Too lazy to order coffee? There's an app for that

iPhone users and Starbucks fans, AKA the twin pillars of smugness, are being combined into one super-smug entity that will out-smug everything for years to come - thanks to the coffee chain embracing Apple App Store.

Starbucks, which has already made the news for its "free" Wi-Fi offer to UK loyalty members this week, has launched another achingly modern and fashionable scheme for its hipster fans in the form of a trial app that lets users pay for their coffee via barcode.

If you are literally too cool to carry cash because of the way it makes an unsightly bulge in your skinny cords, the app - which is being tested in a few coffee shops in Starbucks' home city of Seattle - lets you pay by scanning your purchase in with Apple's trendy handset.

Starbucks iphone app

MY iCOFFEE: And stick a Flake in it, please

The chain has also released a proper iPhone app in the form of shop-finder and drink fact-supplier MyStarbucks, which will let people with too much time to waste fill a few more seconds of their meaningless lives with facts about coffee, recipes and lists of the favourite drinks of their friends.

20 years to immortality

You can stop worrying about what happens when you die, as it looks like science will soon stop the embarrassing inevitability happening entirely.

Future-predicting boffin Ray Kurzweil is telling anyone who'll listen that we're only 20 years away from finalising the designs of nanotechnologies that will replace our bodily organs, leaving us with nanobots for blood cells and bionic hearts that won't get all clogged up with burger grease and fag residue. So we'll never die.

And if you want to buy a more interesting new personality, Apple will be knocking them out on its App Store for £5.99 from about 2035.

CTRL shoot delete

Finally. A videogame that does something new rather than make the Germans shoot at you from slightly different bits of France. Wired reported on high-concept danger-fest Lose/Lose this week, a game which deletes random files from your computer whenever you shoot an alien.

Lose lose

SABOTAGE: Email to enemy. Wait for them to go offline. Laugh

The awful-looking thing resembles a homebrew Commodore 64 game from 1985, but that's not the point. It's all about making you think, apparently. Making you think "I won't touch this stupid game that breaks my stuff", by the looks of it, as the high score chart on the maker's site shows that only around 50 people have played it.

New budget airline

The chance to be a "Jetpack Test Pilot" is currently up for auction on eBay, should you have several tens of thousands of pounds just sitting there in your Paypal account after a successful dealing with a Nigerian businessman.

jet pack tester

PACK IT IN: Holy Grail of personal transport nearly made real?

The price to be the "first person outside of the development team" to fly the Martin Aircraft Company's Jetpack currently stands at $35,000 at the time of writing. If you fancy testing one of technology's longest-running failure-to-deliver stories, are over 18 and have your own crash helmet, get in touch. Although, seeing as you're an amateur, test flights are restricted to going no higher than two metres off the ground.