Staying Power Skil 2410 10.8V Li Ion Drill, $80 skil.com
The problem with most cordless drills is the way the batteries drain
even when you aren’t using them. Unless you keep the battery pack in the
charger all the time, you never know if the drill is going to work when you need it.
Not so with the Skil 2410 10.8V Li Ion Drill. It sat in my closet for a month without a
charge and worked like a champ when I pulled it out, unlike the NiCad-powered tools
I frequently find myself cursing.
Skil claims the drill can hold a charge for 18 months of non-use, but I haven’t had
it long enough to test. (If you don’t trust it, you can store the drill on the charger.) The
2410 has a couple of other handy features, like a quick-change chuck that doesn’t
require a key or the coconut-crushing grip of an orangutan to make sure bits don’t slip,
and a built-in light to help you see what you’re doing.
—Mark Frauenfelder
Fun with a Fridge
$14 frigits.com
My mother has collected magnets for her
fridge as long as I can remember. Whenever we went on trips, all she wanted was a
souvenir magnet. So, you can imagine how
surprised we were to see the memory slate
wiped clean for a game.
Frigits is a great magnet set that lets you
build a marble run right on your fridge. Each
piece has swiveling magnets on the back, so
you can turn them as you’d like. They send
you 12 marbles, and you can buy the “Frigits
Extension Launcher” so short folks can send
the marbles high enough.
I believe that the only real requirement to
use it is to understand gravity; I think most
Earth residents are familiar with that. Kids
love the clicking, clacking, and spinning as
the marble makes its way down. We ended
up moving the Frigits to the side of the fridge
so we would be ready to play at all times.
(See my video of Frigits in action at
makezine.com/go/frigits.) —Brian Stucki
The Daily Grail
dailygrail.com
I’ve savored The Daily Grail for years, and like Boing Boing,
its mix is hard to describe except to say that it combines
many things I’m interested in — archaeology, anthropology, paranormal phenomena, alternative history,
natural science, the occult — and approaches them with
the same fascination and skepticism that I have. The links
are great, and the comments frequently hilarious. As well as
keeping you up-to-date on outlier thought, TDG also follows
a pantheon of fringe notables like Graham Hancock and
Loren Coleman, and performs due diligence on self-assured
authorities such as Egypt’s celebrity minister of antiquities
Zahi Hawass and career skeptic James Randi.
At the end of 2003, the long-running TDG became
the watered-down “TDG News Briefs” behind the home
page of the ill-fated Phenomena magazine. Thankfully
the site came back two years later with even more to
share. Now it also hosts The Red Pill, a reference wiki
that “grew out of Wikipedia’s tendency to avoid ‘fringe’
issues,” and the PDF magazine Sub Rosa, which takes
a deeper look at fringe topics with historical features,
profiles, interviews, and artist spotlights.
It all just makes me want to kidnap the bloggers so
that we can drink wine and talk until dawn, while taking
turns choosing the music to put on the stereo. I’m sad
that I have only one lifetime to explore all the fun things
that TDG covers. Or do I?
—Paul Spinrad
Make: 173
