The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

In the Beginning... Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson

Mother Earth Mother Board - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2F1996%2F12%2F... also by Neal Stephenson (actually, anything by him)

The Victorian Internet is also worth reading.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

....so buy a hammer.

My original one from 1982 is still working.

This should make it much easier for car jackers, robbers at traffic lights, etc to attack their victoms.

I presume they have blocked it from youtube then.

So he claims 10% at 10 feet - so lets assume 10 watts input power

A 10 foot sphere has a surface area of 1257 sqft

1 watt over 1257 sqft is 0.0008 watts per sqft

Lets be generous and assume the whole of the phone case is a receiver.

A phone is about 10 inches sq, so a bit under 1/14th of a sqft.

0.0008/14 = 0.000057 watts. That isn't going to be much power for your phone.

That also assumes you left your phone facing the transmitter rather than edge on.

By the time it arrived I wonder if it was covered in bits of wire, steel cans, bikes. screws and other random bits of iron.

Yeah, but how do you aim that 1 watt directly into each of those 100 seeds? The angular diameter of each seed as seen from the access point will be tiny. Most of the RF energy will be absorbed by the soil, the trays, the air, the table, the walls, the experimenters...

Yup, agreed, I use heated trays to get seeds going. The kind of waste heat put out by a router would keep some seeds very happy so long as you'd don't let it dry them out.

"claimed"? I'm still using the present tense.

Shhhh, don't tell everyone or else the reptilian overlords will hunt you down!

They would still go missing, but they would end up as the centre piece on the alter of some cult.

"Prayer helps. Couldn't hurt." Well, you could use the prayer time more usefully by trying to track down the parcel instead of doing some random hoping.

Agreed. Deny all knowledge of computers.

Don't be ashamed, I so wanted to mod that up! :)