for this device. In other words, you get the faces, not a shrunken version of the entire photo.

The picture quality is not going to win any awards, but it's pretty good for the price. You can scroll through the pictures manually, or just sit back and let it go in slideshow mode. After a period of inactivity it shuts off by itself. Thankfully Royal resisted the urge to add a bunch of useless features to it, but there is an alarm clock, so I guess this qualifies as a double-duty item for packing light. The clip also doubles as a stand.

There aren't a lot of good travel gadgets that will cost you an Alexander Hamilton or less. This is one that delivers.

Get the Royal PF140 Digital Photo Frame at Overstock.com

Get it at Amazon

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Your Own Pics on Postcards from Hazel Mail

How many times have you rummaged through the postcard rack in some tourist town and thought, "My own pictures are better than these." And have you dropped into the post office in say, Cusco, and been flabbergasted at how much it costs to send off those postcards you just bought?

I've been testing out a pretty cool solution from Hazel Mail that brings postcard mailing into the digital age. Here's how it works: first, you log into their site and upload your photo. Hi-res ones straight from the camera are fine. Then you format the image, with the ability to stretch it, crop it, or put a border around it. Then you enter your message and the address, picking out a font that you like. You pay $1.50 per card to addresses in the U.S., $2 for those in Europe, varying rates elsewhere.



Then you go about your travels, knowing that even if your e-mails get filtered and nobody really looks at all those pics you painstakingly uploaded to your Facebook page, your friends and relatives will know you are thinking about them. After all, a piece of mail stands out far more these days than another few megabytes in the digital firehose we're all drinking from.

There are a few little quirks. The website is very coy about giving out any info when you visit. You actually have to go through the whole uploading process to find out anything about fees and payment methods. Then they send a confirmation after the order, which is nice, but in mine the graphics covered up all the text so it just looked like an ad in HTML mode. I assume they'll work out the glitches soon though and add more info for prospective users up front in time. Apart from that, the site is dead easy to use and once you've registered it's easy to send new cards in the future. It'll store the address of Mom and Sis, for instance, so you don't have to retype them later. You can even upload a whole bunch of addresses from a contact list or spreadsheet.

I sent one of the Mexico City postcards to my own house to test the outcome and the result was nice. The photo looked almost as good as what you would get from a photo processing place and it had a real canceled stamp on it. The printed message doesn't have quite the same charm as a scribbled note with road dirt and spilled coffee on it, but still more personal than an e-mail. All this and you can avoid paying rapacious international postage costs.

Several writers have wondered if the sending of postcards is a dying art, but Hazel Mail seems like a good compromise in keeping this more personal communication method alive. Highly recommended.

Design Awards for Gear that Works

I almost fell off my chair when I looked at Travel + Leisure's 2009 Design Awards in their March issue. They managed to slide in a few expensive items from potential advertisers as "honorable mentions," but amazingly the most expensive gear item winner was a $225 bag and two items were under a hundred bucks.

The bag was in the "best luggage" category and indeed it does look pretty cool. It's the Hydro Sports Water-resistant T-Tech Backpack from Tumi.

Best Travel Accessory was this pair of Melissa Shoes pictured here. They pack easily, look interesting, and are 100% recyclable. At $79 retail, they seem pretty practical to me.

Amazingly, a $30 coat made the cut, and from Wal-mart no less. It's the Norma Kamali Trench Coat and I have to say it looked better in the magazine than many others costing 10 or 20 times as much.

The last two items I have reviewed and used myself. The Flip Video Camera got the nod, though I reviewed the older version, not the Mino. For $180 retail, it's a dead simple way to shoot video and it stores an hour's worth of footage.

The other item I've raved about for years and I would argue it's probably the greatest invention to come along in a decade for travelers: the Steripen water purifier. It's small, it's effective, and it helps save the planet. Obviously, it's well-designed enough to get the notice of these critics as well.

Good stuff! You can see more in a slideshow here.


Get the SteriPEN Adventurer Ultraviolet Water Purifier

CVS Picture DVD Slide Show

CVS has installed some cool Kodak kiosks in their stores to get your megabytes of photo data onto something more permanent than your Facebook page. I tried one of them out this week and turned out a DVD that's pretty darn cool. It took 60 of my photos (the max) from two vacations with my family and made a DVD with motion and music. Not bad for $12.99, especially considering the almost-instant gratification.

You can bring in your photos on a media card, on a burned CD, or on a USB thumb drive. The machine reads your photos and you then decide which ones to use and in what order. You make choices just by touching the screen and dragging things around. Then you give it a title, select which song you want as background, and hit "burn." Then you wander around the store looking at painkillers, condoms, and chocolates while it does its thing. (10 minutes in my case)

The music choices on the one I used were limited to 16, but for most people that's enough to find something that will work. The Isley Brothers, Willie Nelson, and KC and the Sunshine Band may not be current, but they're pretty good accompaniment for this kind of thing. Then the photos zoom and pan their way through to provide movement the whole time. When the combination ran on my average TV at home, it looked great.

I'm sure you can do the same thing yourself at home if you're willing to play around with your Mac all day, but since the price of this equates to about 20 minutes of my time, screw that.

I hit a few snags though. The CVS closest to my house didn't have the right machine yet. One machine at the second location I tried gave me an error message just as I was finishing and I had to start over on the one next to it while a clerk rebooted. As you would expect for the wages they get, the clerks aren't exactly tech wizards when something goes wrong either. But as long as you're not cutting it too close on your schedule, you should be okay.

Overall, this is a nice way to preserve your travel photos from one trip or to group a bunch of them together by theme. It offers you a way to show pics to friends and relatives later in the comfort of a living room or to send a neat gift off to someone who was along with you.

Carry-on Bliss with the Flybag

I noticed that it has been quite a while since I reviewed something fitting into the "cheap and light" category, so I present to you the Flybag.

The company sent me one of these to try out for my last trip and as soon as I got back I ordered one for my Mom. How's that for an endorsement?

Plenty of companies now make some kind of carry-on cosmetic kit that helps you cope with the shakedown at airport security. I've reviewed a few here on this travel gear blog. This version adds a bit of fun and novelty to the mix though, which made me smile.

Sure, there is the clear case that will keep most TSA agents from messing with your 3-ounce or less containers and three refillable bottles for special goop you need to take with you. But in an attempt to make your flight more comfortable after you have cleared security, there is a cool eye mask to enable you to catch some sleep and some earplugs for plane noise or crying babies.

The mask and earplugs can also come in handy if the hotel that looked so lovely on Orbitz turns out to have badly-fitted windows and is right on the busiest street in the city.

And I like their sense of humor. The Flybag carry-on kits come in "blue bomb," "pink scissors," and "grey dagger" colors.

You can order direct from the Flybags.com site or get it for under 20 bucks from Amazon.

Hydration Tablets from U for You

If you're hot, sweaty, and on the move a lot, here's something new for you: tasty hydration tabs.

Sometimes I get some oddball samples of things to try out for this travel gear blog, but if they're fun, inexpensive, and have at least some application to moving around your state or the wide world, I'll test them out. Or I'll get some help from others to try them out, which is the case with these U hydration tablets from a company called nuun.

Think of these as a portable form of energy drink, and one that doesn't require throwing away cans or bottles. Each little tube has 16 tablets, each one good for a liter or so of water depending on how strong you want the taste. And in this case, you actually will want to taste them: the surprisingly yummy flavors are tangerine ginger, Goji berry green tea, and lemon chai. You pop in the tablet, it fizzes for a bit, then your bottle of water is transformed.

They contain lots of electrolytes and vitamins to replenish what you've lost on that long hike or bike ride. You'll get your zinc, your magnesium, your vitamin A, and a whole lot more. These would probably be good for jet lag too, with all the B vitamins. Almost no calories though, which puts them ahead of most commercial energy drinks that are full of sugar or corn syrup.

My wife is a personal trainer, so I had some people at her gym try these out, people who run marathons and triathalons while I watch football and drink beer. They universally gave the flavors a big thumbs up, though some wanted to dilute them more. Some of the testers got a boost from them, others preferred the heavier-duty stuff they normally use, but liked the convenience of this.

Get all the details at the U Hydration site, where you can buy a 3-pack of these (enough for 48 liters) for $24.

The tube is easy to pack and is made of recyclable plastic. And hey, the artwork is nice too.

NGA's Best Gear of 2008

The current year-end issue of National Geographic Adventure has a "must-have" gear list for the best of 2008. Some of the items are well beyond the scope of a blog called "Practical" Travel Gear of course. I don't think I'll be trying out the $11,500 mountain bike, $6,900 watch, or $350 sunglasses anytime soon.

There are plenty of featured items though that are fairly affordable yet do what they do very well. I haven't personally laid hands on any of these, but I assume NGT gear reviewer Steve Casimiro has. Something tells me he's at the top of every gear company's mailing list.

Columbia Rapidfire Windshell - made of stronger-than-usual 20-denier nylon, water and wind resistant, but weighing only 4.5 ounces. At a list price of $80, this doesn't hit your wallet or your backpack very hard.

Hi-Tec V-lite Hornet HPi hiking boots - Could they make that name any longer? I've always viewed Hi-Tec boots as the cheapo choice, probably because I lived in Korea where they were made and you could buy them for a song in Itaewon. Apparently they have improved, as this model gets the nod for its innovative new moisture management system: some kind of plasma ion-mask that uses nanotechnology instead of the normal wicking membrane. Vibram tread and a 3/4 shank make it ready for any conditions and despite all the technology, list price is $115---not much above the norm.

KOR ONE Hydration Vessel - This gets featured for its cool-looking design and its BPA-free Tritan plastic. I like the fact it has a flip-open wide top so it's easy to fill and easy to purify (unlike the cool-looking but less practical Sigg bottles). Plus for this price, $30, you also get a rubberized base so it's not so slippery.

Nokia MD-8 - (picture below) OK, this is the one I'm really lusting over, to be honest. It's a "booming sound quality" iPod speaker set that blasts out tunes in stereo, yet fits in the palm of the hand. It runs for 40 hours on the batteries, has an FM tuner, and is a reasonable $50 list. Damn, too late for the Christmas list...

See a photo tour of the best gear items on National Geographic Adventure's site.

Fun Designer USB Drives from Mimobot

Almost all of the travel gear reviews I run on here are based on items I've tried out myself, but sometimes an item is just so perfect that I know I'd buy it immediately. When someone from SeekingDesigners.com contacted me about these cute Mimobots, they screamed out "cool stocking stuffer!"

Let's face it USB thumb drives are pretty much all the same if you go with the basic features. They get the job done and they're fine. But if you have someone on your list who likes to instill a little style in his or her workplace, one of these might be the ticket.

There are a variety of designs, some more feminine, some for those with a Star Wars fetish. (Besides the Storm Trooper one here, there's also a funny Chewbacca one and a not-so-scary Darth Vader.) Some are based on Japanese manga figures, so there's another obsessive type you can take care of.

They come in capacities from 1 to 8GB and are loaded with character-specific animation. See a quick sampling of Mimobots at the Seeking Designers site, where there's also some background on the artist.

To actually buy them though, you need to head over to the Mimoco site, where there's a whole slew of new ones posted on a regular basis. Most designs are $18 to $25 for the 1GB version and go up from there. Buy a few and you'll get a sizable discount.

Luggage Tags and Handle Wraps from Travel Chic

This travel gear blog has been quiet the past week because I have been...traveling! A real vacation, chillin' with the relatives, stuffing myself, and not doing any work. It involved some flying, which means picking out our bags among a sea of suitcases on the luggage carousel. My daughter didn't have any problem spotting hers from far away: her suitcase was adorned with a luggage tag and handle wrap set from Travel Chic.

Travel Chic specializes in hip and fashionable accessories that help you find your bag in a hurry, without resorting to an ugly piece of colored tape or a ribbon tied around the handle. When Travel Chic offered to send a sample to try out, my little one went for the pink ensemble pictured here (because you can never have enough pink apparently). There are a whole lot of colors and styles to pick from, however, from the wild and flashy to the elegant and restrained. There's also a kids' line--see the example at the bottom.

You can order the luggage tags by themselves for $16 or get one of the reversible handle wraps for $14. Or order a matching set for $27 and save a few bucks while getting coordinated.

The items are well-designed, attractive, and feel like they'll hold up to whatever the baggage handlers throw at them. If you're tired of sorting through identical black rolling bags as they come down the belt or you want to buy a nice gift for the frequent traveler on your list, one of these will look thoughtful without setting you back too much.


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Teeny Tiny Micro Lantern from Coghlan's

If you want to pack light and still illuminate your whole tent, you can't beat this Coghlan's LED Micro Lantern. It's so small and cute it looks like a Christmas tree ornament, but it cranks out an impressive amount of light from its tiny package.

The output of light is 3.5 lumens, which doesn't mean much to me, but it seems to rank somewhere between a single-LED keychain flashlight and a "real" flashlight with two or three LED bulbs. It won't illuminate the whole campsite, but fine for a cheap guesthouse room nightstand or a two-person tent.

Unfortunately, the small size doesn't allow it to use rechargeable batteries, but the two CR2032 coin-style batteries keep it going for 25 hours before they need to be replaced. Or if you're lost in the woods, they'll flash for 50 hours.

Considering that this micro lantern is only two inches hight and not much bigger than my thumb, it'll be easy to pack no matter how light I'm traveling. It's water resistant and weighs less than an ounce (24 grams). See more about it on the Coghlan's product site.

You'll have better luck finding this at a camping store than a regular gear store. It generally goes for $8 to $10, but Walmart.com has it for$6.74. A great bargain.

Activetrax Travel Crank and Solar iPod Speaker

There are a lot of solar and crank radios out there now, which is a beautiful thing, but this little Activetrax cube from L.L. Bean goes beyond the rest in several ways. It's a speaker for any MP3 player, iPod, or phone. It's an AM/FM radio and a NOAA weather band radio with an extending antenna. It's about 2/3 the size of a Rubik's cube (3"L x 3½"H x 2¼"D), easily fitting into the palm of my hand or the corner of my backpack.

All well and good, but this is an off-the-grid electronic item that I've used for 12 hours without it coming near an electrical outlet. (There is an included A/C adapter for lazy people who want to charge it up before leaving home.) There's a small crank on the side that provides an hour of play time with only three minutes of cranking. Then there's a solar panel on the top that does even better. In my tests, an afternoon in the sun provided the full seven hours of play time.

The Activetrax comes with a carrying case that essentially doubles the size in order to accommodate the adapter, so if packing space is tight it's better to leave it at home. Otherwise, it's heavy-duty and comes with a carbiner to attach it to your bag or tent.

Alas, there's always a trade-off, and in this case it's the sound quality. It's okay, especially for the radio, but nothing like the sound you'll get from most powered MP3 speakers, like the Altec Lansing Orbit speaker I use a lot when I travel. Plus you need the included mono adapter to hear both channels from an MP3 player and the tiny and sensitive radio dial is hard to tune. For me though, it's worth it to have something I can use anywhere, without electrical adapters or batteries. It also gives me a lot of pleasure to use something so practical pulling nothing but green energy.

Most people know L.L. Bean for its quality outdoor clothing at a good price. They do carry some unique gear items too though. The new catalog has a cap with built-in tiny LED lights in the brim and several crank flashlights. Got to llbean.com/gear to see the line-up.

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Vogel Sunglasses from Tifosi - Smooooth

One particular week this summer I saw three people with Tifosi Optics shades on: a guy I was playing golf with, a cyclist, and the owner of a bike shop. The last one said Tifosis were his favorite shades. Figuring he ought to know, I took it as a sign to check out a few pairs.

I've got one pair that I'm trying out while biking---more on that later---but this Vogel pair pictured here I can wear anywhere, anytime. You get all their regular lens technology, but put into a casual style.

These are some of the most comfortable sunglasses I've ever worn, probably due in no small part to the adjustable nosepiece being barely attached to the glasses. Then the glasses themselves can dispense with the plural: it's one polycarbonate lens stretched across your entire face. This creates an odd sensation when you're wearing them: no dead spots and complete peripheral vision. It's about as close as you can get to getting the benefits of sunglasses without feeling like anything is blocking your line of sight.

The Vogel model from Tifosi comes in seven different lens and color combinations, with models specifically for golf and ones with Fototec lenses that get darker as you go outside into bright light. Whichever lens model you get, it's promised to be shatterproof. The Vogel retails for around $60 and comes with a protective zippered hard case and a lens cleaning cloth. See all the specs at the Tifosi website.

Tifosi Vogel sunglasses at REI

Backgammon in a Bag for Travel

One of the joys of travel is that you finally get some real down time, time to kick back, read a book, or spend a lazy afternoon with a few beers and backgammon.

It's hard to lug a whole backgammon board with you though and while I've carried a small magnetic travel one with me on several occasions, the experience is just not the same. I've been trying out a great new solution called Bag Gammon. It's a bag with a cinch cord that inside has regular-sized pieces, two sets of dice, a doubling cube, and a fold-out full-sized board. It's not super-light because of the heft of the regular pieces, but you can cram it into a corner of your pack or suitcase no problem. (See the video on the website to see how it all works.)

You can use this on any flat surface, so it'll work at a beach bar or on a hotel bed. You get the same click-clack of stacking your checkers on the side as you bring them all home as you would with a regulation board and you don't have to pass the dice back and forth.

For now you need to buy your travel backgammon set from the baggames.com site, where you can also get checkers and chess. The backgammon one is $14.95 plus shipping---not bad. I'll definitely be taking this along on all my future vacations.

Cupcoats for Your Takeout Coffee

I am fortunate enough to have a coffee shop a block from my house that uses real mugs. The one a little further away in my neighborhood does not, however, nor does the landfill nightmare known as Starbucks. Plus if you're grabbing a coffee to go, you're stuck with a throwaway cup unless you've worked out a deal to fill up your own.

I always say that if every person changed a few insignificant regular habits, they could reduce their impact on the planet far more than by doing more hyped actions such as buying carbon offsets for a flight. Here's one that's dead easy: buy one of these cool Cupcoats to put around your take-out coffee instead of slapping on the cardboard sleeve you see everyone using. If you only buy one cup of coffee a week, that's 52 pieces of garbage avoided. If you pick up a cup every day---whoa Nellie! That's a lot of extra trash (and the fuel to manufacture and ship it) avoided.

These things actually feel better in your hand too, whether it's the soft cloth ones in groovy colors and patterns or the burlap ones made from recycled coffee bags. Yes, made from used coffee bean sacks; talk about appropriate recycling!

As best I can tell from the Cupcoat Expressions website, there are about 40 different designs to choose from, ranging from $7 to $9.50. They switch out designs seasonally though and you can order custom prints or logos for company swag or a charity event. Starbucks could do this too, I suppose, but they'd probably charge you $20 for one.

These reusable cup sleeves fit most 12 to 20 ounce cups, they're made in Canada, and are biodegradable. This item is right up there with the reusable grocery bag, compact flourescents, and rechargeable batteries: a no-brainer.

Search for more eco-friendly travel gear and gadgets at Gaiam.com

A Pen for Your Wallet

Put your money where your pen is!

How many times have you seen someone talking on a cell phone start looking around frantically for a pen? Wouldn't it be nice to have a pen on you every time you're carrying your wallet---without having to remember it?

That's the idea behind The Wallet Pen, a nice little writing device that clips into the folded part of your wallet. It's thin enough to squeeze in there without making the wallet any thicker, but it's larger and easier to write with than the tiny pens in the Pico Pen device I reviewed a while back. I've been carrying it around for a week and only notice it's there when I need it or when I open my wallet and see a silver glint coming from the fold.

This is not some cheap throwaway item though. It retails for $49 and comes in a nice gift box with a ribbon, a spare ink refill enclosed as well. It comes in two sterling silver models, made in Vermont and not in some Chinese factory. It's an item you'll want to use and keep using for years---or give to someone who will think it's the coolest and most thoughtful present ever.

You can order the Wallet Pen direct from the manufacturer, or here's a list of stores that carry the pen both in the real and virtual worlds.

MP3 Car Transmitter in a Cup Holder from Maxell

I love the simple innovations that solve a problem well, at a reasonable price, by figuring out what we really need. This cool device from Maxell blasts the tunes from your iPod or other MP3 player through your radio, on a frequency of your choosing, and remembers up to 10 of those frequencies for later. All well and good, but it plugs into your car socket and then fits in your cup holder! So there it is, in a handy spot, right near your radio.

If you are using an iPod, this Maxell FM transmitter performs double duty by charging up your music player at the same time. So you leave the car with more juice in your player than you had to start with--and you didn't pay the electric company for the power. (Yes, I know, your engine powered it, but you were driving somewhere with that gas anyway, right?)

Maybe I'm so overjoyed because this innovation arrived on my doorstep just as my car CD player started picking and choosing which discs it wanted to play, with no discernable pattern to which ones would be rejected or when it would decide to not play any of them. Like a guy who gets in a fight with his girlfriend and then that night picks up the hottest babe in the club, I can smugly ignore my CD player's moodiness now and wait for it to admit it's wrong. Maybe we'll never get together again--who knows.

Sure, everything has its drawbacks, and in time I'll see the bad side of my new date. For now, the one principle flaw seems to be the printed warning to "store unit at temperatures less than 60 degrees F." Say what? Unless I make a drive up to the Arctic Circle sometime soon, I can't imagine any scenario where my car is going to spend a summer day under 60 degrees. So either this little cutie is going to wilt on a hot day or I'm going to have to take her with me everywhere I go...

She's also playing a bit hard to get. If you want to find one for yourself, search around the web for model P34 or Maxell 191234 transmitter.