cowfish

The Register, paragons of truth and virtue, have posted a story about a device that all good collectors of useless gadgets need – a USB toast printer. It’s exactly the sort of thing that I feel a colossal urge to buy, ready for it to be used once, probably in front of guests, before being put back in its box, in case I want to sell it on ebay at sometime in the future (which I won’t, it’ll just gather dust next to the Breville, espresso machine, automated jelly [with fruit] maker and electric pear carver {I do not own all of those items. Some may not exist. Value of attempted humour will probably go down rather than up. Tip your waiter}). It’d put on a shelf while I go and sit in a darkened room, contemplate the meaningless of my existence and then look at my DVD collection until my consumer oriented attitude reorients itself, and I go to play.com to buy DVD boxsets of 60s comedy programs that I don’t really think I’ll like. They would be in the special offer section though, I’m not stupid with money.

As with many items-of-awesome, this link came to me courtesy of my boss, Dave, master of the random link from El Reg, the reading of which he treats as his sole reason for owning his internet connection. Well, primary at least, he does also read b3ta on a Friday. It’s good to be the boss. Having only seen the URL, with its ending of “/wacky-toaster”, I originally ignored it, until I was taken to task by Dave and Steve (his new officemate, ousting me a couple of weeks back. Annoyingly I was in charge of desk assignment and can blame noone but myself for my return to cubeland), who filled me in on the wonder of the story. There are implications, however, that The Reg do not follow up on.

They do mention that as yet there is no plan to produce the machine commercially, much to the disgust of Dave, Steve and Anna, who I have now discussed this with. But they don’t look into the important issue – what would a commercial unit be used for? Luckily, greater minds have thought about this.

Idea 1: Message toast for house guests. What better way to let your visitors know the state of household affairs than by placing toast imprinted with the message of your choice in front of them. Get a cheery grin with a ‘Good Morning’, get an apology with a ‘Was it you who ate the last of the mini cheddars?’, call them out with a ‘You do realise that’s my mug?’, let them know that it’s time to go with a ‘Fuck Off’.

Idea 2: Porn toast. A simple pleasure for a simple time – pornography delivered, quite literally, with your daily bread. Who can say, hand on heart, that they haven’t yearned for a slice of voyeurism with their breakfast? With a pornographic toast print you get a healthy breakfast, a frisson of sexual excitement and the inevitable feeling of shame that combining sexual imagery with a toasted bread based foodstuff brings to the table. To say nothing of the butter.

Idea 3: Daily printouts of religious icons from all across the world. Why wait for a blurry picture of the second coming to appear on ebay? Printout your own Christ child on a toasted bread product…today! And why let the christians have all the fun? Create an RSS feed to syndicate an image of a new religious figure every day and be  woken up with a toasty chunk of idolatry, ready to eat or sell in under 2 minutes.

Idea 4: Daily news. Boring. Mindlessly so. And, as pointed out by Anna, foolish as the time taken to read the news would lead to inevitable cooling of the bready treat, leading to an unsatisfactory toast experience. However, probably the most practical use of the toaster. However, there a big issue with this, as brought up by the SteveDave gestalt – resolution.

Bread is not always a finely grained substance and as such the granularity of the surface will have a direct and obvious impact on the resolution of possible images that could be printed on the bread. If we went for a bubbly ciabatta you’d find it difficult to print anything but large text, and not much of it on a standardly sized chunk. If you moved to a more closely crumbed rye bread then you’d have a greater chance of printing out a small story, potentially with headline, but you probably wouldn’t get much more. On further thought we came up with some suggestions for better high resolution breads.

Firstly, the crumpet or scotch pancake – similar bready treats, with one hitch when it comes to the resolution of a print: a bubbly side. However, the mysterious reverse side is a finely grained printing medium, quickly elevating it to an almost ideal bread product, but there is one seriously problem – contrast. The back of both items is dark, so any burning related printing would lead to issues with the reading due to the low contrast between print and print medium. The age old problem of papermaking, from hides to papyrus – contrast. It mocks us now even with the futuristic medium of burned bread.

Secondly, the humble bagel – the printed bread saviour. Closely grained, easily sliceable and seemingly made for the toasting. One problem – the hole in the middle. This led to the concept of printing your news in the round, so that after an initial bite through the circle one can continue to read as you eat around the hole, digesting your news and breakfast at the same time. A match made in heaven – bagels and print media.

I feel a petition to force Electrolux to provide us with a consumer model of their fairly useless machine is needed, but feel that I am not the best person to start this up. Not for any reasons of modesty, I’m just lazy.

Other posts

• Toast, Redux 2