An amazing new design tool for the iPhone

I love my iPhone. I am more satisfied with it than any other electronic device I've ever owned. I have been an iPhone fan for more than a year, so this is no honeymoon. Every electronic breakthrough since the wireless radio has promised to make life easier. So far as I'm concerned, the iPhone is the first such device to deliver on that promise.

I use it for everything and I've equipped mine with everything from a plumb bob to a line level to a carpenter's calculator to a metric converter to an Italian phrasebook. The iPhone has changed how I navigate and changed my whole relationship with the information age. If it's not already obvious, I am a big fan.

Well, I'm about to become an even bigger fan. On June first, the iTunes App store is rolling out a new, free application called ColorCapture Ben. This app was developed by Benjamin Moore Paints and ColorCapture Ben will allow me to take a photograph with my phone, then zoom in on any part of that photo and color match the photographed object to any one of Benjamin Moore's 3,300 paint colors. Unbelievable.

As if that weren't enough, the app will then use the iPhone's on board GPS to locate the user and then find the closest Benjamin Moore retailer.

All I have to say is "What's a Blackberry?"

How NOT to have a give away

Amerock, the hardware people, are having a contest to generate some interest in their collection of rather pedestrian kitchen hardware. The grand prize, according to their website is this kitchen.

They're not kidding. They are giving away the kitchen in the photo. Not a version of it to fit the prize winner's home, but this kitchen. This pre-existing kitchen that's now sitting in some one's showroom no doubt. Here's the fine print from their entry rules:

One Winner will receive an existing, custom, pre-built kitchen, including custom medium brown maple cabinetry, Amerock Revitalize decorative hardware, Elkay Lustertone gourmet undermount stainless steel sink, Elkay pewter Oldare faucet, Zodiaq “Giallo Michelangelo” island countertop, and Zodiaq “Black Forest” countertop. Kitchen does not include internal plumbing fixtures and hardware or appliances. Sponsor will be responsible for the cost of delivery of the kitchen to the Winner. Winner shall be solely responsible for all costs of installation. Sponsor reserves the right to substitute the prize with a prize of equal or greater value due to availability of featured prize. No other substitution or transfer of prize is permitted.

What a curious thing. The fine print goes on to claim that this used kitchen is somehow worth $50K US and $61K Canadian.

Hmmm. It's not hard to rack up a $50,000 list price for a custom kitchen, but custom kitchens only have any value when they go into the room where they're intended. What makes a custom kitchen a custom kitchen is the fact that it's custom-made. Duh.

Outside of their intended rooms, custom cabinetry and counters has painfully little value. Try to sell Used cabinetry some time on eBay and see how far you get with it.

It's not that there's something wrong with giving away an old display, but what a strange contest.

Sweet, sweet subversion

I love these plates.

I mean, how can you not?

Clever and deliciously subversive, aren't they?

These plates are the handiwork of an artist who calls herself Trixie Delicious. Aukland, New Zealand-based Trixie sells her wares (and ships worldwide) through a website called Felt. Felt is the Kiwi version of Etsy, a marketplace for a group of independent artists and artisans to sell their work.

Ms. Delicious takes vintage plates, platters, saucers and bowls and hand paints her messages of good cheer on them directly. She uses non-toxic, heat-fused, ceramic paint. This means that these delightful, heartwarming iconoclasms will last forever. Imagine the joyous faces around your table when you serve a Thanksgiving turkey from a Crackwhore Tray. That noise you hear is the sound of my heart growing three sizes from the thought alone!

Many thanks to Leona Gaita and her great blog Gaita Interiors for the tip off to these beauties. Spend some time this weekend getting to know Leona, I like her perspective.

How to care for and feed your dishwasher

Thursday's New York Times contains their weekly Home and Garden section. It's always worth the peruse. Always. In that weekly section, there's a recurring column called The Fix, where a Times staffer fields a reader's question.

This week's installment of The Fix was written by Arianne Cohen, and she tackled the question, "Why isn't my dishwasher cleaning my dishes?" Ms. Cohen did a great job with the answer and parts of her column were news to me. Adding to my store of appliance knowledge is something I'm always happy to do and I'm going to excerpt some of her more interesting points here.

“Pre-rinsing dishes is a big mistake,” said John Dries, a mechanical engineer and the owner of Dries Engineering, an appliance design consulting company in Louisville, Ky. “People assume that the dishwasher will perform better if you put in cleaner dishes, and that’s not true. Just scrape. Pre-rinsing with hot water is double bad, because you’re pumping water and electricity down the drain.”

It’s actually triple bad, according to Mike Edwards, a senior dishwasher design engineer at BSH Home Appliances in New Bern, N.C. “Dishwasher detergent aggressively goes after food,” Mr. Edwards said, “and if you don’t have food soil in the unit, it attacks the glasses, and they get cloudy,” a process known as etching that can cause permanent damage.

It’s also important not to use too much detergent, he said.

How much do you need? That depends on how much food soil there is, he said, not how many dishes. “If you have a light load,” he said, “don’t fill the detergent cup all the way.”

Powder detergent is preferable to that in liquid or tablet form, he said, because it leaves dishes cleaner. But store it somewhere dry, not under the sink, where it can absorb moisture and form clumps.

That's an interesting note about pre-rinsing dishes. Who knew that when a detergent doesn't have enough to do, it goes all renegade.

Mr. Dries offered a final tip: stick with the normal cycle. It’s the one consumer organizations conduct all their performance and energy tests on. “Manufacturers know this, so it’s the cycle that the most work went into,” he said.

The pots-and-pans cycle is rarely necessary, except when you have baked-on foods, he said, nor is the heat-dry function.

“A trick you can use is called flash dry,” he added. As soon as the dishwasher shuts off, open the door. “Dishes are at their hottest point and give up water moisture the fastest. Within 5 to 10 minutes, your dishes are going to be completely dry.”

I love this kind of insider information. The bit about all of the engineering of a dishwasher getting poured into the normal cycle is really go to know too. And flash drying, who knew?

Revisiting the sink revolution

Last week, I wrote a quick piece about about the Affluence seamless sink. Within hours of that post's going live, I received a very thoughtful e-mail from Dan Sullivan. Dan Sullivan is the inventor of the seamless sink and he's also the CEO of Affluence, the company who brought the seamless sink to market.

Dan gave me his phone number and asked me to call him, so I did. What followed was an hour-long conversation with a man whose passion for his invention is contagious, let me tell you. What an inspiring story and what a great human being. Dan walked me through Affluence's website and we reviewed everything, sink by sink.

When I wrote about the Affluence originally, all I saw was the streamlined look of a seamless sink. Granted, it's an impressive feature, but it's only a third of the story.

All disposers have a clunky black stopper. In a double bowl sink, which is what most people have, there's a strainer basket on the sink side and stopper on the disposer side. Because that's the way thing just are, no one thinks that they don't coordinate. At least I never did. But in an Affluence sink, the strainer and the stopper are identical. They're identical because the drain opening and the disposer opening are the same size. Brilliant! It makes the already improved appearance look even better.

See what I mean? Now go look at your sink. If you have a double bowl set-up, take a look at how bad your stopper looks. Awful, isn't it? As I'm showing here, there's help available.

The final third of the story is how the Affluence seamless sink re-thought the act of disposer installation. Plumbers hate installing disposers. It's a labor-intensive exercise that invariably ends in bleeding knuckles. But watch this video as Dan himself installs a disposer on an Affluence sink.

All of the parts for this installation come with the sink too, so there's nothing extra to buy. Again, brilliant!

I understand completely why the Affluence Seamless Sink won the Best of Competition Award at KBIS this year. And Dan, you made a believer out of me.