Curt Long

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Women are thought to shop more than men, which might be true in the real world, but online it turns out men shop more, Market Watch reports. Buzz60’s Sam Berman has the full story.

The first thing you notice when you walk into the theater is the smell of soap, followed by a faint stickiness on the carpeted floors, and a tacky coating on the armrests of the seats.

When the lights come up at the Gazillion Bubbles Show, it quickly becomes clear what’s going on. Powerful fans blow tiny soap bubbles into the audience by the thousands. Little kids giggle; bigger kids scream. And like a magician, 27-year-old Melody Yang pulls out her wands.

She uses water-based vapor (she calls it “smoke”) to create bubbles that erupt like volcanoes, and some that launch into the air like rockets. She brings kids on stage and makes huge, tubular bubbles that can encase five of them inside.

“People love it. It’s just something that is so universal,” she says. “It’s something that takes you back to your childhood because a lot of the times when we see a bubble we see it when we’re very young, and we’re just like ‘what is that?’ You know, it puts us back in the moment.”

1. A set of steak knives worthy of a high-end steakhouse

The dad(s) in your life almost assuredly already own at least a couple of knives used specifically for steak, poultry, and everything in between, but here’s the thing about knives: If you love food, there’s almost always room on the shelf for something better.

This set of six 4.5-inch steak knives from Wüstof are close to being the be-all and end-all choice for carnivores, omnivores, and anyone who enjoys an elevated eating experience. They’re certainly not the cheapest cutlery in the cooking store, but Wüstof is a brand of legend, and one that’ll back its products up with a limited lifetime warranty.

If dad spends a lot of the time in the kitchen, these’ll surely be appreciated.

Buy the Wüstof steak knives set for $109.95 via Amazon

2. A head-turning duffle bag for work or weekend getaways

Credit: Filson / Nordstrom

Anyone who’s studied the Official Manual of Dad Complaints will no doubt recall Common Dad Complaint #208: luggage angst.

Dads tend to have three bags: a couple of suitcases for vacation and some sort of briefcase-type number for work. When it comes to packing for a weekend excursion or a last-minute camping trip, the options are limited.

Filson doesn’t mess around, especially when it comes to its luggage. This medium-sized duffle bag is designed to last a lifetime while never going out of style. Don’t let the price tag scare you away—you’re paying for top-shelf quality. Skeptical? Just ask anyone you know who owns a Filson bag (trust me—you know at least one).

You could certainly buy a cheap bag instead, but why would you? Get dad one that’ll last a lifetime.

Get this Filson medium-sized duffle bag for $395 via Nordstrom

3. An entire laundry care kit for dads who enjoy looking their best

Credit: Laundress / Saks Fifth Avenue

There are few things cooler than a dad who gives a damn about fashion, and any gift that empowers a person to look and feel their best is a positive force for good, as far as I’m concerned.

Think of this collection of laundry aids as an easy-to-use toolkit for common, everyday laundry issues, like wrinkled wardrobes, staticky shirts, and unstarched collars. Because no one—and I mean no one—makes it to the dry cleaners as often as they’d like.

Buy this laundry care kit from Laundress for $97 via Saks Fifth Avenue

4. One of our favorite meat thermometers

Credit: Lavatools / Amazon

We recently spent hours upon hours painstakingly testing some of the most popular digital meat thermometers on the market, and the Lavatools Javelin was one of the few that rose to the top of our ranks. It’s fast (averaging just five seconds in its temperature readings), easy to operate, and considerably less expensive than some of the other models we tested.

I’ll admit that a new meat thermometer isn’t exactly the most dazzling gift in the world, but if the dads in your life are anything like my own, there’s a good chance you’ll be rescuing them from the clutches of their hard-to-read analog meat thermometer.

Get your dad the Lavatools Javelin for just $24.99 via Amazon

5. The handsomest edition of Scrabble your dad has ever seen

Credit: Winning Solutions / Amazon

A game as timeless and beloved as Scrabble deserves the best possible treatment—and your dad deserves to have it on his shelf.

This high-class version of the game features a swiveling wood cabinet design with mahogany finish, matching tiles, and an unspoken promise that you’ll never be satisfied with another plastic, rinky-dink version of Scrabble ever again.

As a gift, it’s both a safe bet and a thoughtful one—the gift-giving equivalent of making a classy toast at a party.

Buy this deluxe wooden edition of Scrabble for $109.99 via Amazon

6. A hammock (because dads love hammocks)

Credit: Vivere / Amazon

You don’t have to be a dad to enjoy a good hammock. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy an afternoon spent swaying in a summer breeze, occasionally catching whiffs of a nearby neighborhood barbecue?

Hammocks have been helping people finish pulpy paperbacks for centuries. When it comes to lazy, Sunday afternoon naps, the hammock is the sultan of somnolence. Dads love hammocks because everyone loves hammocks.

This affordable model from Vivere is one of the best-reviewed hammocks on Amazon. It’s easy to assemble, comes in a ridiculous amount of color combinations, and doesn’t require the support of two properly spaced trees like you’re Fred Flinstone or something.

Give your dad the gift of stepping up his summer game—he’ll thank you in August.

Get the Vivere hammock for $119.99 via Amazon

7. An entry-level telescope for dads who won’t stop posting science memes

Credit: Celestron / Amazon

If you’ll allow it, I’d like to get really lame for a second and talk about how cool space is. OK, here goes: Space is like, really crazy, folks.

I didn’t really appreciate the act of star gazing until I spent some time at an observatory here in Boston, witnessimg the surface of the moon, the rings of Saturn, binary star systems up close (or at least, closer than I ever had before).

An entry-level telescope isn’t the most affordable gift idea out there, but as far as returns on investment go, you’d be hard-pressed to find something more rewarding.

The Celestron NexStar 130SLT is widely considered one of the best entry-level telescopes in the game. It’s astonishingly approachable in its design and features fully computerized hand controls.

If you’re looking to blow your dad’s mind this year, get your siblings, grandchildren, aunts, or uncles to chip-in on an easy-to-use telescope that’ll stay in the family for generations.

Buy the Celestron NexStar 130SLT for $384.86 via Amazon

Dog owners will go to crazy lengths to make sure that their fur-babies are entertained during the long, boring workday. I’ve frozen wet dog food in red rubber Kongs, or stuffed them full of peanut butter. I’ve hired dog walkers and pet sitters. I’ve turned on DogTV on my Roku. But my dogs were bred to herd cattle or sheep all day, and they still get bored. It’s not like they can read a magazine.

While cameras with two-way microphones, like the Nest IQ, are good at freaking out your dog, the Furbo is built specifically to let you check in on your pets when you’re gone. When you set up the camera and download the companion app, you can enjoy a wide array of pet-friendly features.

You can speak to your pups, watch a live feed, or toss them treats. With a Premium account, you can also save video footage, take pet selfies, set barking alerts, and keep an eye on any humans coming and going.

Nowadays, I work from home and have two young kids, so arguably my dogs now have a little too much stimulation. But if I didn’t, I would love the Furbo. It offers a very high level of remote doggy interaction.

Pretty Paw-lease

The Furbo is a gorgeous device. It’s smooth and white, a little under nine inches tall, and wouldn’t look out of place in a much better-decorated home than mine.

Finding a good place for it did take a little thought. It has to be plugged in—there’s no way to use it with a battery—and in a spot with a strong Wi-Fi signal. The Furbo has to be set low enough for your dog to see it, and if you want to use it to identify visitors, it would ideally face your front door. Eventually, I made a little shrine to the Furbo on a stepstool in my living room.

With every device that shows the interior of your home, you need to make sure that the data is protected. Furbo uses secure 2048-bit RSA private-key encryption. The footage is also deleted from both the cloud and the app at midnight every night, and you can go into Furbo’s settings and turn off the camera entirely.

Setup is simple. Plug it in and wait for the status light at the bottom to turn green. Yellow means it’s on standby; blue, that it’s in use; and purple, that the Wi-Fi connection has dropped out. Once it’s on, download the Furbo companion app and follow the instructions.

Unfortunately, I hit a hitch shortly after completing the setup. Neither the sweet potato soft treats, nor dog biscuits, that I had in my dog drawer fit in the Furbo’s treat tosser. Furbo does recommend that the treats be under 0.4 inches in diameter, and the app links directly to suggested treats on Amazon (my pups were partial to the peanut butter mini Zuke’s).

However, since they’re both battling a little weight problem (sorry, guys), I ended up filling the treat reservoir with ordinary kibble. The treat reservoir has a half-cup capacity, so the Furbo will only work as an auto-feeder if your dog is really, really small.

It does take awhile for your dogs to figure out what Furbo is all about. The app has a training video that shows you how to teach your dog to respond to it. It took me a day of sitting next to the Furbo and tossing them a treat by hand at the same time that I triggered the tosser. But once they learned what it meant, they parked themselves in front of it all day long.

It has a pretty good arm, too. Sitting a foot off the ground, it can fling treats up to around eight feet away. I caught my spouse using a second tester Furbo to hurl Cheerios for my infant to chase, and it did pretty well on double duty.

The Furbo also seems quite sturdy, and the bamboo top is spill-proof. If your over-enthusiastic dogs knock it over a few times by scrabbling at it excitedly when they hear your voice, there’s no harm done.

It’s Paw-some

Even though it has a lot going for it, a few things about the Furbo were annoying. You can’t log into your Furbo online or even turn it on or off without the app, so software glitches can be a huge problem. Once, I updated the firmware on the app and the Setting tab went MIA. I was stuck uninstalling and reinstalling the app a few times until it reappeared.

Then there’s a few camera quirks: the Furbo has a 160-degree wide-angle lens that you can digitally zoom, but you can’t pan around or rotate the image. So, your dog knocks the Furbo over, you might as well turn it off or give yourself vertigo.

If you have two or more dogs, the Furbo might also be of limited utility. One of my dogs is pretty shy, and the other more aggressive. Even though you can create multiple dog profiles, my boss dog ended up snagging most of the treats.

But for a seemingly simple device, the Furbo’s software was sophisticated. The app informed me that subscribing to premium alerts is currently free. With premium alerts activated, the Furbo kept a timeline of the day’s events. It sent me a push notification whenever it detected a person, a dog moving, or barking (my dogs bark a lot, so I eventually turned barking alerts off).

The Furbo identified everyone who walked by, no matter their shape, size, or activity. It identified my infant rolling around, and even just a flash of adult foot or a pant cuff.

Adorably, it also automatically takes pictures of your dog when they gaze into the camera. Someone better at dog training than I am—or maybe with slightly more responsive dogs—could probably train their dog to gaze into the camera when the signal light turns blue, since blue is one of the few colors that dogs can see. When the selfie feature worked, it was utterly hilarious.

You can set the video resolution at either 360p, 720p, or 1080p. The 1080p resolution was remarkably clear (and looking at high-resolution pictures of my carpet made me realize I need to vacuum more). You can also record your own voice and use it for the snack call, instead of the clicker. My dogs did recognize the voice as mine. On the live camera, I could watch their heads swivel as they looked from the Furbo to my office door, and back again.

Live Long and Paw-sper

Every dog owner leaves their house with a little trepidation. Dogs are intensely social creatures, selected by nature, and our own desires, to be as cuddly and appealing as possible. It’s hard to leave them behind sometimes.

While $200 might seem expensive, the Furbo is simple, effective, and comparably priced to some of the other interactive pet cameras available. It’s also cheaper than constantly replacing shoes and pillows destroyed by lonely doggos.

Since I work from home, I can pet my dogs whenever I want. But my spouse works in an office. In the weeks that we had the Furbo, he developed a habit of feeding them a few pieces of kibble before he starts his commute.

Every day at around 5 pm, I hear the Furbo’s mechanical click-click. The dogs sit in front of the Furbo expectantly, and oddly enough, my toddler, too. When she sees the dogs move, she starts singing, “Daddy! Daddy!” and dances in front of the camera.

Even when your dogs are sufficiently fed, cared for, and entertained, my spouse ended up using it. And the Amazon reviews of hospitalized or overseas Furbo-owning pup-parents are enough to make any softhearted dog owner tear up. It’s an easy, small way to connect, for the pet parent who just can’t wait to get home.

While you’re ogling all the new games at the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) this week, you might want to take a look at these old ones, too. Rivals Sony and Microsoft are each holding massive game and console sales this week, presumably in a bid to outdo each other and gain momentum. There are even a few Nintendo game deals going on. Details on each E3 week game and console deal are below, along with a few particularly good game deals we found.

Pre-Order New E3 Games

Amazon has a roundup of big E3 games that you can pre-order now. Some of the games may include perks to pre-ordering, but do keep in mind that these games haven’t been reviewed yet, and most won’t come out for months. But if you know you’re gonna play a game, it never hurts to pre-order it early. View Amazon’s Full E3 Pre-Order List.

PS4 E3 Sale (Ends June 18)

To celebrate E3, Sony is having what it calls a Days of Play Sale with deals on PlayStation 4 consoles and games on a bunch of retailers. The sale ends June 18.

PS4 Hardware on Sale