In Car, In Kitchen, In Various Countries: August's Top Gadgets

If you don’t have a new car with DAB radio, this tiny kit is a novel solution to costly retro-fitting. Discreetly fitted in your boot, it transmits a signal picked up by your existing FM radio. The sound quality is only as good as your current radio, but with fewer interruptions. A clever workaround if you simply want to hear digital in your car, or finally rid your life of dreadful medium-wave signals.

Instead of picking up any old travel adapter at the airport, plan ahead and buy one of these. This compact square, with a simple flick of a switch, reveals outputs for UK, US, Far Eastern and Continental sockets (all of which it can handle as inputs too). It also has two USB ports for charging your devices while you’re using a kettle or hairdryer. 

Muddler, reamer, jigger and zester. These may sound like Batman villains, but they’re actually monikers for four of the ten cocktail-making implements included within this Swiss Army-style ten-in-one bartending tool. True cocktail purists will turn their noses up at its kitsch novelty, but if you only occasionally make yourself a mojito, this is a fun and functional item to keep in the kitchen drawer. That said, realistically, there are only two functions that you’ll use regularly-—the bottle opener and corkscrew...

If you’re a podcast devotee who’s switched to android from iPhone, have no fear: in PocketCasts you’ll find a sharp and intuitive podcatcher that’s more cleanly designed and more feature-packed than Apple’s Podcasts app. It auto-downloads your favourite shows, syncs across multiple devices, and is controllable from your phone’s Notification Centre.

The criticism levelled at social networks such as Twitter—that they’re full of people uploading “what they had for lunch”—is an apt description of Platter. This app enables foodies to share appetite-whetting images of their home-made cuisine—and I’ve found that discovering delicious dishes created by strangers has inspired me to raise my own game.

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