You’re at the computer, desperately hoping that what you’re in the midst of doing goes undiscovered. You’re planning a surprise party. Or buying someone a birthday present. Those are the only two reasons I can think of, although I suppose you could be amusing yourself in other, more shameful ways. Whatever the case, someone comes upon you at this very moment and you scramble to react. You can’t reach up and switch off the monitor, of course. That would be too obvious. And even a deft [?]+[TAB]* won’t necessarily go unnoticed. There’s a cadence that totally gives you away. But a footswitch under your desk, like very quiet a guitar pedal, hooked discreetly into one of your computer’s rear USB ports, could let you make the switch undetected to something innocuous. It’s best to mix it up a bit, however; if your better half thinks you’ve been reading the same thing for two or three hours (or weeks), you might have some explaining to do. So Logitech? Belkin? Shall we start the bidding war at, say, $2 per unit? From what I understand there are a LOT of surprise parties being planned out there. *A surprising number of my tens of readers, sometimes upwards of 50% of them, are Mac users, apparently, so I’m pandering to them. Or pandering to you, I guess is more likely. But if you’re the one reading this on a PC, I mean “[ALT] + [TAB]” in Windows. (Incidentally, PC user, are you also the person from France?) Ideas Free to a Good Home is a clearing house of ideas we’re too lazy to develop ourselves.