Evernote Smart Moleskin, Bar10der and Best Made Gear Bag
Evernote Smart Moleskin
This, the love child of a favourite app, Evernote, and the journal of choice, Moleskin, involves unprecedented cross-breeding of digital and analogue. Many are probably familiar with Moleskin, which seems to have framed a whole category of notebooks. Evernote is perhaps less well known. It’s a tremendous app that lets you easily collect and organise disparate bits of digital flotsam, like clipping articles from websites, saving images, taking notes – and gathers them in digital notebooks on your desktop and mobile devices.
When you take a photo of a page in the new Smart Moleskin with your smartphone app, it’s digitised and saved instantly to an Evernote virtual notebook. A special dotted pattern on the pages helps line it up for optimal digitisation. Little stickers can automatically tag it to definable categories. So jot some travel notes in your Smart Moleskin, add a travel sticker, snap it with your phone and it’s filed digitally tagged Travel. OCR (optical character recognition) can even interpret your handwriting, but only if it’s beautifully copperplate. This geek’s sprawl would defeat the code breakers of Bletchley Park.
Evernote Smart Moleskin $30 see moleskin.comEvernote app from various app stores
Bar10der
The proverbial Swiss Army penknife is all very well – it’s a fine, well-made multi-tool – but the daftly-named Bar10der (something of a phonetic car crash) embodies a particular practicality that may not be the forte of our serious Alpine friends.
Ten classic, essential, bartending tools in one pocket-sized party-maker, well that’s some type of unhealthy genius. Combining what sounds suspiciously like Snow White’s party-crashing ne’er-do-wells, including a reamer, jigger, zester, stirrer, strainer and opener, along with other vital cocktail-ware, the Bar10der is a must-have in case of an emergency party.
Bar10der $50 from uncommongoods.com
Best Made Gear Bag
This is actually a tool bag that’s so good looking, you might take up DIY just to be able to haul it. The Best Made brand doesn’t overstate its case. Every element in the construction is sound: a heavy duty waxed outer over a waterproof inner. Super-high strength Kevlar handles.
Brass feet and grommets for tying on. Gnarly enough to haul your tool kit, cool enough to weekend away in Monaco (to pluck somewhere pretentious out of the air), the understated Gear Bag is all bag.
Best Made Gear Bag $240 from bestmadeco.com