I found an old piece my late father wrote for Art Samaniego of Manila Bulletin. Reposting it here for posterity’s sake
UTTERLY USELESS GADGETS II
BOOMER GEN – MANILA BULLETIN
By Jose Ma J Fernandez
Last week, we came up with a couple of seemingly useful but also useless – for most people – gadgets. Of course, we must credit our neighbors, the industrious Japanese, for always managing to come up with these crazy nice ideas and items that we await with bated breath each year. One blogsite I bumped into (Hubpages) has a list of some ten utterly useless travel gadgets. I had a big laugh as I went through the list of these items, and felt that I should at least share some of these with you. Especially since the others writing for this section are true techies who owe their allegiance to the Empire of the Geeks. Call me the non-geek, the absolute non-techie in this page. Which makes me wonder why the editors give me a rather long leash!