(FORTUNE Magazine) – CLEANING VINEGAR Ask your mother: Scrubbing with vinegar makes a bathtub shine. Now H.J. Heinz has taken one of its oldest products, doubled its acidity, and repackaged it for the detergent aisle. All Natural Cleaning Vinegar ($1.39 for 16 ounces) costs less than other spray cleaners and contains nothing toxic. It works on any surface except marble, which it erodes. Heinz has added a dash of lemon and pine so you don't have to hold your nose when you scrub -- and so you don't mistake this vinegar for the kind you put on salad. (FORTUNE household hint: Mixing in a little baking soda makes vinegar an effective abrasive cleanser.)

TV ALLOWANCE Worried that your kids are zoning out too much in front of the TV or playing too many videogames? Here's a cheat-proof way to curb their tube time, even when you're not at home. Plug your TV into the lockable TV Allowance box, and pocket the key. The $99 device, made by TV Allowance Co. of Miami, Florida, works by controlling the flow of power to the set. Each of your offspring -- up to four -- chooses a personal four-digit access code, which he or she must punch in to turn on the TV. The clock then starts ticking toward however many hours you've allotted that young videophile for the week. The child can check how much time is left by pressing a button; when the time runs out, the set shuts off. You get a parental master code that enables you to add to or subtract from the kids' allowances -- and, of course, watch all the TV you want. Come midnight Sunday, the clock resets, giving each kid another week's time supply. TV Allowance can also be programmed to enforce a video blackout at certain times of day, such as the homework hour.

GREEN TEES They look like plastic, but these ecologically correct golf tees are made from corn and potato starch. While regular wooden and plastic tees can litter the fairway for an entire season, playing havoc with lawn mower blades, Envir-o- tees, by Jireh Co. of Winnipeg, Manitoba, melt into harmless mush in a day or two when exposed to water. Saving trees with starchy tees isn't cheap: Sold through Austad's, a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, golfing catalogue, a pack of 100 costs $7.95. Ordinary tees: about a penny apiece.

POCKET CHECK PRINTING ACCOUNTANT In an age when cameras focus themselves and computers know how to spell, it was only a matter of time before checkbooks, too, wised up. Panasonic's CPA Check Printing Accountant makes out personal checks on your behalf. Feed a blank check into the keyboard-calculator -printer and punch in the name of the payee, amount, and type of payment (such as auto loan or entertainment); the 13.5-ounce device will store the data, balance your account, and print the check -- all you have to do is sign. Type in deposits and automatic teller machine withdrawals, and the CPA will keep a running record. Initial debit: $350. The 128K internal memory can store names of 25 payees to whom you frequently write checks, as well as records of two checking accounts, ten credit card accounts, and 50 phone numbers. Attached to a paper feeder (included in the price), the CPA lets you print out this month's account activity, this year's mortgage payments to date, charitable contributions to date, and other permutations of your data. The CPA even informs you when you've overspent -- after each transaction, your balance flashes on the LCD screen. But it won't curb your behavior: It prints checks even if you're in the red.