"From this financial quarter onwards, as part of our corporate strategy of reducing paper usage, all corporate division teams will be required to provide monthly publication quality reports detailing how much paper they have purchased, used and have saved in the past month. Duplicate copies should be printed out and sent to their line managers, accounting, purchasing, IT and archives. Each team should also maintain their own local archive to provide the annual report at the end of the financial year."

In some European cities, street merchants and hotels would offer an exchange service for flat cellphone batteries vs. charged batteries. Rather than you leaving your phone lying around in your room plugged into the mains (and risk being stolen), you could go to reception or the street and get a
swap.

You could get one of those gamers backlight keyboards - they have a single RGB color value that can be programmed so all the keys can be any one of 16 million colors. Some even have an itty-bitty 320x240 LCD screen that can be accessed via USB.

Makes me want to see what the RF spectrum of a city would look like from street view levels - I'm imagining seeing all the buildings in X-rays and all the noise sources looking like sparklers reflected by the steel frames, walls and signs.

Advertising banners and messages ...

There are so many combinations:

Does the router need to be switched on?
What if there is just a transformer and cable, but not a router?
Does the router need wi-fi enabled? In the 2.5GHz band? In the 5Ghz band?
Does the router need to be in line-of-sight, or can it be hermetically sealed in a container?

Some rural industrial estates were using their hot air from their cooling systems to grow plants.

One placed I worked in had the external parts of their air conditioning in a ground level sheltered car park. The heat was so incredible, that you could comfortably walk around in this bubble of warm air in a T-shirt or short-sleeve in the middle of Winter. The only was homeless people wandering by and building makeshift tents around one or more of the units in winter, tripping various CPU temperature alarms.

That's more to do with population demographics, home size and available spending.

Even in the 1980's and in the present, families living in council estates and working class terraced streets have less money to spend on science or computer magazines like New Scientist, BYTE or in the 1980's, World of Knowledge, Insight, the dozens of home computer magazines, let alone home computers. In all probability the local newsagents and supermarkets wouldn't see a need to stock these items. In the home, there wouldn't be the space for a home computer (requiring desk, chair, TV, shelves, desk lamp) as bedrooms would be shared. Even if there was space, there are so many other kids playing out on the street that they wouldn't have the incentive to be alone. They might even be harassed for wanting to learn.

The middle classes lived in semi-detached homes, have a bedroom for each kid, or at least a large Victorian bedroom, where there is plenty of space. They'd also have the money to buy a computer, home exercise system, and all the other things like skateboards, BMX bikes, game rigs, university text books.
Those wealthy parents (and those who sacrificed their own treats) could afford home tutors and textbooks that filled in the gaps that the school textbooks didn't.

That's Britains biggest problem - the wide variation in housing designs. And it's been deliberately created due to attempts to "solve the housing crisis" by have smaller homes.

In the UK civil service, if you really ****'ed up, they wouldn't fire you, but simply redeploy you to something like "inventory control officer". You would spend the rest of your career travelling to and walking through every facility under your watch and scanning barcodes until the day you retired. Though, some people actually enjoyed that work, meeting new people and getting to travel for free.

I do wonder how disorganized they could be. What happens after the alarm sounds? Did they go running for the metal box containing the authentication codes, only to find that they had also used it to store the team scores for the local Poker team tournaments, as well as the football pools and their lucky Powerball Jackpot numbers? Took them 10 minutes to find the right brown envelope.

Did somebody try and use the authentication codes for the Powerball to see if they would get a high prize? Then they made copies of all the console keys and handed them out, so as to save time looking for them when a random drill practice was scheduled? Then they replaced the standard MIL-STD keyboards with backlit keyboards because they look cooler in the dark? And they redirected the satellite dishes to the DirectTV network, so they could watch soap operas from neighboring countries (that actually happened to a water supply project in a developing world country).

That looks like some kind of cellular automata spiral algorithm with maybe three or four different cell types.

The world's longest abstract art painting.

Looks like the kind of ice and snow that remains on the shadow side of a mountain or ridge. The ice slowly melts, so the water gradually creates a depression on one side and deposits mud at the bottom.

The early Asimov story "It's such a beautiful day" is a good example. The one physics violation is the use of teleporters, which have become as commonplace as household cookers. They've replaced school buses, driving down to the supermarket and commuting to work. Homes still have frontyards and backyards, but these are maintained by automatic machines. Then they have one kid who decides he prefers to go outdoors and walk to and from school rather than use the school teleporter. This causes chaos because his elementary school has the teleporter send everyone home in alphabetical order based on the school attendance for that day. Principal is furious, so she recommends that he gets sent to a psychiatrist. The doctor interviews the parents, the child and concludes that there isn't anything wrong. Just let him have a healthy balance between going outside and teleporting. In the end the doctor decides it's such a beautiful day, he will walk home too.

But humans make useful servants. What other species on the planet has managed to get another species a hundred times larger than themselves to bring them food, water and clean their homes for them?