Listen up bubbelahs, now that the shiksas and sheygets are gone let’s kibbitz. Your diet? Not so great. Lucky for you, two new iPhone apps are designed with kosher-keepers in mind. iBlessing tells you the correct brachas for meal time, and ParveOMeter helps your milk and meat stay separate. So wipe that schmutz off your punim, get off your tuchas, and let me show you how they work.

iBlessing, a ported version of the Say-A-Blessing keychain, shows a plate filled with food—no traif, of course. Clicking on the meat, fruit, bread, wine, etc., brings up the blessing you should say over the item in question. The app has additional “bonus blessings” as well, for events like hand washing and the after meal grace. While iBlessing is supposed to recite the blessing out loud, that part hasn’t worked for me yet.

The other app, ParveOMeter, counts down the amount of time until you can eat dairy after meat and vice versa. The milk to meat setting is customisable depending on how kosher you are (zero minutes to an hour), but the meat to milk timer keeps ticking for six whole hours. The app keeps you on track too, since there is no easy way to manually stop the timer. However, when the time is up you are rewarded with a large round of applause.

Both of these apps are free and available now, but remember: Don’t use them on shabbos! [iBlessing, ParveOMeter]

Seems that solar panels, clothing-infused or not, are tough to tie in knots:

Application of the solar panels to the tie made it difficult to tie the knot. In typical tie knots, a small loop is created through which the large end of the tie is passed. At this step in the process, the physical width of the solar panel forces the user to enlarge their tie loop to allow the solar panel to pass through. The solar panels are limited to bending around a three inch diameter and should not be creased. Usage of narrower solar panels was considered, but there would be sacrifices in power generation. Applying solar panels to clip-on ties would eliminate this problem.

Still, we can only see a bright future for wearable, chargeable clothing. [JTATM via Talk2MyShirt]

For serious swimmers, here’s some serious info about this next gen suit. It was designed with input from NASA, and the fabric is touted as the “world’s lightest swim fabric.” The seams are ultrasonically welded together and the Hyrdo Form Compression system holds the swimmer’s abdomen and other bits at an optimal position for streamlining. The suit is made up off three pieces, which were cut from a three-dimensional pattern to hug the body more closely. Word on the street is it takes about 15 minutes or so to squeeze into this marvel of modern swimming pool engineering.

The suit is available for pre-order now at Speedo, and ships in October. [Speedo via Uncrate]

It could quite simply be considered the world’s easiest competition to win one of the world’s most sought-after prizes. So, before you knock off, head over to the website to try and win!

[Win-an-iphone]