I recently decided I was going to try to spend an hour a week practicing some sort of basic graphic art (Calligraphy, paint, etc) and that a cheap graphics tablet would be the optimal way to do this without using $ and space for art supplies (and cleaning up).

A glance at some reviews and some personal shopping made the choice obvious. The clear winner in this category is the Wacom Bamboo tablet.

It’s currently on special at Dell for less than $50:

It’s a nice little USB drawing tablet with double-sided stylus and some control doodads at the top. It supports 256 pressure levels, has great reviews from both tech pundits and actual producers of graphics (some claim that they use the cheap Bamboo line of peripherals more than the high-end expensive tablets from Wacom and others.)

I purchased one (used) for not much less than dell’s sale price, and it’s been great so far. I’ve used it with open source software to start practicing pen-style calligraphy.

The Wacom Bamboo would be great for a student, freelancer, or hobbyist.

I’m actually thinking about getting one of these for myself, since I’ve been playing Broken Picture Telephone and it’s nigh impossible to draw with a regular mouse. Thanks Sean!

I bought a hot water boiler kettle for my younger brother (an undergraduate, meaning he can live off of things cooked only with hot water for some years yet). These are pretty common devices (moreso outside the USA?) and there are a zillion brands, some quite pricey, many of them cheap, and many of which are cheaply made (exposed heating element, etc).

Why would one want such a thing? [Electric kettles are awesome.]

This seems to be a well reviewed, inexpensive hot water heater.

A higher-end version (for aesthetic reasons, as well as anti-plastic superstition) that I bought for myself: Capresso H2O Plus Glass Water Kettles. But it costs over twice as much. [$60 at Amazon]

Both of these seem reasonable for their respective purposes, so I figured I’d share the outcome of my research.

These do seem quite reasonable. Thanks for the recommendation, Sean!

If you use a computer with any regularity, you probably already know that you can never have too much “screen real estate”, as we like to call it. In this day and age, it’s unreasonable to be stuck with a 17 or, heaven help you, a 15 inch monitor. Upgrading to a bigger monitor will pay dividends in the future, especially if you do graphics, publishing, video, or software. And if you have an extra video card (or a fancy video card that supports dual monitors), you can go “multiheaded” like our friend Al Gore (who endorses both widescreen monitors and being reasonable, but doesn’t his wrist hurt?).

There are so many LCD displays being manufactured right now, with varying levels of quality, that it can be daunting to choose one. For $260, this 22″ widescreen (1680×1050) Samsung 2232BW LCD monitor is very good deal. Consumer Search labels it the best 22″ widescreen display, and it’s currently at a sweet spot of price/size/quality that can’t be beat. This Christmas, give a friend the ultimate gift of boosted productivity and higher contrast. They’ll thank you time and again for being so reasonable.

Updated 2008/11/8.

David Attenborough narrates this original BBC version with his British accent, and he’s great to listen to. 11 episodes of 50 minutes apiece, covering both poles, mountains, fresh water, caves, deserts, ice worlds, great plains, jungles, shallow seas, seasonal forests, and the ocean deep. Beautifully done; earth porn at its finest.

In fact, the very first post I made to Reasonable Goods was for a toaster. Our business cards say “It shouldn’t take all day to buy a toaster”. This is exactly the kind of product that Reasonable Goods was made for.

So when I was doing the research on the Reasonable Toaster, I did what any reasonable person would do if they were actually shopping for a toaster. I went to consumersearch.com and consumerreports.org, and I chose what I would have bought: the best toaster for the cheapest price, which happened to be a CR Best Buy–always a good sign if CR thinks the product is in a sweet spot of price/quality too. I checked around the web for negative reviews, made sure it was available on Amazon, and I posted it. “It makes toast, two pieces at a time.”

Well, now it’s been exactly one year since I made that first post. We’ve made 50-odd recommendations since then, and although I’m not as regular at posting new content as I should be, overall I’m proud of the values that Reasonable Goods stands for and the progress we’ve made.

About That Toaster

Ironically, that toaster–the Proctor Silex Cool Touch 22450–turned out to be a bust. While fixing some broken images, I saw that the Proctor-Silex was no longer for sale on Amazon. After a bit of research, I found that there were 63 reports of the heating element not turning off when the toast was done, and 3 reports of food fires (no injuries), so the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a recall in March. Not very reasonable after all.

Well, over the past year I’ve come to understand a lot more about What Is Reasonable. And honestly, I still think that first recommendation was pretty reasonable, at the time. The toaster was simple, it did what 90% of people expected it to do, it was well-reviewed by Consumer Reports, and it cost less than $20.

In fact, there are only two factors that I overlooked in that recommendation:

1. The toaster was not an established model with a history of reliability and customer satisfaction.

Even though the electric toaster is a basic product whose design has not changed much in the last 50 years, there don’t appear to be any standard issue toasters that have actually been around for several years. I don’t know why. But there’s no obvious forerunners in the longevity marathon, and my particular trusty Black & Decker 10-year-old toaster is out of production.

2. Proctor-Silex previously recalled 95,000 toasters in 2000…for this exact issue.

I should have found this one in my original research. I would have called it out, but it may not have even changed the recommendation, the argument being that lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice. I won’t be making that argument now.

I was wrong. I sincerely apologize. If you bought one of these toasters, you can contact Proctor Silex and get a free replacement toaster, which will hopefully not set your food on fire.

Everyone makes mistakes. A reasonable person will acknowledge their mistake, apologize, offer compensation if anyone was hurt, and then just keep on bein’ reasonable. I have learned my lesson, and I endeavor to be even more wary of new products than I already am. (Sorry, iPhone.) But I am going to get right back on that horse and announce the new Reasonable Toaster (this weekend; shopping for a toaster actually does take all day), which I absolutely guarantee will make toast, two pieces at a time.

Happy anniversary, Reasonable Goods!

The Moleskine comes in a few different flavors (Large/Small, Ruled/Squared/Plain), but all with hard covers and a nice elastic strap to hold it closed. They’re quite durable: I keep the Small one in my back pocket at all times, so I’m constantly sitting on it, and it took six months for it to lose a single page. It is looking a little beat up now, but considering the abuse I heap on it, the rest of the pages are hanging in there quite well.

Since getting a Moleskine, I’ve started to notice that tell-tale elastic strap everywhere, and it doesn’t surprise me anymore when I tell a friend about some cool book they should read and they whip out their Moleskine. With its plain black cover, the Moleskine is so understated and simple, that I just wouldn’t have noticed until I had one of my own. I feel like I inducted myself into some kind of reasonable Moleskine club.

They are a little expensive; at $15 apiece, the Moleskine probably does not make for a good notebook or scratch paper. But after years of taking down my personal thoughts in $2 spiral-bound college notebooks, I can personally attest to the difference in quality of the journaling I do now. Many details are just taken care of, and I didn’t even know these things were important. Even the size, which I initially thought would be too small (the Large is about three-quarters the size of standard US Letter), is perfect.

The Reasonable choice is Large Ruled, for writing; artists will prefer Large Plain for sketching. I’m sure the Small, Squared, and/or specialty Moleskines fill other niches quite reasonably, but unless you know why you want it to be Small or Squared, just get the Large Ruled. You can always buy another one later.

I’m looking for a hard-disk handheld video camera for my husband’s birthday. I want one that we can download the movies onto our computer and edit them. I want it to have lots of hours of available memory. I want it to be small.

We record family events, wrestling meets, basketball games, and football games. We have a camcorder that is about 7 years old with tapes. It’s okay, but tapes are harder to find, get messed up, and until we figure out how to get them on DVD, we can only watch them when we plug the camera into the tv. Our camera does have an incredible zoom so that helps a lot when we’re on the sidelines and can’t see our player clearly with the naked eye. We have a normal home computer that I imagine downloading the videos onto to burn DVDs. We would probably want to delete zoomed in shots of baldspots and anything else our boys think hilarious to record. We are not professionals.

HDD camcorders are definitely awesome, the way to go if you don’t want to deal with tapes (most of the midrange and budget camcorders are miniDV; the Reasonable Camcorder might be too). The reasonable HDD camcorder seems to be the Panasonic SDR-H18, as suggested by Consumer Search with a reasonable review by CNet.

The SDR-H18 has enough storage for 7 hours of footage, and the battery life is excellent (though you’ll need at least one extra battery to fill up the hard drive). Editing may be difficult with the camera itself, but with a computer, transfer and editing should be much simpler than with any other format. It has 32x optical zoom, which is good for this price range.

You can order it straight from Panasonic for $500; I have no idea why Amazon charges $700, but a $200 markup is pretty unreasonable in my opinion. That’s still a little higher than what Bethany wanted to spend, but there are so many options out there (and it really is ridiculous) in this case I’d say a little extra money will go a long way towards minimizing the risk of getting something that’s really unusable.

These great texts deserve to be listed in one place, so we’ve started the Reasonable Bookshelf, a collection of the best and most broadly accessible books available on a wide variety of topics. We know we’ll have to leave out many great books, but our goal is to choose one very reasonable book to bring the uninformed layperson up to speed on the given topic.

As always, if you have a suggestion, send us a message or leave a comment below.

Intoxication is Only for Self-Sufficient Adults

If you are under the age of 18 (21 in some temperaments), you should absolutely not be smoking or drinking or injecting or swallowing anything psychoactive. I am sympathetic to the desire of existential beings to alter their consciousness (in the parlance of our times, I know the people wanna get fucked up), but it is very important that you save it until you’re older.

Please, I am dead serious about this. Your mind is still developing, and I’m not giving you a load of anti-drug propaganda. Stay up all night, dance like a maniac, make out with people (I mean a lot of people, not just one), gamble with your parent’s money–just don’t use drugs. Even nicotine and alcohol can permanently modify your maturing brain chemistry, and you can give yourself a bad case of ADD with too much caffeine and high-fructose corn syrup. It is ultrareasonable to not use any recreational drug for the entirety of your adolescence and much of your adult life. Take it slow. Remember, there’s a time and a place for everything, and it’s called “college.” You’ll thank yourself later.

Of course it should go without saying, that regardless of age or experience, you should absolutely never operate heavy machinery or care for children under the influence of any drug, which includes alcohol and some prescription medications. Also, anyone involved with drug law enforcement or extreme drug intolerance is legally required to stop reading this document now.

On to the reasonable intoxicant.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.
– Lord Byron

Today, you went in to work at 7am because you wanted to go home at 3pm, but then everything went wrong and you want to throttle your co-worker for “accidentally” ruining hours of your hard work, and by the time you got home it was already 8pm. A sandwich for dinner, only a few hours before bedtime. You don’t always feel this way, but tonight you want to get a little messed, maybe invite your neighbor over to watch a movie or play a game.

Occasional moderate intoxication is reasonable for most people, though it’s definitely not for everyone. The most reasonable intoxicant is marijuana, a ferocious weed whose buds happen to contain a high concentration of psychoactive cannabinoids. Marijuana is widely used (4% worldwide, 20% in the U.S. annually), it’s not addictive, and it won’t kill you–there are no discernible long-term health effects from casual use. You won’t become violent, it doesn’t interact negatively with either prescription or recreational drugs, and there is no toxic dose. At worst you’ll pass out or mumble something really really really stupid. Under the influence of marijuana, you can expect mood elevation, aphasia, laziness, and the munchies. If you overdo it–which, well, sometimes you will–you’ll have a little harder time waking up tomorrow, and you’ll definitely need some caffeine before lunch.

Marijuana is not actually a completely harmless panacea, though compared to other intoxicants, it’s pretty close. Some people will find it unreasonable for a few reasons. First, it’s usually smoked, and smoking anything regularly is not healthy, and this includes marijuana. If you’re allergic to smoke, you can use a vaporizer, or make it into a tea, or bake some brownies. If you’re really worried about it, you should ask your doctor about the health effects of occasional marijuana smoking; she’ll probably laugh.

Second and most unreasonably, cannabis is prohibited in many countries, including the U.S., which makes it more difficult to procure than alcohol (though not by much), and prevents the government from collecting any taxes on it. Simple possession is being decriminalized in many places (Seattle, Denver, Canada, Belgium, the U.K., to name a few), but unfortunately the penalties for selling marijuana are still outrageous and unreasonable, and therefore no reasonable vendor exists on the web. I’ve linked to some other items that you may find interesting, either in lieu of or in conjunction with any weed you may somehow procure. It is quite reasonable to support local legislation (NORML subscription, $35) that stops the incarceration of responsible citizens for growing and selling a harmless plant.

Finally, you can use any intoxicant too much. Always take care to tend to your soul:

The truth is marijuana probably isn’t gonna make you kill people, and… it most likely isn’t gonna fund terrorism, but… Well son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored and… It’s when you’re bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or… being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren’t good at anything.

Ethyl alcohol, also known as beer, gets an honorable mention for being ubiquitous and legal in most countries. However, too much alcohol can lead to the emergency room or even death, and an alcohol hangover is basically your internal organs getting together in your brain for a little afterparty and barfing all over the place. Also, an equivalent amount of intoxication with alcohol is usually several times more expensive than marijuana. So despite alcohol’s legality and availability, marijuana is still a more reasonable intoxicant.