Racqueteering Inquisitive interviewer Shorten Humourless chats to innovative inventor Simon Sideways about his latest research projects. SH: So, Simon, you’re known as the clever clogs of lateral thinking and...
Category - Technology
Our gas heater has an important role in winter in keeping us from freezing to death as the temperature plunges toward zero. But it has an undocumented function that’s not in the user manual: the death rattle. Turn it off and it...
“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.” Emo Philips (1990) Admit it. We get close to our computers just like we get close to our dogs. They both have funny little habits like lying down...
Surely now is the time to call for equal rights for all the different typefaces of the world. Fonts have feelings too, whether they are full blooded serifs, shy little sans serifs, script fonts that can only mimic a handwritten...
As soon as I walked into my local electronics store, I started to feel something was very wrong. As I browsed the aisles of gadgets I overheard a salesman saying “Male subject, purple New Zealand t-shirt, arriving one minute...
I loved my primary school library collection of Richmal Crompton’s “Just William” stories written in the 1920s to 1960s. William’s adventures were set in a well-off English village, which was close enough to London for...
Don’t you just love clickbait headlines in online media? Clickbait story titles ask a question or state a fact or attitude that prods your curiosity or stokes your outrage. It bothers you so much that you just...
There I was driving behind a big tipper truck full of dirt, emblazoned with the company name and motto: “DIRT-TEK – For all your dirt technology needs phone 1-800-DIRT” I imagine there is a lot of technology...
OK, I’m ready to confess here and now. I confess that I often send emails to myself. It’s sad really, like the old song “I’m going to sit right down and write myself a letter (and make believe it came from you)”...
It was a simple heart-warming scene. A young mother was pushing her beloved toddler in a pram and arrived at the pedestrian crossing. Naturally, mum was talking on her phone as well. But the crossing required her to hit the...