A Guy Made a Computer Mouse That is Also a Functional Laptop (vice.com)

A YouTube user who goes by Electronic Grenade has designed a computer mouse that is also a functional laptop. From a report: As detailed in a video published on Sunday, the computer mouse computer consists of a 3d-printed mouse, a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, a small keyboard, and a handful of components that were taken from a normal computer mouse. "Even though the screen is attached to the mouse, the sensitivity of the mouse makes it not that hard to follow along with what is happening on the screen," Electronic Grenade said in the video. Nevertheless, the mouse does have its faults. According to Electronic Grenade, a few resource intensive applications will occasionally cause the mouse computer to crash.

Comments

This would have been really cool...

[BringsApples]

...had it come out prior to smart phones. Maybe.

Ah an old school Slashdot Article.

[jellomizer]

This is the type of Slashdot Article that we got back in the late 1990's. About some crazy guy trying to make something just because he could. Never mind it was practical, or profitable. Just a cool thing to do. Just like the Potato Powered Web Server back in the year 2000. Completely pointless, but just a cool idea.

And you know what, just because the idea is silly, there were probably a lot of good learning events taken place in such an exercise.

Re:Clever but pointless

[Jeremi]

They spend huge brainpower on things that are obviously useless.

99.99% of the work done by students in schools is also "useless" by your definition, since it only replicates efforts that had already been done previously. 99.99% of the world's art is also "obviously useless" in that it doesn't do anything.

However, students still benefit from doing the "useless" work, because in the process of completing their projects and assignments, they (hopefully) learn more about the subject at hand, and get better at doing that sort of work.

In the same way, designing and building this project helps the creator get hands-on experience designing and building this sort of device, and helps him (and others) explore the possibilities related to it. All the mistakes he made while completing this project are mistakes he'll know not to make in future projects.

Perhaps he puts this on his resume, and as a result gets a better job offer than he would have otherwise. Perhaps someone else watches the video and says "well that's not useful, but now that I've seen what is possible using today's technology, I have an idea -- what if I did something similar except apply it to this other use-case; now that would be useful!" -- and thus a new technology is born, which may or may not be The Next Big Thing. If nobody scratched their itch, but rather limited themselves only to "products that fill an obvious need", then a lot of people simply wouldn't do any extracurricular projects at all, and we'd never see many of the new ideas that nobody had yet realized would be useful. As Henry Ford allegedly once said, "if I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse".