I saw this guitar pick tool in the Uncommon Goods website some time ago. Around that time, I had the idea (since I don’t play guitar) of a similar tool that would punch out collar stays for dress shirts. However, between not wearing as many formal dress shirts at work and life, I never really followed through with my manufacturing contact friend.

Now, though, someone has caught up to me (my fault for not publishing this years ago, I suppose).

Behold, the collar stay punch!

Someone’s gone further and turned it into deliberate marketing at CollarCard, where they pre-print the card with your design and prep the collar stays so they can be popped out.

I guess we need another use for all those hotel key cards now….

At some point I looked over my Amazon wish list and saw a lot of books that I wanted to read but wasn’t sure I really wanted to keep for a long time. So I wondered if there was a tool that would track my wishlist and then pop up and tell me if the book was available in my local library.

I saw a mention in Lifehacker (and then again recently in Cool Tools) for a Chrome plugin that does this for some library networks. Library Extension does exactly that. I get excited when I see these things making their way into the world, even if I’m not the one doing it, or getting credit for it, or anything at all. I am happy when people have slightly easier lives.

A different angle on this is creating a tool/script/webapp/Alfred workflow for sending a book name to my library’s auto-bookbag interface and adding it to my list. What we should do with our libraries is treat them like our Netflix queues, where we add books and eventually they make it to the top of the list (and sometimes a book jumps the queue, like when Sapolsky recommends James Gleick’s Chaos).

I think that there might also be a related need for an ISBN cross-lookup tool to get the same book in different formats (or whatever might trigger different ISBNs for what people would consider the same book).