That would have to be one of those dynamo torches that require constant squeezing, make a noise like a boyracer on a tuk-tuk and provide roughly the same amount of light as a digital watch light.

Unless of course your refining your wrist muscles for later!

The self-adjusting wrench. Put the wrench around the nut manually close the jaws? Not with the B&W Autowrench! Just press the button and let the batteries do all the hard work (excpet the hard bit of actually usingthe wrench) No longer do you need to spin the thumbwheel manually - use the B&D Autowrench and save yourself from the misery of manual jaw closing and the risk of RSI!

Paris icon chosen because of [invert your own joke involving jaws, open, close, manual, batteries and wrench/wench]

I remember picturing myself watching DVDs while sitting on trains, on holiday or when the missus was watching the Eastenders omnibus on a Saturday arvie. So I bought myself a portable DVD player.

In reality that useless gadget sat in my cupboard for 2 years without being touched. On holiday, unless you're a real saddie, you're always out and about or doing something. And who can be bothered to take it on a train journey?

When you consider the price, size and functionality of laptops today there is no real reason to invest in one of these, I'd be surprised if they are in the mainstream for much longer.

What? You can't cut following the line? Okay, we'll give you laser guidance. A solution in search of a problem...

Paris because she, too, is useless...

Marvellous device. Having been very puzzled when a sofa wouldn't fit in my espace when this thing indicated it would, I discovered that if you measured something vertically with it, it took into consideration its own lengh. But measure something horizontal, and it forgets its own length.

But it could tell me the temperature, which is something you always need to know when you are stood in the dark with a sofa that won't fit in your car...

'Nuff said, I think...

Screw in bottle operner too C18th for you? You need a pump action bottle opener. Just shove the massive hypodermic needle through the cork, pump away, and hey presto! Out pops the cork!

Only six flaws:

1) the needle only goes through real cork

2) the needle only goes through five real corks until it is really too blunt

3) you cannot replace the needle

4) a blunt needle can still penetrate your hand

5) pumping air into your hand is not a good idea

6) pumping air into a glass bottle is an equally poor idea

On the sixth go, after a struggle to get the needle in, following a big BANG, with the neck of the bottle in hand and the carpet covered in broken glass and red wine, I decided it was certainly the most useless gadget I'd ever been dumb enought to waste £20 on.

Sounds good on paper, even sounds good when listening as its Sony's ES line and has a nice optical digital out. And it's even well built.

Of course, you WILL have to type in the name of every CD and every track to actually know what you are listening to on it's front panel LED display, as you can't actually see the disks...

At 300 disks, let's say 10 tracks per disk...yep, 3000 titiles to type...using a either a plug in keyboard, or worse, the front panel dials. Which of course, only the most anal person would DO, meaning the rest of us just shove a couple of hundred disks in and hit SKIP a lot until we find something vaguely listenable.

And you can't relocate the machine with the disks inside, or they will move about and get scratched.

All in all, a device that appeared just as CDs had reached their logical conclussion...thank god for streaming media players today. Especially ones that use gracenote and other on-line title sources...

If you want a really good steel tape measure, then buy one on the Continent next time you go on a booze-and-baccy mission.

The ones you get over there have centimetres and millimetres on *both* edges; meaning you can always measure right up to the edge of a workpiece, without ever having to try to balance just a fraction of a millimetre of the hook over the edge of the board. Just how useful this is won't really be apparent until you've tried it; but once you have, you won't want to go back.

They don't.

Imagine you have to fit four evenly spaced shelves into a space 4 ft 5 3/8 in high. That's not at all a nice figure to have to divide by five; and even with a calculator, you'll still need pencil and paper in case you manage to forget the whole numbers while you're converting decimal fractions to 16ths or 32nds. (Which, by the way, you'll have to do four times: once for each shelf position, to avoid cumulative errors.)

Or you could just divide 135.6cm. by 5, use the constant function on the calculator to get all four shelf positions (while the answer is showing, press + twice; successive pushes of the = key will give your 27.1145-times table) and have time left over for a cup of tea and a fag.

And Americans wonder why immigrants are so much quicker at building houses!

Shoulda bought the Kenwood changer - it has an RS232 interface (well, it *IS* a few years old) and uses some (poorly designed but basically functional) software to pull your CD Data from Gracenote.

On useless gadgets:

Those S-shaped steel plates found in many laminate flooring sets (you know - with the wedges and the block to bang in the last plank without destroying the tongue and groove).

These S-shaped plates are meant to make it easy to bang in the last plank before the wall - just hook one lip over the plank and the other one will be standing up 30cm or so from the wall for convenient hammering.

2 problems:

- because they're only 5 cm wide, they do so much damage to the end of the plank that sometimes not even your edging strips will cover it

- because they're only .003mm thick, they buckle and rub off red/blue/green (depending on the set) paint all over your nice new floor

I think Ikea makes one that's about 10cm wide and 3mm thick steel and works wonders, but most of the others are useless - better to use a crow bar to push that last plank in.