Comment Articles

Dross surfaces during silly season

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 14 Aug 2003 12:25 BST

It's the silly season, and sensible people are away on their holidays. I'm left holding the fort, and by the look of things I'm joined by other heat-addled people from marketing departments across the world.

Their thermal insanity is plain through the list of things foisted upon a sweltering hemisphere: mine because I thought it was a good idea to write about them. So here are my favourite summer products, all just as welcome as a writ from SCO.

Loo Roll Printer
Shown at the last Ideal Home exhibition, it has only now come to light via the ever-alert Cory Doctorow at www.boingboing.net. Let me quote: "Fancy catching up with your emails? The Internet Loo Roll Browser is a novel and unique product designed to make best use of the time you spend on the loo! The product allows you to search the Internet whilst sitting on the toilet and print out any pages you are interested in on your toilet roll."

It's true that time spent in porcelain pondering is often very productive -- Martin Luther and St Augustine are just two of the people who changed the world with ideas that came out of the water closet. And as most printed material ends up as rubbish after only a single reading, it makes sense to produce it in readily recyclable form. Furthermore, it's a rare reader who hasn't at some time come across a missive of asinine vapidity and felt the urge to show how they felt: you can't crumple up a laptop screen and throw it across the room, but here's an alternative that's even more satisfying.

It is, however, wrong. There are places technology can and should go, and this ain't one. Besides, how exactly are you going to summon help when fatally compromised by a paper jam?

It had to happen – but why, oh Lord, in our lifetime...

Wi-Fi Chair
It was a very 70s thing, the habit of taking innocent objects and dumping them in blocks of clear acrylic to make quirky paperweights. Now Intel feels it has to go one step further, and has commissioned chairs made out of old network leads embedded in a sturdy yet transparent resin. The purpose, you will be intrigued to hear, is to demonstrate how we are moving on from a wired world to one where every thought and wish is mediated by Centrino.