And so to the world of fashion, where Dutch company Nieuwe Heren has created a pair of keyboard jeans. That’s right, keyboard jeans, which the inventors think will sell for around $400. That’s far more than you could charge for a keyboard keyboard plus a pair of jeans jeans, so they had better be special. 

Ah, they’re not just keyboard jeans: they have a set of speakers and a wireless mouse in them too. We’re always criticising designs like this, which is a bit unfair of us, because it’s just too easy. 

On the practical side, reviewers have pointed out that the return key is in the middle of the crotch, which might or might not make typing more pleasurable for you. Functionally, one wonders exactly which situation will make it easier to type on your jeans compared to, for example, the keyboard of your laptop. 

Backbytes is perhaps the smartest desk at Computing, rather like being the world’s tallest dwarf, and we have a lot of data and a laptop. We should be natural customers for this week's gadget, but whether we would pay two hundred quid for a wearable 2GB memory stick plus Wi-Fi is another matter.

“These incredibly chic cufflinks feature 2GBs of USB-friendly storage,” says Firebox.com, “and, get this, a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot. They’ll also secure your shirt cuffs. Awesome or what!”

"What!" we reply, in unison.

“Ludicrously cool”, decides the web site. We agree with the first half of that description.

Great news for everyone who has used Second Life to escape from the everyday world of work to do things like, er, exactly the same things as they do in the outside world.

The Inter-Life project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), has developed 3D virtual worlds in which the avatars of schoolchildren can do exciting things like film-making and photography, for little more than 10 times the cost of giving them a camera and showing them how to do it in real life. Doing stuff that doesn’t really exist helps them develop organisational skills, the ESRC claims this week.

So do not fear for the future of the global economy: the developed world might have crumbling finances and crippling debt, but we’re solving the problem by building a world for our children which means they can pretend it never happened.

“An innovative kitchen that gives step-by-step cooking instructions in French could spark a revolution in language learning in the UK” claims a press release: one of those where “could” means “probably won’t”.

Scientists at Newcastle University have created an application in which cooking instructions are delivered in French, and motion sensors track whether you have done what it told you to do. The idea is that with context and an incentive you learn quicker.

Of course, this is not the first time that this type of learning has been tried on the UK’s hopeless linguists. For years Parisian taxi drivers have been offering an informal initiative, that has brought satisfaction to a generation of tourists, in which they delightfully refuse to move until their passengers pronounce their destination perfectly.

Americans spend $40bn every year on dietary aids, and Brits would spend just as much if we hadn’t blown it all at the pub and on a curry afterwards, so we welcome a tool for crowdsourcing nutritional information, called PlateMate.

In experiments, the average of nutritional information guessed by a crowd – based on a photo of your meal that you take with your phone – was as good as a trained nutritionist, and much more accurate than reporting your own intake.

This leads us to conclude that, if you want to reduce your calorie intake by using Plate­Mate, the best thing to do is to stand further away from your food when you photograph it.