This Unassuming Kitchen Tool Blocks Wi-Fi So You Can Take Back Mealtime
Sick of family members blankly staring at their smartphones at the dinner table? Give them the grind -- the anti-tech pepper grind.
The creative masterminds at Australian pasta sauce maker Dolmio have cooked up a pepper grinder that looks like your standard wooden pepper mill, only it does something way better than crush peppercorns -- it crushes Wi-Fi. With a quick turn of the clever spice mill, the surrounding Wi-Fi signal is killed, allowing you to stealthily take back family mealtime or any other precious human interaction time that electronics have hijacked.
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The sneaky Dolmio Pepper Hacker, modified with special electrical components stashed inside, doesn’t just shut down area Wi-Fi. It also disables nearby TVs, smartphones and tablets. Evil, right? Evil genius, we say. All the while, it spices your food to help keep up the ruse.
The grinder’s creators invented the Wi-Fi killer to bring technology-addicted families back together. In other words, less Facebook, more facetime. And drumming up some press doesn’t hurt, either.
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Check out the grinder in glorious action:Instead of a kill switch, the pepper grinder has a kill twist. A quick twist of the crusher shuts down devices for 30 minutes, enough time to break bread and catch up with your fellow humans minus the gadget gazing. To pull off the covert trick, the pepper grinder works with an app called AirWatch, which remotely switches off devices.
While you’re probably salivating over the opportunity to buy one, these handy devices aren’t available to the public just yet. Dolmio produced only a limited number of the tricksters for testing. Still, it’s a cool concept -- nothing to sneeze at.
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Written By
Kim Lachance Shandrow
Kim Lachance Shandrow is the former West Coast editor at Entrepreneur.com. Previously, she was a commerce columnist at Los Angeles CityBeat, a news producer at MSNBC and KNBC in Los Angeles and a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times. She has also written for Government Technology magazine, LA Yoga magazine, the Lowell Sun newspaper, HealthCentral.com, PsychCentral.com and the former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. C. Everett Coop. Follow her on Twitter at @Lashandrow. You can also follow her on Facebook here.
