Technology: Must-have gadgets

By
Paul Morris
-
1976

Coffee: The fluid that fuels many a late-finish or tedious meeting. Coffee and tech have a strong relationship – the world’s first rudimentary webcam was cobbled together from an old video capture card and a spare computer in order to monitor the coffee pot in the Trojan Room of Cambridge University in 1991. Caffeine-free programming wasn’t a thing in those days. If you’ve ever found yourself caught in the vicious cycle of making coffee, getting busy, realizing it’s cold and making another, only to do the same all over again, the Ember is for you. It’s a coffee cup that comes with a built-in heater and will keep your coffee at the temperature you like it, all day long. It’s got an app (of course it has) so you can set your preferred temperature and the mug will remember this and activate as soon as a hot liquid is poured in. The regular-sized mug holds around 300 ml and will alert your smartphone when your drink is up to temperature. And, er, that’s pretty much it. You could be forgiven for thinking that this is a mere trinket, something to give as an amusing gift to a friend. Well, you could indeed do that, if you really liked your friend and have a spare €150 down the back of the sofa. Yes, you read that correctly – €150 for a mug with a light in it. Still, if this is your cup of tea go to ember.com and slap down the plastic. Me? I bought an electric Moka Pot and a really nice cup for under €40 all-in. I love my tech, but even I think things have gone too far sometimes.

Something many haven’t considered is the benefit – no, in fact the sheer delight – of a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. If the soundtrack to your daily commute is the tchikita- tchikita-tchikita of someone’s in-ear headphones, or you work in an open-plan office or if you just want to make it abundantly clear that chit-chat is not an option, an investment of around €250 can clear your head and free your mind. If you aren’t familiar with them, they do pretty much as their name suggests. How they do it is the strange thing – they do it by creating more sound. They monitor the incoming sound from your surroundings, then create more sound waves that exactly mirror them, filling in the peaks and troughs of the sounds, effectively cancelling them out. They’re still very much there, you just can’t hear them. I’ll leave you to do your own research on the best ones but you’ll never go far wrong choosing Sony, Sennheiser or Bose. Your music will sound better, your day calmer and your life better.

For me, if it were a choice between a mug with a light or a set of noise-cancelling headphones for roughly the same price, I know what I’d go for. You might really like coffee though, I don’t know.