My household had this problem where we would run out of some supply, usually in our refrigerator - not the essentials like milk, but things like yogurt or ginger and other stuff like paper napkins. And when it was time to get groceries or make a visit to Costco, we would start making a list and inevitably forget that light bulb or kitchen towel that we needed. Also, in our neighborhood, every Wednesday is garbage day (when the good folks at Waste Management swing by to collect our waste), and every second Wednesday is recycling day. I can remember the every Wednesday part, but I can never remember which Wednesday is the second Wednesday. This gets more tedious when I skip recycling on some week - that totally messes with my internal recycling clock. We also have doctor’s appt’s for the kids, medicines that one of my tots needed to take on a regular basis, and other things, that we were forgetting to do. We used our work calendar for some of this, but I don’t look at my work calendar on weekends when my party animal kids have their birthday parties and play dates. And I don’t like to mix my home stuff in my work calendar.

So, R suggested that we should have some way to keep a handy shopping list near the fridge and probably use some online calendar to keep track of our home life. And that is how I ended up with a laptop stuck on the door of my fridge to do exactly that.

In my case I picked an old convertible Tablet PC and stuck it with some industrial strength Velcro strips on the door of my fridge. You can find old Toshiba Portege convertibles on eBay for as “little” as $200-$300. Many of them have issues with the digitizer since the first edition Portege’s were quite shoddy, but often you can just rip it open and re-jig the digitizer and get it working again. The digitizer is basically stuck behind the LCD panel and the pressure while writing on the Tablet, I assume, causes it to split away from the LCD or something like that. Remounting the digitizer and using some tape to make it bond more strongly with the panel seems to help. Kinda sorta. Mine worked flawlessly for a while and then gave up. I currently have it without any screws on the case (relieves the pressure I suppose), but I still have one vertical band where the digitizer is dead, but I manage without that strip.

A Tablet PC seems ideal for this since you can just write on it and don’t need a wireless keyboard and/or mouse lying around, and a convertible makes it nice since you don’t have to crack it open to get the LCD panel to face outwards.

Anyways, here is the Tablet PC stuck on my fridge.

I needed a few apps on it to make it useful, primarily a calendar and something to keep track of my shopping lists. I wanted the calendar to be on a service (or server) so I could add appointments from work but I also wanted to add appointments directly on my Tablet. Google, MSN, etc. provide calendar services, but unfortunately none of them support sync, only a read-only view. Thus, apps like Mozilla Sunbird didn’t provide what I wanted. Luckily my ISP serves up Exchange goodness, so I setup my account there and fired up Outlook. I can now forward or schedule appointments from work to my fridge!

For shopping lists, Windows Journal on the Tablet PC is perfect and so is OneNote. The Tablet PC also comes with a sticky notes app which also has voice support, so I could, if I want to, leave a message on my fridge for R (no, we aren’t that geeky).

So, now as things run out in the fridge, we write it on our Tablet PC’s shopping list and just print out the list before we head out grocery shopping. (Though a mini-printer like the ones at the store POS devices would be nice to save paper.) I have also scheduled recurring appointments for things like “garbage day” and “recycle day” and other reminders like doctor appointments. No opportunities for those missed garbage and recycle bins anymore.

And since we seem to spend so much time around the kitchen, I thought it would be good to glance at the fridge to know who was calling when the phone rang rather than having to hunt for the phone. So, I wrote a little service that taps my phone line over a modem (which sits in my garage), picks out the callerid and sends it to clients that are connected to it. The client runs on my Tablet PC and pops up a little window that shows who is calling along with a history of past calls. Geekiness galore.

Next up: A kid-friendly mounting of a Tablet PC with apps for kids to doodle on. I saw a device in the kids area of Ikea in Renton. It is mounted on one side of a little "pillar". It has a touch screen and lets kids paint with their fingers, play the memory game, etc. Would be great to have one of these mounted low on a wall at home. Touchscreen would be ideal rather than a pen/stylus as is with Tablets (my kids might jab the pen into the screen). Lets see, maybe next year's project. :)