This week’s new smartphone app is Caffeine Zone. Developed at Penn State University, it warns you when your intake is either too high, or is going to keep you awake. 

“Many people don’t understand how caffeine levels in their bloodstream go up and how they go down,” said Frank Ritter, professor of information sciences, technology, and hot beverages at Penn State. So, if you have between 200 and 400 milligrams of caffeine in your bloodstream, you are in an optimal mental alertness zone. For sleep, you need less than 100 milligrams. 

By saying what coffee or tea you have been drinking and how fast you drank it, the app plots a graph to tell you when you’re going to be below the sleep line. It’s also useful, as the developers probably realised, to find out how much more caffeine you need to consume to stay awake long enough to finish coding your app.

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. 

The pit of rubbishy research shows no more evidence of having any bottom after Valentine’s Day last week, with the most relevant (though no means the worst) press release that day “revealing” that 67 per cent of women would now happily date a geek. Apparently slightly amusing spoof secret agent Johnny English is the nation’s favourite, which is a wonderful coincidence considering he’s the lead character in a film whose publicity machine set up the survey in the first place. 

“Far from preferring brawn over brains, women now prioritise personality when looking for a mate,” it said. Which is great news for all nerds with personality, if such people exist.

Geek of the week: Mark Hall. “I always wanted to propose in some nerdy way,” said Mark last week. And he did, by recording his proposal in binary while wearing a Bender mask from Futurama. The resulting video became a quaint, if incredibly boring, viral hit. Rather like porno, a lot of people will be watching the first minute only. The message (It begins by him saying 010011110110100 in a robotic voice and sort of goes from there in similar fashion) translates as “Rachel, you are awesome! Will you marry me?” – although in binary that takes more than three minutes to say. We hope that he doesn’t keep this up, or the ceremony will outlast the honeymoon.