I imagine that, just like me, you like the idea of arranging your uploaded photos on a map of the world according to where they were taken – but that you also find the actual process of doing so a real chore. It would be much easier to have a chip in your camera that stored a GPS reading with each shot, which it would then download at the same time as the pictures, wouldn’t it?

Those with a burning urge to live the airborne life they were promised by watching The Jetsons every week should keep their fingers crossed that this flying trike-autogyrocopter thing makes it into production. Completely unnecessary, probably very expensive and dangerous – but I’d still really like one.

While not exactly what you might describe as practical, anyone who decides to install a huge Tesla coil on the roof of their car is alright by me, whatever the reason they did it for. Speaking of the man Edison owed his reputation and fortune to, BoingBoing linked to a profile of Tesla over at the Fortean Times. One of the most fascinating characters of Victorian-era engineering, without a doubt.

This either represents an apogee of convenience engineering, or says something deeply unsettling about paranoia and material possessions – you can now sign up to an online service that allows you to unlock, start, locate, disable or alarm your car. Without, you know, actually being there. All we need now is a way to drive the things without being in them … thanks to Bruce Schneier for the link, who quite rightly points out that it’s a system that just howls to be hacked.

If Bill Gibson could somehow conspire to sue reality itself for intellectual property theft, he’d never need to write again. He could certainly take DARPA to task for dreaming about replicators and blatantly ripping off the idea of Nanofaxes that he came up with in Idoru.

(Yeah, so loads of other sf books and shows have had replicators. I just happen to like Gibson best.)