Courtesy of Red5

Having rejected all semblance of a healthy lifestyle, Techeye doesn’t spend much time outside these days. Our reasons are purely aesthetic – in other words, we enjoy being rotund and blindingly pale. If it weren’t for the sun, the fresh air or, heaven forbid, the chance of some leghound being attracted by our natural porkchop-tinged musk, we might linger occasionally beneath the open sky instead of scurrying from house to hatchback and vice-versa. But no, we’ll not risk our pudgy, hard-won bioluminescence.

A curious byproduct of this lifestyle is that it’s much harder to mark the passing of time. We stopped buying calendars years ago, you see, because Grandma and Grandpa Techeye used them to keep records of their nights of wild, wrinkled passion. Indeed, we can’t look at a calendar without imagining “Tupped her blind! Yaaar!” scribbled across half the month in Grandpa’s palsied scrawl.

Anyway, we’re not wholly ignorant of the season – the supermarket which sells our favorite breakfast pizzas always has a special seasonal offer on its website, whether it’s Halloween, Easter or Armistice Day. Judging by the pens, notebooks and other junk that was on sale last time we ordered, it’s probably almost back-to-school time.
The start of a new school year is always a curious, emotionally distressing time, so Techeye got to thinking about the gear today’s kids need to get by. Near the top of the list, at least for older nerds, is Livescribe’s Echo Smartpen (www.livescribe.com).

The Echo is basically a ballpoint pen with a computer inside which records sound and writing. Want to play back whatever was being recorded while you were busy writing “Mr Dickenson smells like man-radish”? Just tap the pen on the sentence and listen.
Livescribe’s smartpen comes in four- and eight-GB versions; the former costs about $116 on Amazon, while the latter costs $181. And both models can record hundreds of hours of audio. If our Grandfolks were still around the Echo would make a great gift, but we shudder to think what they’d use it for.

For more mischievous pupils, the Wrongulator from gadget hawker Red5 (www.red5.co.uk) looks essential. The age of the single-function calculator is over, but this is no ordinary number-cruncher: multiply two by two and you get seven. Or maybe three. Whatever the answer, it will be wrong.

Obviously you don’t want your own kid using this to do homework, but perhaps your clever offspring could slip the Wrongulator into the hands of a straight-A classmate? That might be worth £4.95, no?

Courtesy of Vision Research

With its ability to capture up to one million frames per second, the camera is perfect for gathering evidence. Show everybody that the nasty girl at the back of the classroom really does eat her bogeys, or finally prove that the creepy biology teacher is as much a perv as everyone thinks – these are priceless school-day memories in the making.

And priceless they’d have to be, because the V1610 itself has a very real, very daunting price tag: around $100,000 for the basic model.

But, whether it’s in the hands of a pasty-faced shut-in, a ribald, calendar-defacing grandpa or a kid headed back to school, we’re sure the V1610 could be put to some highly edifying uses. Like blackmail.