By Chris Scott Barr

Do you grow tired of drinking coffee?  I don’t mean the flavor, or even the hassle one has to go through to procure a good cup of Joe. No, I mean are you tired of having to lift a cup to your lips and drink every few minutes in order to get your caffeine boost? I’ll be the first to admit, it takes a lot of effort. You have to drop everything you’re doing with one of your hands for a few seconds, not to mention those cups can get pretty heavy. What you need is a better caffeine delivery method.

While an IV drip would seem like the most direct method, it’s not the most practical. Instead, might I suggest Le Whif Coffee? That’s right, someone has made a coffee inhaler. The tube contains powdered coffee with caffeine equivalent to a light espresso. Each “stick” has about 9 hits (all of which are needed to get the full caffeine effect of a single cup of espresso) depending on how hard you inhale. Sticks will run you $3 each, or you can buy a three-pack for $8. Now if only they had disguised these as asthma inhalers, you might have avoided looking like an idiot every time you took a hit.

[ Le Whif ] VIA [ BoingBoing ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Remember last month when we told you about South Korea’s brilliant use of the sausage stylus? Sure, it seems pretty bizarre, but it’s also apparently rather handy. The sausages used aren’t widely sold here in the US, but one enterprising company imported a whole bundle of them to sell as styluses.

That’s right, if you head over to CaseCrown, you can pick up your very own iPhone Sausage Screen Stylus. It’ll only set you back $.99, which is about as cheap as you’ll find a stylus. The site lists them as “not for consumption,” so I wouldn’t expect to snack on one of these when you’re hungry. I would, however, expect a number of people to as “is that an iPhone stylus in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

[ CaseCrown ] VIA [ TUAW ]

Giga Pudding comes in vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry, and all you have to do is add boiling water and refrigerate. The video, however, is a bit misleading since the “giga” prefix means “billion” and the pudding in the ad is nowhere near large enough. Must be some kind of demo thing. So let’s see: if one pudding equals one of those Jello snack cups, which seems entirely reasonable, a Giga Pudding would end up weighing about 125,000 tons.

This is a lot of pudding.

I would like to attempt to explain to you just how much pudding a Giga Pudding is through a useless (but entertaining!) thought experiment.

More, after the jump.

If the space shuttle used pudding for fuel (powering both the solid rocket boosters and the main engines), a Giga Pudding would be enough to get it to the International Space Station and back sixty five times,* assuming that the pudding also functions as an oxidizer (which I’m sure it does). Two Giga Puddings would be enough fuel for pretty much the entire history of the shuttle fleet (130 launches so far).

But wait! This is assuming that pudding has the same energy density as rocket fuel, which is most likely not the case. If we assume that Giga Pudding has about the same amount of calories** as Jello (100 per 113 grams-ish, depending on what kind of Jello you like), that’s a specific energy of 3.7 MJ per kg. The aluminum fuel in the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, on the other hand, has a specific energy of 31 MJ/kg, while the liquid hydrogen burned in the main engines produces 143 MJ/kg. If you were to replace these fuels with Giga Pudding, you’d need 8 times the amount of solid propellant and 39 times the amount of liquid propellant, again assuming that the Giga Pudding recipe incorporates an oxidizer. Where does that leave us? Needing nearly 37,000,000 kg of pudding per launch. That’s another 50 external tanks full of pudding, but you’d still get a solid three launches out of one Giga Pudding.

Like I said, that’s a lot of pudding.

Giga Pudding is, as you might expect, currently available in Japan. Space shuttle sold separately.

[ Giga Pudding ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]

*The propellant used for each launch is 500,000 kg x 2 for the SRBs, plus about 630,000 kg + 105,000 kg for the oxidizer and fuel respectively for all three SSMEs.

**Since I don’t have immediate access to a bomb calorimeter to determine the actual energy that you get from burning pudding, and even if I did I’d eat the pudding instead of setting it on fire, I’m just using the food calories. This ignores energy contained in indigestible things like dietary fiber, but pudding doesn’t have any fiber in it, so I’m going to assume that it’s a fair approximation.

And feel free to rip apart my math on this one, it’s 4am and I’m suffering from a vicious combination of sleepiness and pudding cravings.

By Chris Scott Barr

Do you do a lot of eating in your car? If so, then you probably grow tired of digging around in the McDonald’s bag for those last few french fries. What you need is some sort of handy tray to set all of your food on before driving away. Well my friend, such a tray exists and it’s called the Swivel Car Tray.

First, I would never trust this thing to hold a juice box in place, regardless of what you see in the picture. Other than that, it probably is rather handy to have around, even if it does look a bit silly. I suppose you could simply take it out of the cup holder when you aren’t planning on stuffing your face on the freeway. If this sounds like something you could use, then pick one up for just $11.

[ CollectionsEtc ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

‘Mad props’ to Japanese LEGO artists Sachiko who created this scale, color accurate version of a McDonald’s Big Mac combo meal complete with french fries and a pop. The only thing that’s not LEGO is the cardboard box holding the Big Mac, and for the record I do believe this holds just about as much nutritional value as the real thing. (I kid, I kid!)

[ designboom - lego big mac ] VIA [ Cribcandy ]

By Chris Scott Barr

The ketchup packet is one of those things that has stayed exactly the same since before I was born. After all, it fulfills the duty that is required of it. It holds your condiment until such a time that you’re ready to add it to your food. Well at some point Heinz decided that they could do better, and undertook the task of reinventing the ketchup packet. The end result was essentially a cross between the old packet, and the little plastic containers that you get BBQ sauce in at McDonald’s.

It does seem to make perfect sense. When you grab a burger and fries through the drive-thru, where do you put the ketchup that you’re going to dip your fries in? Maybe on a napkin, or even the wrapper for your burger. Either way, you’re increasing the risk of somehow getting it on your clothes. Now you can tear off the whole top and dip your fries in, or just tear off a part of it and squeeze the ketchup onto your sandwich.  So simple, yet so brilliant.

[ Heinz ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

By Evan Ackerman

Remember how your mom used to tell you not to eat so fast? Well, if you’re not living with her anymore (and you really shouldn’t be) technology has come to the rescue with a gadget that replicates her nagging. The Mandometer is essentially just a scale that weighs the food on your plate while you eat, and then yells at you (vocally, no less) if you’re stuffing your gob faster than is allowed. It’s not just doing this for fun, though: studies have shown that using the Mandometer can lower your BMI by 2% over 18 months, and it’s supposed to act as part of a clinical method of improving your eating habits.

Still, this thing has no idea what you’re eating, it only records weight. Solution: pack your plate with chocolate mousse and souffle plus a couple rocks to throw of the sensor, and then go ahead and make a gigantic mess of things.

Or I guess you could just turn it off, but that would be way less fun.

[ Mandometer ] VIA [ DVICE ]

By Evan Ackerman

In the future, all of our food will come in tubes. Why? Because that’s just how things work in the future (the pre-replicator future, obviously). And I know you’re thinking, “wow! That’s convenient!” But only uncultured heathens would eat food straight out of the tube. I mean, spluh! This is why you need a food printer, and MIT is getting way ahead of the future by starting to work on one in the present.

The Cornucopia personal food factory is essentially just a 3D printer that uses cartridges of food instead of cartridges of plastic or whatever. So like, if you feel like an apple, you just put an apple cartridge in, run the apple program, and wait while printer extrudes an apple shape. Heating and cooling elements in the print heads do all of the cooking for you, and by combining different cartridges in a single dish you can potentially create some truly horrific meals.

[ MIT Fluid Interfaces Group ] VIA [ Shapeways Blog ]

By Evan Ackerman

S’mores: they’re the most efficient way of getting chocolate and marshmallow and graham crackers into your mouth. And I’m all for efficiency (and chocolate and marshmallows and graham crackers). The issue with s’mores, though, is that making them relies on obsolete technology: fire. And fire is obsolete for a reason… I mean, who really wants to be outside, where it rains, next to a fire that makes you too hot on one side and too cold on the other and leaves everything smelling like smoke and risks getting out of control and incinerating you and all your friends and burning down the forest and contributing to global warming and making baby seals cry? Is your s’more really worth that? The tears of baby seals? Of COURSE not. Plus, there’s like mosquitoes and stuff. I mean, come on. We’ve made progress, people. We’re indoors now and we’ve got microwaves.

The Micro S’mores machine uses “core fusion technology” (which I think is the same stuff that they use in quantum computers and the large hadron collider) to not only keep your s’more components properly positioned in the microwave, but also provide enough downward pressure to ensure that everything sticks together and melts evenly, all in just ten seconds:

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “core fusion technology? I can’t possibly afford that!” But don’t worry, in a noble gesture of goodwill towards humanity Micro S’mores have been made available for only $20 for a set of two. Order them here.

[ Micro S'mores ] VIA [ Geekologie ]

I’m not really sure why nuts are more popular around the holidays, particularly when they’re still in the shell, but I think it might have something to do with relieving stress or pent-up rage when you smash them open. And while it might not be as satisfying as using a straight-up hammer, this nutcracker from Northern Tool + Equipment ($11.99) looks like it was designed sometime in the middle ages, and pulling the lever to bring an end to an innocent walnut just seems like it would be really satisfying.

[ Northern Industrial Tools Nut Cracker ] VIA [ The Green Head ]