Teforia Leaf offers a cool way to brew tea

A countertop tea infuser called the Teforia Leaf has been happily brewing on the counter for the past few weeks. Bottom line: There is no cooler way to make tea.

The Leaf is actually Teforia's second-generation infuser, replacing the Teforia Classic. The Leaf and Classic share the same design, but the Leaf costs less than half the price of the Classic.

It would be easy to describe the Leaf as a Keurig for tea, but that wouldn't be doing it justice.

One downside is that you need to use Teforia's proprietary tea pods called Sips. They cost between $1 and $6 each.

The Leaf is about the size of a coffeemaker. Both the infusion globe and carafe stayed cool to the touch, but the carafe will keep the tea at the proper drinking temperature for up to an hour.

The infusion is a unique process. The hot water is introduced to the globe 4 ounces at a time. The water and tea meet and steep for a bit and then the mix is bubbled with some air to keep the tea leaves moving around before the tea is released into the carafe. There are three infusions for each 12-ounce carafe of tea, and the process takes four to six minutes.

So do you need a $400 tea infuser? No, you don't. But if you like tea, it's a very cool gadget that makes great tea.

If you have ever burned files to a CD or DVD using your Mac, you have probably used Roxio Toast. The latest version is called Toast Titanium.

With an updated drag-and-drop interface, Toast still burns files. But more important, you will find it's the missing link between shooting digital films and your heavy-duty video-editing software.

It can handle footage from one or several cameras and can capture images from your monitor, even if you use multiple recordings. It works well with iMovie on Macs and with other movie-editing programs. But Toast has its own editing component that allows for cropping and trimming video as well. It's especially useful for what are called "unboxing" videos — YouTube clips that explain and review new computer hardware — and it can record video directly from a webcam.

Toast has some bugs, which it should not have.