http://reasonablegoods.com Shop less, live more. Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:00:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My reasonable friend Sean (who previously recommended an electric kettle) is back with another recommendation: 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 ... http://reasonablegoods.com/products/graphics-tablet-wacom-bamboo My friend Sean wrote in to recommend a kettle: 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 ... http://reasonablegoods.com/products/electric-kettle Computers are great; even better with a monitor. Time was, you'd connect your blinged-out calculator to your television set, but as computers got more sophisticated, they required a dedicated display. I grew up with bulky CRTs, and though I find childhood comfort in their quiet hum and warm ... http://reasonablegoods.com/products/flatpanel-monitor We've been recently getting these DVDs from Netflix (a very reasonable service on its own), and this documentary from the BBC about Planet Earth is ultrareasonable. With a $25million budget and five years going around to every climate in the world, the production team got amazing footage that should ... http://reasonablegoods.com/products/planet-earth-bbc A friend asked for a recommendation on a voice recorder. ConsumerSearch notes the Olympus WS-311M as the Best Digital Voice Recorder overall. I considered the DS-30 and DS-40, which have more memory and other niceties like a builtin speaker, but they were substantially more expensive. All the ... http://reasonablegoods.com/products/digital-voice-recorder-olympus-ws-311m The electric toaster is the canonical Reasonable Good. It's a required small appliance for any modern kitchen, and there are so many different makes and models all clamoring for your attention. This one's transparent! This one prints on your toast! And yet, what do 99% of ... http://reasonablegoods.com/products/our-one-year-anniversary Ah, the Moleskine. Before I owned one, I wondered what the big deal was. Then last year I got two (one Large and one Small), and now my favorite part of every day is taking a few notes just before bed. I will absolutely buy another Large ... http://reasonablegoods.com/products/journal-moleskine Reasonable Reader Bethany requested a recommendation for a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) camcorder: 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. ... http://reasonablegoods.com/products/hard-disk-camcorder-panasonic-sdr-h18 If you had to recommend only one book on a particular subject, which one would it be? A recent MetaFilter post along these lines sparked a flurry of responses and some sincere debate. Several readers even complained that they had spent their entire monthly book budget in a ... http://reasonablegoods.com/products/canonical-books 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 ... http://reasonablegoods.com/products/intoxicant