Aerobie AeroPress
While not a coffee drinker myself, I’m married to a caffeine junkie - one whose wish list this past holiday season included an espresso maker. So researching I went, and I’m back from weeks of pained review-scoping to tell you that the general consensus is such: if you’re looking to spend less than, oh, $1,500, espresso makers are sort of a lost cause.
Every model seems to get the same complaints: inconsistent brewing, weird controls, wonky housing that’s hard to clean, unreliable hardware that fails in a matter of months. Even when I considered that for pretty much ever household item and electronic gadget there’s a loud minority who have had a bad experience, this was still worrying - what’s the workhorse of affordable, casual espresso makers?
The answer is a bit surprising - it may be this odd-looking little thing called an AeroPress. A hybrid design between a drip brewer and a French press, it’s a small, $30 set consisting of a chamber, cap, and plunger, which you position over your cup and then apply gentle pressure to press your coffee through a filter. It takes up no counter space, requires no electricity, has no moving parts, and is as easy to clean as a measuring cup. Sure, you have to buy filters; a year’s supply will set you back a laughable $6.
But how’s the coffee, you ask? Once again, I’m not the world’s biggest coffee drinker, but the AeroPress, combined with a frother, makes the best homemade latte I’ve had. My wife loves it, as do several friends who have them. It’s also recommended by Cooks Illustrated. At $30, you don’t have much to lose, really. I hope you find you’ve found a winner, though!
I drink a lot of coffee - an unhealthy amount, no doubt - and I have to agree on the opening comments about espresso makers. I was given a Cuisinart model as a gift, and my in-laws, who bought it for me, no doubt paid in excess of $300 for it (I am fully aware that that’s cheap for the kind of machine we’re discussing, here).
Within 6 months, its time-to-pour had gone from less than a minute to over two; almost a year to the day I received it, it died. Cuisinart wanted me to pay to ship it across Canada for repair, so it ended up at the recycling plant, and I went back to my Moka. I’ve had it for 15 years, I paid maybe 20 bucks for it, and it’s served me faithfully with nothing more than a daily rinse: water, coffee, stovetop, done.
Not on the grass, Sweetie. Never. On. The. Grass. See how much fun Daddy is having?
(Photo: Jack Thompson, Dwell, October 2009)
On the Perils of International Commerce
I Live in Canada. Back in December, I bought my daughter a lava lamp, from a company in the US - $24.99. Shipping with FedEx Ground was a further $16.92.
Today I get a bill from FedEx for another $13.69. It turns out that the import duty and GST (total $3.19) hadn’t been factored into the original shipping price, and they’d paid it on my behalf. Then they charged me another $10 (+GST!) for the privilege.
I called FedEx, to be told it was the shipper’s fault for not charging me ahead of time. In my view, though, the responsibility lies solely with FedEx: They know they’re shipping from the US to Canada; they know that there are going to be fees associated with it; they will happily pay them on your behalf, in the knowledge that they’re going to make some more money off it.
FedEx should be giving shippers a quote with the customs and GST rolled into it. If the shipper pays an intra-national delivery cost for an international delivery, Fedex should refuse to take the package. If that means the shipper has to contact the receiver to get the difference, fine. We’d be paying it anyway and, the way it is now, we just get the shaft a few weeks later.
Ten bucks isn’t a lot of money. What I object to is being told a price for a job and then charged something else without my agreement.
Error 0xE8000051 (iPhone)
A colleague and I just experienced some weirdness when trying to install an ad-hoc .ipa to an iPhone via iTunes. It shows up in iTunes no problem, but when trying to sync to the device, iTunes throws up an error 0xE8000051.
The cause of the problem turned out to be that our .app bundle was inside a directory called “payload”, rather than “Payload”. Changing the case of the directory name fixed the problem.
There are very few Google hits on E8000051, and none of them are about this problem, so I’m hoping this will eventually become one.
Update: Now I actually search for 0xE8000051, there are a ton of hits. Maybe one day I’ll understand how to Google.
Scousers
