A pizza oven that gets hot in minutes

By Tim Martin

Uuni 3
uuni.net, $299/£199

Traditional brick pizza ovens are wildly expensive and take hours to reach the apocalyptic temperatures (450-500°C) required for baking. Enter the Uuni, a wood-fired oven that hunkers on tripod legs like a little spacecraft. Feed it a scoop of wood pellets, light up and within minutes it generates a dough-blistering, mozzarella-liquefying tabletop inferno.

The Uuni also flash-cooks steak, fish and veg in a cast-iron pan, and the foldable legs and detachable chimney make it a rewarding travelling partner. It’s the jolliest bit of cooking kit I’ve used in years.

Tacoma
Fullbright, PC/Mac/Xbox One, $19.99/£14.99

It may be a video game about things going wrong on a space station, but for once there are no gunslinging aliens in sight. Instead, as a freelancer employed by a faraway megacorp, the player of Tacoma must harvest data from alternate-reality holograms showing the last days of a mining platform’s crew, then bring home the ship’s resident AI.

Tacoma is a conflict-free, story-driven experience. Any object on the space station can be examined, any scribbled note read, any email consulted. The vanished crew appear as 3D recordings that can be rewound, fast-forwarded or followed about at will. It’s a kind of wry technological ghost story, wringing new narrative flavour from one of the most overused themes in games.

Olio
iOS/Android, free

In 2014, a study by the US Department of Agriculture estimated that 31% of the country’s food was thrown away. British households, meanwhile, waste more than £10bn worth each year. This is the market targeted by Olio, a free app that lets you snap a picture of your unwanted food and find a hungry neighbour to take it off your hands.

As with all apps, Olio’s usefulness will depend on the uptake where you live. Friends in the capital hoover up pot plants, tins of veg and leftover patisserie; my own options include half a bag of breadcrumbs, 20 back issues of the British Medical Journal and a single “large yellow orange”.

ILLUSTRATIONS ANDY MARTIN