The Chinese will celebrate Tomb Sweeping Day on April 4, a ceremony which encourages them to remember their ancestors by laying out food at their grave sites, and burning paper replicas of daily necessities, such as clothes, money, cars, and houses. This year a few new items have been added to that list of necessities: the iPad and the iPhone.
If you think about it, printers are probably the worst-designed gadgets in our homes (unless you own the same awful Samsung Behold as I do). But despite the mythical advance of the paperless office, nobody has been able to kill them off. Until now. A new survey says that the iPad has finally doomed the printer, and is even saving trees.
Your iPhone and iPad are great paper replacements, but they couldn’t actively stop it. Until now: PaperKarma is an iPhone app which lets you stop paper junk mail, just by snapping a photo of it.
I have this terrible habit of doodling on things while I’m on the phone. Often it’s to jot down information that the person on the other end is feeding to me, but sometimes it’s simply to draw silly faces and obscure patterns to pass the time. When I don’t have a notepad to hand, almost anything could become my biro-covered victim.
But the Papernomad case for iPad is begging to be doodled on. It’s a tear resistant sleeve made from a patented material that consists of several layers of paper, cotton, and Australian sheep wool; and it’s completely biodegradable.