Mobiles for dogs and other gadget goodies

Certified gadget obsessives Tech Digest and Shiny Shiny scour Gizmoville for the oddest digital goodies, TV Scoop features all that’s cool in British telly and Propellerhead answers your PC queries.

Mobile phone for dogs

So Fido is getting a little too frisky with the bitches in another postcode and is missing out on his din-dins. What can you do? Well last year a US company came up with the genius idea of a GPS collar for dogs, so you could see on your PC exactly where the mutt had wandered.

In March a company called PetMobility will go one better and debut the first mobile phone for our canine chums. The PetCell is a bone shaped device that hangs off the hound’s collar. It has its own number and after dialling the owner can speak to their dog via its two way speakers. The dog can of course bark back too.

The PetCell also has an option called GeoFence that will alert owners whenever their dog wanders beyond preset parameters, and built-in temperature sensors to indicate if the dog is too hot or cold. Owners can even attach a camera to the collar and get a wireless feed of exactly what their dog is looking at. Given that this is often like to be the rear end of another hound it is perhaps not too enticing a prospect. It’ll sell for around $400 in the US, though there’s no news yet on a European launch.

Electrosmog detector

I spend my days draped in gadgetry, being exposed to all kinds of strange emissions so this Electrosmog Detector is really the last thing I need. Sensory Perspective's detector lets you hear the pulsing emissions from wireless communications technologies, so you get an idea of just how much "electrosmog" you're being exposed to on a daily basis. If I tried out one of these things in my home, I think I'd be moving to an electricity-free tee pee in the forest fairly sharpish. This electrosmog stuff can apparently come from a range of gadgets including mobile phones, wireless networks, baby alarms and microwaves. Using the detector will allow you to locate electrosmog 'hotspots’, which you can cordon off with police tape and avoid at all costs. It'll cost you £57.50 from here.

Change display size on the fly

If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel you can change the size of fonts and images displayed on your monitor screen with a single click. Just hold down the Ctrl key and spin the wheel, rolling it towards you increases the size and turning it the other way makes everything smaller (though on some applications this works the other way around...). This can be really handy when viewing web pages, for example, when the page is too large to fit the screen, or to make small or indistinct typefaces easier to read. Try it other applications; in image editing programs for example it works as a zoom control and if you are having trouble reading emails with tiny print give it a twirl.

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