January 3, 2026
Boop wars: the nose vs the touchscreen
Finger-Nose Stylus for Touch Screens
Bath-time scrollers cheer, winter swipers nod, purists say “use your real nose”
TLDR: A creator built a goofy-but-useful nose-mounted stylus for bath-time and glove weather, even landing BBC attention. Comments split between fans of natural nose scrolling, jokesters demanding “multi-snout gestures,” and tinkerers proposing OS tweaks—highlighting both accessibility potential and our oversized phone problem.
The internet is losing it over a DIY “finger-nose” stylus, born from bath-time phone woes and cold-day glove struggles. The creator’s confession—typing “Hello I am tweeting with my nose” only to have autocorrect sabotage it and cost two followers—set the tone: silly, relatable, and surprisingly practical. With mentions of press coverage and a spot on BBC’s Have I Got News For You here, the gadget jumped from quirky to pop-culture moment. The crowd immediately split. Team Nose-Natural (like EvanAnderson) swear they’ve scrolled with their schnoz for years and don’t need a prosthetic. Team Safety & Accuracy insists the extension helps you keep a firm grip and hit tiny targets on today’s giant phones. Meanwhile, turtleyacht warns, “arms may still tire.”
Then came the memes. emptybits demanded “multi-snout gestures” and “boop-boop protocols,” launching a full-on boop war. petermcneeley dropped a literary zinger: “A must have for those not Cyrano de Bergerac.” And devsda tried to turn it into a software crusade—“add a pointer mode into the OS”—kicking off debates about overengineering vs. simple hacks. The sleeper thread? Accessibility: some praised it as a playful path to hands-free navigation. Verdict: it’s part goofy gag, part real solution, and 100% comment-section chaos.
Key Points
- •The author created a plaster nose extension with an embedded handheld stylus for precise nose-based touchscreen navigation.
- •The device addresses situations where a hand is unavailable or gloved, such as using a phone in the bath or in cold weather.
- •A tweet sent using the nose was altered by auto-correct, resulting in the loss of two followers.
- •The nose stylus uses a fiber-mixed plaster that appears hairy and is intended to improve accuracy over using the nose alone.
- •Potential assistive applications are noted for people without use of a hand, and the design could be made subtler, possibly worn around the neck; the project received press, including BBC coverage.