Our masters in Silicon Valley have our best interests at heart. For evidence, look no further than an innovation uploaded to Google鈥檚 Digital Wellbeing Experiments platform. is aimed at helping those driven to destruction by their smartphones and the Google products on them.
To take advantage, simply go to the Google Play store and download the Paper Phone app (bear with us here). The app allows you to choose the things on your phone that you can鈥檛 do without 鈥� your daily schedule, say, maps, notes, recipes or Sudoku puzzles, and then鈥� print them. On paper.
For those who don鈥檛 remember paper, it is like a super-thin tablet with very limited memory, or a single page of a Kindle book in independent physical form. With essential data logged in this handy format, you can safely leave your phone at home. 鈥淎 paper phone can do most of the things a smartphone can do,鈥� the app鈥檚 designers explain in a helpful video, 鈥渂ut it doesn鈥檛 distract you as much.鈥�
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It all rather reminds Feedback of the Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge device, a paper-based technology many moons ago. Compact, portable and durable, the BOOK ordered essential information on sequential sheets of paper that were optically scanned directly to the brain. BOOKs even came with their own personalisation tool, the Portable Erasable Nib Cryptic Intercommunication Language Stylus, or PENCILS.
Feedback still owns a few BOOKs, and highly recommends them. Having just tried out Google鈥檚 latest digital detox device in the bath, we can report it worked swimmingly too. That鈥檚 more than can be said of our last smartphone.
I, spy
Emerging from beneath the suds, Feedback is reminded that the key to being a good spy is the ability to stay undercover. Feedback isn鈥檛 a spy, we add perhaps too hastily. We are merely an anonymous magazine column prone to talking about itself in the third person.
Few spies have blown their cover quite so spectacularly as Hvaldimir the Russian spy whale. His is a story that tugs at the heartstrings. The beluga was first found in April near a Norwegian fishing village wearing a harness saying 鈥淓quipment St Petersburg鈥�. He has since continually attempted to make contact with humans, receiving numerous injuries from ship propellers and the like.
A few weeks ago, a beluga looking strikingly like Hvaldimir was of a boat in the Arctic Ocean. 鈥淐atch this,鈥� say the sailors, as they throw a rugby ball into the icy waters. 鈥淚 know I shouldn鈥檛,鈥� you can imagine Hvaldimir thinking, 鈥渋f I want to continue the charade that I am but an ordinary beluga whale, but go on.鈥�
The suspicion is that Hvaldimir, whom Feedback is choosing to call The Spy Who Came in from the Cold But Then Went Back Because It Was His Natural Habitat, was so heavily socialised during his training that he has proved unable to kick the human habit. Meanwhile, we don鈥檛 wish to blow any more covers, but we would like to know what a crew of South Africans equipped with a rugby ball is doing in the Arctic Ocean.
High on the hog
Never work with children or animals, top wisecracker W.C.Fields once wisecracked. Friendly Arctic whales aside, that certainly seems to apply if your line of business is selling cocaine in central Italy. One gang of dealers, accustomed to keeping its powder dry in underground woodland caches, has had its entire stash discovered and destroyed by a gang of wild boar.
The elite tusk force is said to have destroyed more than $20,000 worth of high-grade cocaine, grubbing up and ripping open several packages, and .
Assuming altruistic motives, that makes them the do-gooding-est swine since sheepdog locum Babe won the county sheepherding competition in the eponymous 1995 film. If Feedback were an Italian hog, we might be considering a career change 鈥� the thought of being turned into an unusually intoxicating guaniciale doesn鈥檛 bear thinking about.
Hot water bottle
Good news on the climate change front: we could soon be tackling it in our sleep. 鈥淵ou may be interested in purchasing an advanced technology ,鈥� writes regular correspondent Prashant Rao. The revolutionary technology in this bed cushion is 鈥減owered by our own metabolism鈥�, in which 鈥渂io-ceramic [gel] recycles and converts radiant body heat into something that gives the body a boost 鈥� infrared energy鈥�.
Ah yes, infrared energy 鈥� otherwise known as heat. Blu Sleep promises that the pillow will increase tissue oxygen levels, reduce inflammation and promote vitality, as well as lessen stress and fatigue 鈥� a crucial selling point for anything calling itself a pillow. Yet Feedback thinks the Ceramo is something far more precious. By heating us with our own expelled body heat, it must be the world鈥檚 comfiest perpetual-motion machine. Buy 10, and sleep like a baby knowing you鈥檙e doing your bit to save the planet.
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