Flipper Zero

The Stanley flask is the one you picture on a building site or a fishing trip, and the design has hardly moved in a century. The Classic Legendary Bottle is the current version. It’s vacuum-insulated stainless steel and keeps hot drinks hot or cold ones cold for a full day. The stopper twists to pour without taking it out, and the insulated lid doubles as a cup. It’s leakproof and slim enough to hold in one hand. The 1.1-quart size holds just over a litre. It comes in about ten colours, including the classic Hammertone Green.

Film is expensive, and a half-frame camera halves the cost. The Kodak Ektar H35N takes two pictures in the space of one 35mm frame, so a 36-exposure roll gives you 72 photos. It’s a light, simple point-and-shoot with a built-in flash. This version improves the lens and adds a switch that puts a star filter over it, a bulb mode for long exposures, and a tripod mount to go with it. The viewfinder and rewind have been tidied up too. It comes with a wrist strap and a soft case, in six colours. The sage green is pictured.

QuestBar is a to-do app for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. You pick one task as your current quest and it stays in view: in the menu bar next to the clock on a Mac, as a Home Screen or Lock Screen widget on an iPhone or iPad, and as a complication on your watch. You scribe a quest, begin it, vanquish it, and resurrect it if it turns out you weren’t finished. Quests sync through your own iCloud, there’s no account and no tracking, and it’s a single purchase covering every device rather than a subscription.

The Allbirds Tree Runner is made from trees. The upper is a knit of eucalyptus fibre, which feels smooth and cool against your feet and lets air through. It’s a plain, light, everyday trainer for walking about in rather than running in, and it’s at its best in warmer weather. There’s no logo on the side and not much else to it, and they go with nearly everything. The jet black upper on a white sole is pictured. Allbirds also make them in a lot of other colours.

The first Anglepoise was designed in 1932 by George Carwardine, a car engineer who specialised in suspension. He worked out that a set of springs could balance a lamp arm so that it stayed in whatever position you left it. The Type 75 Mini is a smaller version of Sir Kenneth Grange’s redesign of the lamp. Grange also designed the nose of the InterCity 125 and the Kenwood Chef. The springs sit on the outside of the arm, it moves with very little effort and holds its position, and the shade points the light at your desk rather than into your eyes. It’s sized for a smaller desk, and it comes in a wide range of colours.

The Braun BC02 is a small analogue alarm clock designed by Dietrich Lubs, who spent decades at Braun working alongside Dieter Rams. It has a plain black dial, a yellow second hand, and nothing else on its face. The alarm is a crescendo beep that starts quietly and gets louder until you deal with it. There’s a snooze button, and a light for checking the time in the dark. It runs on a single AA battery and is small enough to take away with you. If your phone is currently your alarm clock, this gives you a reason to leave it charging in another room.

The Playdate is a handheld games console made by Panic, the company that published Untitled Goose Game, and designed with Teenage Engineering. It’s bright yellow, fits in your palm, and has a crank on the side. The screen is a 400×240 black-and-white display with no backlight. It’s sharp, and it’s easy to read in direct sunlight. The crank is used as a game control alongside the D-pad and buttons: depending on the game you’ll use it to reel in a fishing line, wind time backwards, or steer. It launched with a season of 24 games, released two a week. Panic also publishes a free SDK for making your own.

The AeroPress was invented in 2005 by Alan Adler, a Stanford engineering lecturer who was already known for the Aerobie flying ring. It works like a large syringe: coffee and hot water go in the chamber, you stir, leave it for a minute or so, then press the plunger down through a paper filter straight into your mug. The pressure and short brew time give you a strong, smooth cup without the bitterness a cafetière can leave behind. Cleaning up is quick, too. Take the cap off, push the plunger and the used grounds drop into the bin as a single puck. It’s light and made of plastic, so it travels well, and it’s popular enough to have its own World AeroPress Championship.

The Casio F-91W has been in production since 1989 and has barely changed in that time. It’s one of the best-selling watches ever made, and it still costs about £15. It weighs 21g, the case and strap are resin, and the battery lasts around seven years. There’s a daily alarm, an hourly chime, a stopwatch that times to a hundredth of a second, and a small light to the left of the screen for reading it in the dark, though it’s not a very bright one. It’s splash resistant rather than waterproof, so it’s fine in the rain and best taken off before a swim.

Teenage Engineering have never made a boring object, and the EP-133 K.O. II is no exception. It’s a sampler and sequencer about the size of a hardback and just 16mm thick, laid out like a piece of industrial equipment from a 1978 stockroom. Point the built-in mic at anything… a kettle, a door, your own voice, and it stores in one of 999 sample slots, ready to be chopped, pitched and sequenced. There’s 128MB of space to fill it with, MIDI in and out for the rest of your gear, and a speaker so you don’t have to dig out headphones to hear what you’ve done. All of this running on four AAA batteries, or USB-C when you’re near a plug.