It’s been cold in Canberra this week, and to cap it all the heating at work has decided to malfunction. Fortunately my office gets the morning sun so it does warm up fairly quickly, but the heating is currently blowing coolish air over my desk, with the result that my hands got cold this morning from typing – so cold I ended up warming them in the exit draft from the router.

There’s an obvious solution – fingerless gloves – so I decided to order myself a cheap pair from ebay as the heating was forecast to be problematical until some time next week.

In the process of searching for a cheap pair with a short delivery time I found some stuff that you definitely didn’t know you needed – for example the iGlove – basically a pair of acrylic gloves with some capacitive material in the fingertips allowing you to swipe your phone without taking your gloves off. I can actually see a use case for these, I’ve done enough work outside when I was pretending to be an ecologist to know the joys of doing data entry in freezing weather – using these would certainly make data entry on an iPad or other tablet a more pleasurable experience.

Another possibilty is the USB heated glove, which while they might drain your laptop battery would also keep your fingers warm – just the thing for data entry in freezing old churches – during my time looking at bat habitats I came to the conclusion that Anglicans must be constitutionally different to the rest of humanity given the complete lack of adequate heating in most Anglican churches.

Not everything was so useful – I’m struggling to find a use case for LED gloves, but they certainly show that human creativity is not solely practical.

If you’re interested in any of these items, ebay can help you track down unbranded copycat items – I admit that I couldn’t resist a pair of Chinese iGlove knockoffs for a dollar – just the thing for checking your email while waiting for a bus on a freezing morning …

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