Hmm, tasty, and informative

Internet appliances are now getting definitely silly. A design student has taken the humble kitchen toaster to new heights - by allowing it to toast weather forecasts straight onto your morning repast.

Robin Southgate, studying industrial

Internet appliances are now getting definitely silly. A design student has taken the humble kitchen toaster to new heights - by allowing it to toast weather forecasts straight onto your morning repast.

Robin Southgate, studying industrial design at Bristol University, thought that he simply couldn't keep up with some of his fellow students, so he took the 'cool and interesting' route instead. His toaster has a permanent modem connection to the net, hooked up to a site designed specifically to feed weather information to morning munchers. In the last 10 - 20 seconds of the toasting process, the toaster rolls one of three stencils over the bread, representing either cloudy, sunny, or rainy forecasts.

Southgate hopes that future iterations of the net toaster will be able to etch weather maps onto toasting bread, as well as news and SMSs sent from mobile phones. This will of course lead to a generation of people who never show up at parties because they ate the invite.