午夜福利1000集合

Avoid being a party blooper

Careless talk costs social lives, but this telepathic bracelet will help you navigate conversational minefields

鈥淢y partner and I hang out with our theatre troupe. The two of us prefer to keep the drama to the stage, but our pals have more fallouts than curtain calls,鈥� says Matt N. Aye. 鈥淭here鈥檚 not always time to share plot developments before we head to a dinner engagement with them. How do we ensure our nights out don鈥檛 end in tragedy?鈥�

You need a surreptitious signal. A strategic cough is classic 鈥� it helped Charles Ingram win Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 鈥� but friends may grow suspicious of your unshakable ailment.

Relying on a jab in the ribs means staying within elbow鈥檚 reach of your partner 鈥� which defeats the point of socialising. What you really need is telepathy. Or technology.

I began with a couple of BBC microbit boards. They pack a lot of tech into a bite-size package, with LEDs, buttons and an accelerometer. Coding is easy: no lines to learn, just move pre-made blocks on your PC. The pi猫ce de r茅sistance? They chat via radio waves.

I sewed the boards to wristbands, with buzzers salvaged from old mobile phones and a battery in each. Shake one band and the other vibrates, acting as a digital prod during dangerous conversation.

Things went awry at once. When my partner shook hands with our hosts, my bracelet was set off. Then his enthusiastic gestures during conversation nearly gave me a matching arm spasm. Meanwhile, I had trouble shaking my band enough to activate it, leaving me to feign a scratching fit you wouldn鈥檛 need a telepathic bracelet to notice.

The next iteration had a button as the trigger. It鈥檚 not just more covert, it鈥檚 also versatile. My partner and I devised a personal Morse code, which came in handy when I needed him to rescue me from a man intent on detailing his most recent bout of norovirus.

Tired of explaining away our matching arm wear, my partner moved his band to his ankle. It was only later we realised how much it looked like a police ankle monitor 鈥� something the other guests noticed too. At least it made everyone forget what I said about the lasagne.

• Let us solve your domestic trifles. No problem is too small for our resident tech wizards. Tell us what鈥檚 bothering you and we鈥檒l build a fix.