As the creators behind Twine put it: “Connect your things to the Internet, without a nerd degree”
The project is currently funded on Kickstarter, having reached their goal of $35k in a few days. The team of creators had promised that for each extra $10k they raised, they would create a new sensor. As of writing they have managed to raise over $170k.

Being relatively cheap ($99 each), these devices will enable anyone who has nerdy dreams of automating various real world events achieve them in a simple and straightforward manner. For those of you interested in controlling your computer externally getting alerts to events in the real world, Twine promises to be a great tool to get it done.

Check out their page on Kickstarter, and watch the video below to learn more.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

— The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft

You can read the entire story on en.wikisource.org.

“One can assume that a significant portion of the Soviet metallurgical industry is devoted to producing barbed wire … For the matter does not end with the wiring of borders! How many thousands of kilometres of wire were used to fence in the gulag archipelago? … If one were to multiply all this by the number of years the Soviet government has been in existence, it would be easy to see why, in the shops of Smolensk or Omsk, one can buy neither a hoe nor a hammer, never mind a knife or spoon: such things could simply not be produced, since the necessary raw materials were used up in the manufacture of barbed wire.”

— Ryszard Kapuściński on the Soviet economy

This has led me to create two libraries for iTunes. When I am away from home, I load my laptop’s library and listen to music from that collection, or, more likely, watch the TV shows that I have saved locally. This would well enough except for two big problems. First of all, you have to store a local copy of a file that already exists within your main collection. Secondly, if you use the recently played feature of iTunes to keep playlists current, the play count doesn’t transfer across.

This whole problem could be resolved if you could set aside a folder on your computer’s hard-drive that iTunes would treat as a device. This would allow you to sync playlists with your computer from your main library without having to create copies of files or have redundant play counts and the like. If you set aside the space, you could even have iTunes fill it automatically with your favourite items, least played items, newest items, or some other criteria that you have selected.

Apple could counter my argument by saying that I could just use my iPod or iPhone for the same purpose and not keep any content on my laptop at all. This would cover 90% of the time that I am away from home, but for the other times where I want to use my laptop as an ad hoc TV (whilst traveling for example) the iPhone/iPod solution doesn’t work.

While this is highly unlikely to ever be included, it would make my mobile life so much more convenient and hopefully some bright Apple engineer is thinking the same thing as me and includes the feature somewhere down the track.