Behold, the FUTURE!
Digital cooking, virtual water coolers, and computerized hovering heads. Oh my!
Another decade down, and one step closer to the future. Sadly there are no flying cars (yet…). But what we lack in commoditized levitation has been made up for by a mix of commoditized & free technology. And of course, there’s always a story:
KiP is born
For Christmas, my girlfriend and I decided to try and be more creative with our gifting to each other. We decided on a price limit ($32) with one stipulation, for every dollar you go over on your gift you owe the other person 1 minute of massage. Coming in under budget gets you nothing and there are no limitations to the gift; item(s), event, etc. What do you give a girl who loves cooking and all things kitchen gadgety when on a shoe string budget? Two words: Kitchen Computer. A computer that would reside in the kitchen and act as a digital cookbook (and be available for general web-surfing use when needed).
So with that in mind, I went to my Man Lair and began scheming. Here is what I came up with:
- Total cost: $5
- Working title: KiP 1.0 (short for Kitchen ‘puter)
- Old laptop with Ubuntu Linux (sitting on a shelf collecting dust)
- Evernote Pro for 1 month for $5 (to be able to upload enough photos through the iPhone app)
- Created an account for her (bound to a placeholder e-mail; secrecy was key)
- Photographed all of her printed & clipped recipes from around the house
- Appropriately named them
- Evernote’s Optical Character Recognition processed all of the images for me
- Edited the photos as need (to rotate, resize, etc)
- Tagged the large quantities of recipes; e.g. desserts, soups, breads, etc
The setup
A couple of weeks before we left, a conversation started between my girlfriend and I about kitchen gadgets and technology. Off the cuff she said something like “What about a computer for the kitchen? If something like that ever came around I would put it to good use.” I smiled and nodded, scanning for sincerity and hoping that my ingenious plan hadn’t been foiled. Near as I could tell, I was in the clear. Now was my chance.
On the drive up to my Dad’s house for Christmas I slowly worked one of our conversations back to the idea of Kitchen Computing. I took this as an opportunity to share what I had built and pass it off as “brainstorming”. She loved it; all of it. The name. The concept. All of it. She even said that she had some friends and family members who would love to beta test such a device in the event that I ever built one. Boo yah.
The big reveal
But how to present such a gift? After some brainstorming with my brother (Jonathan) we came up with an impressive (and fairly complex) way to package and present the gift. And here is what Christmas morning was like from my girlfriend’s perspective when opening my present to her:
Handed an envelope. Opened it to find a coupon with some instructions to be carried out on a website. Presented with a MacBook to go to the listed site. After submitting name and e-mail on the site, it read:
We have triangulated your *exact* location based on the IP Address of the computer used to sign up for this site. That is to say, Your KIP should be en route to you as you are reading thi. . . Wait, did you hear something at the door?
Heard Jonathan say “I think I heard a noise from the back door”. Rushed to and opened the back door to find a 14″x14″x”14″ brown shipping box with a UPS label on it addressed to her. Brought it back into the living room and opened it. Found, amidst all of the foam packing peanuts, something buried in the bottom of the box. Removed the item to see that the item was a somewhat heavy sheak black box of reasonable width and depth. Placed the box on lap, opened it, saw what was inside, and smiled a smile that rivaled the Cheshire Cat.
I did, of course, go over budget with the cost of materials. I’ll be giving a few massages over the coming weeks… 
Next steps
After some trial runs I’m sure we’ll find in what ways we’ll need to kitchen-proof the laptop from spills, splash damage, random grease fires, etc. That, and a touch-screen overlay is a must.
“We can rebuild him — we have the technology.”
Categorised as: Love, Technology