10 March, 2022
The Smart Bone
Control your dog’s bone with your phone.
Customers say: Won’t charge. Won’t connect. Dog won’t play with it. Dog destroyed it.
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10 March, 2022
Control your dog’s bone with your phone.
Customers say: Won’t charge. Won’t connect. Dog won’t play with it. Dog destroyed it.
6 March, 2022
For a bit shy of two hundred bucks, you can have your dog genetically analyzed, and find, for example (as they show on the box) that your dog is 50.0% Staffordshire Terrier, 23.7% Golden Retriever, 14.5% Australian Cattle Dog, and 11.8% Great Pyrenees. What you would gain from learning the exact racial breakdown of your dog is hard to know, but as a reviewer said, “when people at the dog park ask what kind of dog she is I just whip out my phone and show them her family tree.” We all do things for different reasons, I guess.
12 January, 2022
From the makers of Rapid Ramen comes Rapid Hot Dog Cooker, a plastic tray that is in no way simpler or faster than putting a hot dog on a plate and microwaving it for a minute.
17 November, 2021
The PetChatz PawCall is a “smart button” that alerts you when your pet wants to talk to you. The button also dispenses a treat. By letting your pet use this, you are using food as a reward to train them to repeatedly alert your phone while you’re at work or in another room of the house.
It works exclusively with PetChatz HD, a two-way video and audio system mounted at animal-height on your wall to allow your pet to video-chat with you while you’re at work. PetChatz doesn’t just dispense treats and prison-phone your animal, it releases PetChatz essential oil to “calm your pet.”
25 October, 2021
Thanks to FitBark, you can now run your dog’s life with the same obsessive, phone-based tracking that you run your own with. You can set health goals for your dog, and, neurotically, compare your dog to similar dogs. Five years ago, you would have been convinced I made this up. Today, it’s not only real, but perhaps not even the worst smart device for dogs: that honor probably goes to Petzi, the $160 box that lets you remotely drop a dog treat out of a hole when you tap a button on your phone.
(Petzi’s competitor, the slightly-more-expensive PetCube, integrates with Alexa, so you can tell Amazon to tell your PetCube to tell your dog he’s a good boy.)
24 October, 2021
Is a hot dog, technically speaking, a sandwich?
Is ketchup an appropriate condiment for a hot dog?
Leaving aside these two unanswerable questions, the Condiment Gun can be loaded with any viscous condiment, and when the trigger is pulled, it dispenses your ketchup, mustard, mayo, bbq, ranch, or whatever it is you put on your food. Customer reviews are mixed, with some saying it doesn’t work at all, but universally ignoring the fact that using a gun to shoot your food is insane. So is using salt and pepper shakers shaped like shotgun shells, or making ice cubes shaped like handguns. But we’re so far down this path that it’s not entirely clear when or where the cultural slide towards murder even happened, in whole or in part. In the 21st century, you hang your sign that spells out your name using guns, and give it your best thoughts and prayers that tomorrow you won’t be on the wrong end of someone’s condiment gun.
21 October, 2021
The idea of a grilled-cheese toaster seems appealing, even if you’ve mastered the art of combining bread and cheese in a pan on the stove. Unfortunately, the customer reviews are overwhelmingly negative, with some saying it doesn’t get hot enough to melt the cheese, and others saying that one side burns the bread while the other doesn’t toast at all, or that it arrived physically and functionally broken.
You could buy some toaster bags made of woven fiberglass to make grilled cheese in a normal toaster, if you can’t let go of the idea of toastering a grilled cheese. Or you can roll your cheese-squares up and stick them down into the holes in this Hot Dog Toaster, a countertop device which allows you to push hot dogs and buns down into it to cook them. Nothing is real, everything is permitted.