Review: Handpresso Wild
Written: 1249126086|%e %B %Y, %H:%M (low-carbon-high-lifestyle)
Gadget review: Handpresso Wild
Coffee was once a small African bean that caused goats to leap, until it was banned by imams in Mecca in 1511, who discovered the Streisand Effect five hundred years early.
Today, of course, coffee is one of the five essential ingredients of the modern economy. And nothing captures the essence of coffee - the bitter kick combined with a restorative caffeine burst - than a well-made espresso. The perfect espresso is creamy, tasty, and just bitter enough to leave a sweet after-taste. One should never add sugar or milk.
As a traveller, my usual struggle is to find, in order: espresso, Internet, and power. My fall-back, in the US is to find a Starbucks and order a double espresso, and a tall glass of water. It's cheap espresso: bitter, burnt, and beastly. Thus the water.
You get the best espressos, of course, in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese coffee bars. The French also do it pretty well. This is thanks to the historical Muslim influence, since it was the Ottomans that brought coffee to Southern Europe from North Africa and Ethiopia.
Elsewhere… it can be pretty desperate. Yes, my name is Pieter, and I am a lifelong coffee addict.
So, it was with some emotion that I ordered a Handpresso Wild on Ebay from a French firm "EspressoDiscount". Was this going to be the answer to decades of searching for the always-available hit? Would this be a cheap plastic disappointment?
The package arrived about a week later and my credit card got a Euro 85.05 charge. The packaging was nice, but irrelevant. This is not about the box but about the espresso. I opened it up and found a neat, solid device looking like a cross between a bike pump and a drug delivery system from some far planet.
Bootstrap problem: the Handpresso demands pods. Not the larger soft pods but the smaller 7 gram "single dose espresso" (ESE) pods. They can be hard to find. I found an 18-pack from Lavazza for 6 Euro, a 12-pack from Rombouts (Belgian coffee brand) for 2.50 Euro, and an 18-pack from Kimbo for around 3 Euro.
Now, how to use the thing. My first trial was at the beach. To use the Handpresso, you twist the handle to unlock and then pump, twenty or thirty times, until the needle hits green. There is no point in over-pumping. You then fill the cup with hot water (I took a vacuum flask with me). You place the coffee pod over the cup, and screw the cap tight on. Then you turn, and press the pressure release button. A small steady jet of hot coffee emerges, as pressurised air fills the water chamber and forces the hot water out.
Surprisingly, it works. You get a small but very good cup of espresso. You also get a lot of stares from people who wonder what the heck you have there.
The Handpresso is very well made. It is solid, has few moving parts, a steel body, and feels like it could last for twenty years or more.
My second trial was on a trip to Bratislava. The Handpresso fits neatly into my camera/computer backpack and adds 500g. I learned a couple of things. First, take out the Handpresso when you go through airport security. You will be asked to explain anyhow, but that way you avoid a full bag search. Second, take enough pods with you. They can be hard to find, and when you start showing your toy to friends and colleagues, the pods get used up very rapidly.
Incidentally, a tip if your airline places limits on hand baggage and you want to avoid checking in your stuff: check-in online and go straight to the gate. They don't (yet) weigh hand baggage at the gate.
You can make the coffee stronger by overfilling the cup and then allowing the pod to soak up the excess water, and leaving it for ten seconds before pushing the pressure release button. You get the same effect by forgetting to pump before adding the water.
My conclusions: if you like espresso and you travel, buy this. I've wanted a portable espresso machine for ages, but this design is genius, and successful. It is not as good as a Southern European espresso served in a smoky bar, but it's very close, especially if you buy the more expensive pods. You might think that pre-ground coffee is bad, but the pods are sealed and firms like Lavazza have done this for decades. I actually have a Lavazza Espresso Point in my office but the Handpresso is just so much easier that it's what I'm using now.
I expect that as soon as the patents run out on this, or perhaps a lot sooner, there will be cheaper imitations hitting the market and we'll see many variations on this idea of hot water pumped by manual action: larger capacities, working with ground coffee rather than pads, with built in water heater, and so on.
And finally, because there is no large mechanical pump that needs to be pre-heated: it's good for the environment. Boiling a small cup of water is cheap and efficient. Leaving a machine to sit, heating the room, is wasteful. The Handpresso fits perfectly with my slogan for better living: "low carbon, high lifestyle".
Comments: 0, Rating: 1
How I'm Voting, and Why
Written: 1244210384|%e %B %Y, %H:%M (politics)
This Sunday Belgians vote for local, regional, and European Union representatives. I'm going to vote for the party that I consider to be the most pro-business, pro-market, pro-competition. That is, the Greens. Here's why.
As a young man I voted for the Greens because they represented the vision of a clean Earth where people worked harder and consumed less. The Green movement was always a strange mix of hippy idealism and hard-nosed pragmatism. Consuming less, and living smarter: not options in a world with limited resources.
But that's not why I'm voting Green tomorrow. The main reason is that since 1999, the Green parties of Europe have consistently been the strongest voice in the European Parliament fighting for what I consider to be an ultra-capitalist vision of pure and real competition unfettered by cartels, monopolies, and political cronyism. When it comes to software patents, criminalisation of copyright law, retention of communications data, and the sharing of software developed with public funds, the European Green parties have consistently taken a consistent pro-market line, uninfluenced by lobbyists. Prominent leaders such as Eva Lichtengerber have hammered home the message: Europe depends on its diverse economy of small, innovative firms. The patent system, especially, is the corrupt tool of egomaniac politicians, monopolists like IBM and Microsoft, self-interested bureaucrats, and cynical speculators. It preys on the economic majority of creative SMEs, and taxes the consumer with fraudulent fees extorted through artificial monopolies.
While the other main parties seem unable to snap out of their wide-eyed love of industrial giants, the Greens have correctly understood that the role of the European Parliament is not to rubber-stamp texts written by industry and polished by the Commission. Government does not serve just industry, it serves everyone, and big industry is small, stupid, greedy, and ultimately wasteful part of the whole.
Thank you, Eva, for all the fights you started and finished in Brussels, on behalf of people like me, who ask nothing except the freedom to create. Tomorrow you get my vote, again.
Comments: 0, Rating: 0
IPv6
Written: 1242822093|%e %B %Y, %H:%M (ipv6 piracy progress)
A prediction of how and when IPv6 will become widely used.
This is what I predict will drive IPv6: the desire by the "criminal majority" to create invisible and untraceable file sharing networks. Efforts to fight copyright infringers depend on the IP address of the person sharing (uploading) files. IPv4 addresses are limited, and easy to trace to at least an ISP, if not an end user. This lets the content industry push for "3-strikes" legislation, as they are doing around the world.
As in any arms race, it's not over just because one side scores a hit, and history tells us that the content industry is typically responsible for technological innovation, through their clumsy lobbying efforts to regulate the Internet into behavior that would protect their distribution channels.
So the question is not whether the file sharers will discover ways to continue their illicit fun and games, but how.
And the answer is, IMO, encrypted Tor networks that emulate IPv6 networks, running over a physical IPv4 network. The real world won't go to IPv4 for a long time, the inertia is almost unmoveable. But emulation is an easy way to run a second real world inside the real real one. So IPv6 will be emulated, and will be pushed by brilliant minds who seriously just want to be able to download the latest episode of Lost.
And thus my prediction: IPv6 will struggle to make any inroads into the Internet as we know it today but it will get into software stacks, into Linux, into browsers, and eventually into network fabric, through the file sharing community and through the actions of the content industry.
