Gadgets: Making travel easier

Six Bottle Bike Bag
As the party season beckons, committed cyclists are facing something of a logistics dilemma: how to get their six pack of carefully chosen craft beers to the festive gaff. Banish the calamitous prospect of them falling off your carrier with this Six Bottle Bike Bag. You can sling it over the bar neatly and secure it in place with Velcro tabs. Designed to take 500ml bottles, it's made from tough waterproof canvas with a handle on top. Needless to say, never drink and bike. €42 from firebox.com

Suntatics sCharger-5 solar charger
Available from Green Angel in Wexford and online, Suntatics claim its solar-powered sCharger-5 is capable of recharging anything with a USB connection at near regular wall socket speeds. In full sunlight, it should be able to juice up your iPhone in about two hours. Certainly it's small and powerful for its size, thanks to the mono-crystalline solar cells, and it will work with just about any USB slot. And if you're a gadget fiend, there's a bigger sister sCharger-12 which can power two devices at the same time. €139 from greenangel.net

Thor Ice Scraper
No, this isn't some movie studio merchandising spin-off, though one might worry that the Hollywood legal eagles could decide to make life tough for it: "We own all the Norse Gods." Meanwhile, behold its mighty power for ridding your windscreen of ice. With double blades that work forwards and back, an extendable handle to get all the way across the SUV's expanse of glass and a handle at the blade end for a bit of extra Thor, it's a step up from the CD case or flimsy plastic flap most of us use. $21 from quirky.com

Tom Kelly
betweenideas.blogspot.com