Okay, so my brother brought home the coolest thing I have seen in a long time. It was a calculator that had a function where you push a button and the screen cover unfolded, came around and proped up the calculator. It was so cool. Granted it seems almost totally useless, but it was really cool none the less. I was just wondering what cool (and possibly useless) gizmo’s flabbergast and amaze my fellow dopers.
Whenever I go to a trade show I have to get all of the junk they pass out. I have men that walk down walls which are also useful for throwing at co-workers. Some of this stuff is just useless gadgets like the pen that also has a bubble blowing end.
How much for the bubble pen?
Well, how about a million bucks, oops hunting season is over plus I don’t like the idea of killing that many deer for a little pen 
so instead send me your address and I will mail it to you. I don’t know how good the bubble stuff is cause I got it at the last MTT in Anaheim and that was a good year ago. Consider it my Christmas gift to you if you would like.
But I am not the only one interested in useless gadgets. My office mate brought in a blinking light advertisement for beer. He just thought it was neat and wanted to share.
I think interest in gadgets is an occupational hazard in engineering. Mostly it ends up being toys that we can’t resist, especially free stuff.
I have a pen with two connected glass bulbs at one end. If you squeeze one of the bulbs with your fingers, your body heat boils the small amount of green liquid (propanol?) inside, and it fizzles into the other bulb.
It’s almost, but not quite, as amazing as the Dippy Bird.
Lasers and Tesla coils and blinking lights and Hoberman spheres and LEGO robots and little cardboard tubes with springs and drumheads that make thunder noises…<regains some semblance of self-control>
I’m so obsessed with gadgets that other people don’t make enough–I have to build my own. Propped next to my computer desk is a laser that looks remarkably like a bazooka–some friends and I cobbled it together in college, and I still keep it handy (it’s labeled in Klingon characters with a parenthetical translation “Acme Little Giant Death Ray”). Within reach at the moment there are also a couple of laser pointers, a thunder tube, a gyroscope that I’ve rigged with motors, a digital camera, a Tesla coil, a color graphing calculator, an A/D converter that makes my parallel port into a crappy oscilloscope, a pocket multimeter, a cuecat I’m working on a Linux hack for, 50 ft of unjacketed fiber optic cable, and a pile of dichromatic mirrors.
My favorite gadgets, though, are kept far from my computers–my zap glove and my gauss glove. They’re computer killers–the zap glove has (well insulated) metal studs that charge to 40 kV, and the gauss glove has neodymium rod magnets sewn into the fingers (it leaves beautiful handprints on screens). Sometimes it’s awfully satisfying to zap the crap out of an antiquated, junky computer–it’s a little like burning all the crappy computers out there in effigy.