mug

After all the shopping and cooking and traveling, the end of the year can be a real time crunch, and it's easy to overlook the little day-to-day things we regularly attend to without a second thought. Thankfully, when it comes to the most basic consumables of our daily lives (coffee), there is a product designed to help those of us who need to save every minute (or are incredibly absent-minded).

The Self-Stirring Mug from Think Geek can help us shave precious seconds off of our daily routine. Powered by two AAA batteries installed in the base, the mug accomplishes … Read more

It seems like unusual coffee mugs are a good fallback plan if you can't think of a holiday gift, but even among all those unique mugs that get given out every year, the Link Mugs stand out. The ceramic coffee mugs are white and generally look like typical mugs, except for the sides, near the base. Each coffee mug in the set of three links together by way of a plus-shaped plug on one side of each mug and a corresponding socket on the other. Link your mugs together and you can carry them all over your home or … Read more

Anamorphosis refers to a distorted image that only appears normal when reflected from a special device--generally a cylinder with a highly reflective surface placed the in the center of a painting lying face up. This visual play, popular in 18th century Europe, has been modernized in the Anamorphic Cup, created by American-born designer Ross McBride, now living in Tokyo.

The cup is stainless steel with a polished mirror finish. Its porcelain saucer is printed with a distorted image. Separately, the cup and saucer are ordinary--an unlikely match, even. But put them together, and that indecipherable graphic is suddenly reflected in … Read more

Google has cut the price to store photos at its Picasa Web Albums site by a factor of eight.

The photo-sharing site offers 1GB of photo and video storage for free, but now going beyond that limit costs less. The options now range from $5 a year for 20GB to $4,096 a year for a whopping 16 terabytes.

"Today we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage even more affordable. You can now buy 20GB for only $5 a year--that's twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for … Read more

For more than 60 years, Germany's Fraunhofer Institute has promoted and undertaken "applied research...of wide benefit to society as a whole," according to its mission statement. That's why it's not at all surprising to hear that they recently came up with the Perfect Coffee Mug, a temperature-regulating drinking receptacle that keeps coffee at the ideal drinking temperature for up to 30 minutes.

The mug uses phase change material (PCM)--that's a substance with a high heat of fusion that can store and release energy (heat) over time. By adjusting the amount of PCM … Read more

I don't even start thinking about what I'm doing on a given day until I have a little caffeine in my system. The makers of Write-On Glassware have realized I'm not the only one and have come up with a coffee mug that you write on as you sip your morning brew. They also offer a tumbler--in case your morning routine focuses more on juice than on coffee or tea.

Both are glass with a special surface added on the outside. The surface comes preprinted with lines and times for a schedule, and you can write on … Read more

I spend more time than I would like shuttling children around town to school, lessons, play dates, speech therapy, and other fun engagements. I've heard this crazy rumor that there are people who actually work outside their homes and still have to drive to a separate location every day, too. So it seems that a lot of us find ourselves on the go quite a bit. And if you need a coffee fix as badly as I do, you know that you need an on-the-go solution.

The Brugo travel mug, featured in the December issue of Self Magazine, claims … Read more

Ever get your coffee mug mixed up with the guy in the next cubicle? Maybe it would be easier to tell your mugs apart if they were customized. The House of Harriet line of personalized mugs is unique: Harriet Damave draws portraits on the mugs she sells. You can even arrange for a face other than your own to be emblazoned on your cup: Damave works from photographs or descriptions of characteristics. She can even do pets.

Damave's usable artwork is food safe: she glazes and fires the cups herself and makes sure that all glazes melt completely. These … Read more

As the weather gets colder, I practically live on soup and crackers. Of course, that means I wind up with cracker crumbs everywhere when I take the crackers along with my soup. The Soup and Cracker Mug offers an easy solution, though: along with a mug perfect for a cup of soup, it has a "sidecar" that's perfect for holding crackers. This glazed stoneware mug holds 1.5 cups of soup. Of course, it works perfectly for cocoa and cookies or other hot beverages and snacks. The sidecar will even catch all your drips after dunking.

The … Read more