In more evidence that Apple technology will shortly turn the entire planet into drooling cretins, a Los Angeles animal shelter that lets its cats chase toys on top of iPads is selling the artwork that they generate for $5.99 a smudge. The art looks exactly as you’d imagine a touchscreen device, running an app called “Paint for Cats”, that’s had a cat running around on it, would look. The art will clearly be keenly sought by collectors of random blobs of colour. The shelter president told Associated Press that the cats had so much fun, they are going to buy some more iPads. So, to sum up: the profit from consumers buying random stuff made by cats running around on iPads will be used to buy more iPads so cats can run around on them and make more random stuff to sell. Can’t we just send all our money to Apple in an envelope, to speed the process up?

Kudos to Read Write Web, which has published its second round-up of the worst Tech Tattoos. Actually, it is called “The Best (and Worst)…”, but we’re struggling to identify the best ones.
On the other hand, among the obligatory Steve Jobs tributes and naff bits of code, there are more creative ways to embarrass yourself.

Our favourite: the guy who had CIE 4736 tattooed on his knuckles “because I have been a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert for over 10 years.”

If your colleague has a geeky tattoo, please send it to us. We’ll send a nude techie calendar for every one we publish.

This year we believe that the robots will finally take over, for which we’re extremely grateful. We haven’t had a decent afternoon’s kip on the Backbytes newsdesk since 2007.

So, as a good start, http://romotive.com/ will sell you a device to turn your smartphone into a little robot. You can download apps to make it dance (when it is strapped to its little cart), explore, or remote control it. And developers can create their own iOS apps to make it do things like play bad football and take over the world.

This is great, until your phone works out how to program itself.

First your CEO dies, and then this: “Pope Benedict XVI shunned Apple’s iPad and used an Android Sony Tablet S to switch on a giant light installation in Italy from his apartment in the Vatican,” reports the Daily Mail. “When the Pontiff switched on the Christmas lights in the Italian town of Gubbio, he used a Sony Tablet S to transmit the command.”

We’re sure he made this choice only after carefully weighing up the options available, considering the relative merits of an open technology platform against an integrated hardware and operating system environment. On the other hand, he could have just pressed the button on the thing they put in front of him.

We’ve been looking for a way that Backbytes can get more in touch with world affairs. When future humour columnists ask us what we did in the global meltdown of 2011, we’ll say we spent most of it making jokes about satnavs, and they will turn their faces away.

Just in time, a star-struck hack Andrew Gilligan has profiled Syria’s president Assad in The Telegraph: “A former president of the Syrian Computer Society, he sometimes explained things in computer terms,” he chortles. “Comparing Syria’s leadership with that of a Western country, he said, was like comparing a Mac with a PC. ‘Both computers do the same job, but they don’t understand each other,’ he said. ‘You need to translate’.”

Actually, as anyone who uses a computer can point out, you don’t. Gilligan didn’t ask whether Apple or Microsoft was playing the part of the Syrian security forces, and therefore which company he sees as more likely to commit what Human Rights Watch is calling “Crimes against humanity”.

Maybe the Syrian embassy could let us know which company they identify with. Or you’re welcome to make a suggestion.