Cordless Shoe Dryers

You plug the ABS plastic dryers (the white things in the picture above), which have a fold-out plug, into an AC outlet for charging.

After an eight-hour charge, you unplug them and put them inside your wet shoes.

The dryers ($24.95), which don't use heat and thus won't damage or shrink your shoes, have "tiny silicon granules with thousands of capillaries to draw dampness from the [moist] air" within your shoes.

It's the same material as in those little packets of white powder - you know, the ones that say, "Do not eat contents" - that you often find in boxes, cans, and packages of foodstuffs nowadays, meant to keep things crisp.

The shoe dryers are said to remove up to 25 milliters of water from each shoe overnight.

They have charge indicators; a full eight-hour charge is good for five or six drying cycles.

A bit mysterious to me, how electricity activates the silicon, but sometimes a little mystery's a good thing.