Cool Products to Share- What are yours?

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
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(DISCLAIMER: I HAVE NO FINANCIAL OR OTHER INTEREST IN ANY OF THE THINGS I AM ABOUT TO TALK ABOUT, I JUST THINK THEY ROCK)

So I have a few semi-obscure products that I LOVE, and because I have a lifelong tendency somehow to doom anything I like to stop production, I try to share with others, purely to help keep the product on the shelves. This is most often a situation with food, but sometimes with other things.

One of my all-time favorite tools, one I have used for oover 20 years, is what is being referred to here as “the Smart Clipper”, but which I was originally introduced to in the 80’s as the Nalclip System, then they were known as Clam Clips, now I guess it’s the Smart clipper, and I’m addicted to it. I have anxiety attacks if I think I’m running out of clips.

Truly a flawless blend of a paper clip and a staple. They bind papers as tightly as a staple, but you slip them off as easily as a paper clip!

I now have all three sizes, I use it constantly, most recently it has been very useful to clip sections of books together for copying.

Monster’s “iFreePlay” headphones for the Shuffle. I HATE cables, this thing rocks.

And speaking of the ipod Shuffle, I haven’t tried this specific incarnation of what these folks do, which is currently to wateproof(!) your shuffle for swimming, but I have been using their earlier waterproof MP3 player for a long time. They know what they’re doing, the headphones are the best, and swimming with music is indescribably delightful.
Finally, “The Jumpin Weasell” and it’s simply THE BEST DOG TOY EVER!

It’s essentially the same concept as a cat toy, so it won’t be equally interesting to every kind of dog, but if your dog has a high prey drive, this thing rules. I have to get video of him playing with it, it is SO much fun, and he is completely hilarious. He’s also insanely fit, and fast, and agile. It’s far more entertaining than throwing balls, and it’s good in small areas.
So those are my great product shares…what are yours? (And I imagine the Reader would frown on people promoting their own stuff, so only talk about things you appreciate as a consumer and want the world to know about.)

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Wusthof cooking knives. (And “No, I don’t know how to put an umlot over the U.”)

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Some of my favorite products:
iPhone
MacBook
Leatherman Wave (I have 3 - one for each car, and one for my computer bag)
Bokers ceramic knife
Hot glue gun (indispensable)
3W Luxeon 1-CR123A cell flashlight (tiny, and astonishingly bright)
Knotted-rope dog chew toy (both dog’s favorite toys)
Zircon i500 stud finder (Star Trek-like technology)

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The one I will share is called Lemi-Shine. It’s an additive for automatic dishwashers that makes your dishes sparkle. We have well water, so our dishwasher would get all crusty with the sediments after 1 wash cycle and the dishes were always spotty and cloudy. We tried everything to try to get our dishes clean and this stuff is the bomb. Seriously, it is amazing – we add about a tablespoon of it with the dish powder and our dishes are all sparkly and clean when they come out of the dishwasher. The dishwasher itself looks cleaner, too!

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My ceramic curling iron. I had no idea about ceramic curling irons until the girl who does my hair mentioned it a couple months ago. Seriously, I have used curling irons all my life, since about the eighth grade, and this thing is FAR superior to the bare metal ones. I use quite a bit of gunk on my hair, and the metal kind cakes up and burns on and frizzes your hair and makes a mess.

With the ceramic, your hair GLIDES through and the gel never, ever EVER sticks. Plus it came with this heavy-duty cover that you can put over the iron as soon as you’re done with it and put it away, or in the suitcase or whatever, without waiting for it to cool down.

Also, they’re not really any more expensive than the other ones. Less than $20.

This curling iron is my New Favorite Thing. :slight_smile:

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Shoes For Crews

They’re marketed as non-slip shoes for kitchen workers, but their true calling might as well be for city-dwellers. Around here, there are countless steel plates, covers, drains, grates, etc. in the sidewalks, as well as streetcar tracks running through crosswalks. All get worn smooth from all of the people walking and/or cars driving across them. When it rains, those things all get slick.

Vibram-soled boots might as well be greased, but Shoes For Crews shoes let my feet stick like geckos on those slippery surfaces.

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Yak Traks. Best things ever to get around in snow and ice.

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You are right. Yak Traks are the bee’s knees.

Here’s another toy for dogs and/or toddlers. The Wiggly Giggly ball, in several sizes. As it rolls, sound-reedy shuttles slide in tubes inside, making weird laugh-like noises.
http://www.petedge.com/Wiggly-Giggly-Balls-MP410.pro?PIPELINE_SESSION_ID=4d61f6d5c0a86e670109dc35f0f7b0e2

I was going to reccomend a garden weeder from Plow&Hearth, but they no longer sell it. They once were THE place for the very best spades, hoes, and such. Now they don’t sell any of it. How disappointing.

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They just don’t make them any better than my Zojirushi rice cooker. If you follow the very simple directions, it makes absolutely perfect rice every time, and has keep warm and extended keep warm features. It also cooks up that Irish steel-cut oatmeal very easily. It’s a snap to clean, too.

Also, it kind of looks like a Prius.

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Over the years, I must have had a couple dozen penlight flashlights. They were mostly pieces of junk, and I stopped carrying a flashlight in my purse until last December, when I bought my husband a Streamlight Stylus LED penlight as a birthday gift. He loved it. I loved it, too. So we bought four more of 'em. These tiny things put out an amazingly bright, strong beam of light, and they don’t gobble up batteries.

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I’ve said it before but it merits saying again.

Green Bags. You know the ones they sell on the shopping channel (also on line but not in stores, as far as I know).

They are green plastic bags of various sizes which keep your fruits and veggies fresh for ages. I was terribly skeptical when I purchased them. I was embarrassed that I’d spent $20 for 35 bags, so I spread them around to my friends.

Now I love them, as do each of my friends who received them. They really do work, my veggies and fruits never go bad before I get to them now. I have some fresh coriander in my fridge that I have had for a month, I swear, and it’s still fresh and usable.

(They are not MAGIC bags however, left long enough things will eventually go off. Just so you know!)

This $20 has saved me much more than that, I wish I’d bought them sooner, I truly hate waste.

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Marmot PreCip rain coat. It breathes, wears nothing, has a proper hood with that little extra visor like flap, little vents under the arms and allows absolutely no water to come through ever anywhere (plus mine is a satisfyngly dull lichen grey.) As I have never had enough sense to come in out of the rain, to finally be able to comfortably wander about in the woods has made me extraordinarily happy.

(My Leatherman Waves, by the way, on the belt inderneath the coat.)

Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning is the best part of my kitchen. Tony’s is what food tastes like.

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Air Dog.

That’s the beast’s most favorite thing in the world. He carries it all around the house and squeaks at everything.

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On a recommendation in a previous thread, I ordered some (I love salad but I can’t stand how fast vegetables go off, so I end up eating nowhere near as much in the way of vegetables as I should) and am now waiting for them to arrive. The fact that they randomly pop up in a thread now is rather heartening.

The phone order system was one great big p.i.t.a, however; they tried to sell me eight billion other products, each product twice in a row (and sometimes they repeated products further). Until I figured out you could press 0 to immediately skip each offer, it was really starting to piss me off.

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Kangaroo Bags.
http://www.amazon.com/Fiskars-Kangaroo-30-Gallon-Gardening-Container/dp/B00004SD7D
I use 'em for laundry hampers and emergency ‘clean up the room’ containers. Just the right size to carry down to the dry cleaner.

The knowledge that pretty much anything can be recharged off a USB cable, and that they make car-to-usb adapters as well as wall-to-usb adapters
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I can’t find it on hallmark.com’s website, but…

Y’know those annoying greeting cards with sound, that, when opened, play music clips or sound bites?

I walked by the sound card rack at Wal-Mart, saw one with Linus and Charlie Brown sitting at school desks. Could it be? I picked it up and opened it. A split second later…

“WaaaWhaaaWhaWhaaaWaa, WuhwaWAAwaWa. Wuwuwahwahwah, Wuhwahwawawawa, wah wah.”

Yeah, it’s a sound card of the famous “Peanuts teacher” sound effect. I was delighted, picked one up, and have begun using the sound chip inside to have a Peanuts teacher on demand. And, oddly enough, once you have one on demand, the times you need to use it increase exponentially. Coworkers also picked up their own copies of the card, and mysteriously, Charlie Brown’s teacher has been heard over the intercom systems, on phone calls, and in meetings.

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ChicoBags . I picked one up for $5 at the Vitamin Shoppe nearby. It’s nothing more exciting than a reusable nylon grocery bag, but it stores in a little tiny clip-on bag (that stays ATTACHED when you unfold it!) It fits in my purse or clips on my belt loop. When my husband and I are out on weekends, we’ll often find ourselves doing some unscheduled shopping, and I would buy something and say, “Crap! My tote bags are in MY car, and we brought YOUR car!” My little ChicoBag has ensured that I always have a bag on me, and they’re cute and inexpensive enough that I’m buying a bunch of them to give as stocking stuffer gifts this year.