Occasionally Useful

Zynga, purveyors of annoying, Facebook spamming games, have decided to release a complete and total rip off of NimbleBit's Tiny Tower.

Charlie Kindel, who used to work on Windows Phone, won an Android 'phone in a raffle. His review is to the point, and he admits he may have some bias, although his points seem spot on to me:-

A typical non-geek consumer would be absolutely-fraking-crazy to pick an Android phone over a Windows Phone. Windows Phone is vastly more refined, cohesive, and easy to use. Period.

There was a dramatic graph produced by Fortune recently, that showed Apple sales soaring above the other main PC manufacturers if the iPad was included in the figures. It turns out that the figures and the graph produced weren't entirely accurate.

I used to work in real-time control, so the idea of using PID control for a coffee machine seems like such a fantastic idea...

Consistent pressure and temperature through the entire pull is the key to getting a perfect shot of espresso. And that's exactly what our machine gives you, at a price far below any machine currently out there.

There are basically two kinds of home espresso machines on the market today. The affordable models have no good mechanism of temperature or pressure control. These machines can’t pull consistent shots. So if you're serious about espresso, you’ll need one of the higher-end machines - they make great coffee, but they also start around $700.

But we’re engineers, and we knew that we could design a machine that was just as good as the expensive models - for less. And because we’re coffee enthusiasts ourselves, we kept the consumer experience in mind, and included features that we ourselves lusted after in an affordable machine.

Our machine will retail for around $400, but it's available to you guys on Kickstarter for only $200!

No other machine at this price point offers high-end quality, PID-controlled customizable temperature and pressure, pre-infusion, or shot-time settings - we do.