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OK, here’s another gadget I want. Someone please make this and offer it for sale at a reasonable price, please, so I can buy one.

It would pretty much be a computer keyboard, with a built-in one or two line LCD display. When attached to a computer, it functions as a normal keyboard. However, you can disconnect it from the computer, and take it with you to meetings. There, you can type notes, which you can see, and do simple editing of, using the LCD display. The device stores the notes, and when you return to your computer and reconnect it, it uploads those to the computer.

No need for fancy software on the computer, either. The device could upload them by simply sending them as keystrokes, so you just have to go into whatever program you use to store notes, and hit the “upload” button on the keyboard.

A one or two line LCD display would be sufficient, because you aren’t meant to use this to take elaborate formatted notes. It is just mainly for writing down all those short action items that you acquire in meetings, and is for those of us who just suck at taking handwritten notes and suck even more at reading those notes later.

The credit card companies are promoting cards that have instant pay systems. You’ve probably seen the ads, where the user just swipes the card over the instant pay terminal, and the transaction is done. No signing. No ID check. The sales person doesn’t even necessarily see the card.

Sounds great, but what happens if you lose the card? Won’t it be easy for someone who finds it to use it, at least until you report it lost? Sure, you are probably limited in what you will be liable for, if you report it promptly, but it will still likely be an annoyance to get the items off your bill. It would be much better if the card would stop working by itself after you lose it, automatically.

Idea: build Bluetooth into the cards, and let the user pair them with their cellphone. When the card is about to do a transaction, it can check for the cellphone. If it does not find it, it should not allow the transaction. That way, you’d need to lose both the card and your cellphone to allow the bad guy to use your card.

At work, while discussing a broken piece of code, a coworker intended to start a sentence with the phrase “When this was written”, but he botched it and said “When this was wrotten”.

We have decided we like that word, and have added it to our vocabulary. It means written, but also means that the thing that was written was broken from the start.