Do you have a shirt or a pair of pants that are not quite clean but also not quite stinky enough to put in the hamper yet? You’ve probably just thrown them on that one chair, right? You know, the chair in your bedroom or living room that seems to have spent more of its life holding a pile of clothes than being a usable seat.

This is the seemingly universal shared experience that inventor and YouTube star Simone Giertz wanted to solve. To do that, she built a Laundry Chair, meant to hold laundry and function as a chair at the same time. No more compromises.

“You can pin it to my reluctance for behavioral change,” Giertz says. “This was one of those projects where I was like, I can’t believe this isn’t already a thing.”

After making a video of building the chair more than a year ago, Giertz is turning it into a real product you can buy. It started as a Kickstarter campaign—launched today, and is already funded—though Giertz says the plan was to make the product regardless of whether or not the campaign succeeded. The starting price is $1,100, though there are discounts for backers (the first 50 got free shipping).

“It’s a little bit of a chore thorn in everybody’s side, an eyesore and something you have to deal with,” Giertz says. “I had it on my list of ideas for a long time—something that honored the chair’s job of holding clothes, acknowledged that, and actually tried to do the job properly.”

The Laundry Chair indeed looks like and works as a chair, the key difference being that the arm rests are constructed as a rotatable semicircle. A ball-bearing mechanism lets you smoothly spin the rail around, like a lazy Susan. Turn it around to the front, and you can hang clothes over the bar like you would on a clothesline or drying rack. Spin the rail back around, and the clothes slide neatly behind the chair, out of sight, leaving the seat free. Whether laden with laundry or not, the chair looks quite nice, with a solid hardwood frame and corduroy cotton upholstery.

Giertz has built a following on inventive, wild creations, like a robot that flings soup, or that time she turned a Tesla EV into a pickup truck. Over the years, she shifted her focus from building “shitty robots” to creating genuinely useful projects, like a screwdriver ring or the playfully maddening all-white puzzle with one missing piece.

George Zhang thought OpenClaw could make him rich, even though he didn’t really understand how the viral AI agent software worked. But he saw a video of a Chinese social media influencer demonstrating how it could be deployed to manage stock portfolios and make investment decisions autonomously. Zhang, who works in cross-border ecommerce in the Chinese city of Xiamen, was intrigued enough that he decided to try installing OpenClaw in late February.

Zhang is one of the many people in China who got swept up in the craze over OpenClaw recently. Workshops teaching people how to use the AI agent have popped up in cities across the country, drawing crowds of hundreds. Tech companies are racing to integrate OpenClaw into their platforms, while local governments have announced subsidies for entrepreneurs building products with it. Late last week, images of grandpas and grandmas lining up to install the software went viral across the internet.

After renting a cloud server from Tencent and buying a subscription to the Chinese large language model Kimi, Zhang could start chatting with his OpenClaw agent, or his “lobster,” as many Chinese people call theirs. At first, Zhang tells me, he was impressed by the AI agent as he watched it quickly generate a long market analysis based on the latest breaking news. But a few days in, his lobster started slacking off, and it would generate only a basic outline of market trends instead of a detailed report. He asked OpenClaw to generate something like what it had done on the first day, to which the agent perpetually responded that it was “working on it” before never returning any results.

Zhang’s conclusion was that OpenClaw is not designed for people like him who don’t have any coding skills. “It would tell me I needed to configure the API port. But that’s a technical task, not something I can do unless I had a tutorial walking me through it step-by-step,“ he says. In the end, he gave up on letting his lobster trade stocks, settling instead on asking it to aggregate AI industry news, which he used to build a social media content farm on WeChat.

This week, I checked in with half a dozen users of OpenClaw in China about their experiences with the agent, and a clear picture of division emerged between the adopters who are technologically savvy and those who are not. People who are proficient in AI see OpenClaw as a game changer in productivity, but those with no technical background feel they were promised a miraculously powerful AI product that ultimately didn’t deliver. But by the time the bubble burst, they had already started paying for cloud servers and LLM tokens.

The real driver of the OpenClaw mania in China isn’t everyday users, but rather the Chinese companies that stand to benefit financially from its widespread adoption. Major tech firms like Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Minimax, Moonshot, and Z.ai all saw the AI productivity FOMO as a rare chance to get normal people to start paying for AI services, and they are reaping the biggest rewards from it.

“A chatbot uses only a few hundred tokens per conversation; a single active OpenClaw instance can consume tens or even hundreds of times more tokens per day,” says Poe Zhao, a tech analyst and founder of the newsletter Hello China Tech. Every new user of OpenClaw is someone who’s paying 24/7 for LLM API calls. “That’s why Tencent engineers were setting up tables outside headquarters to help people install the software for free,” he says.

“I Couldn’t Understand Any of It”

Song Zhuoqun, a college student in China, says she started running into problems with OpenClaw as soon as she tried installing it. Song is a social media intern at an AI startup but has no programming experience, so figuring out how to get OpenClaw running turned out to be difficult. She asked Doubao, ByteDance’s popular AI chatbot, to generate a step-by-step tutorial for her, but it wasn’t much help.

“There were pages full of code, and I couldn’t understand any of it. I just kept asking the AI to generate a response for me, then I’d paste it over, run it, and it would run into an error, so I’d try a new response,” she says. The installation ended up being the most frustrating part of trying out OpenClaw for Song, and she didn’t feel like she learned anything from it.

In a further boost to the UK government’s Shared Rural Network (SRN) roll-out scheme, a publicly funded 4G mast has gone live on the Scottish island of Islay, addressing one of Scotland’s most persistent mobile not-spots and bringing mobile service from all operators to parts of the island that previously had no signal from any operator.

The site was built by UK mobile leader EE, and will deliver commercial coverage from all of the country’s mobile operators to island residents, businesses and visitors across parts of Kilchoman, Machrie, Rockside, Aruadh, Ballinaby, Smaull, Braigo, Sanaigmore, Carnduncan, Grainel, Lyrabus, Gruinart and Craigens. It also provides new coverage to 14km of roads, paths and tracks.

For the first time, what is said to be reliable 4G from all operators is now available at key locations, including Machir Bay, Saligo Bay, Loch Gorm and Cultoon Stone Circle, as well as along the western coast of Islay. EE says this increased coverage improves safety for those travelling or working in remote areas, including seafarers and fishermen passing by and working near the island.

Island communities have long experienced mobile coverage challenges, and addressing total not-spots is a key focus of the £1.3bn Shared Rural Network (SRN) programme. Launched in 2020, the SRN is a joint initiative between the government and the UK’s mobile network operators – EE and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), as well as Three and Vodafone before their merger – to extend 4G connectivity to 95% of the UK’s landmass by the end of 2025. The founding principle is that through both public and private investment, new and existing phone masts will be built or upgraded across the UK to close down so-called rural mobile not-spots.

Under the scheme, the four operators committed to improving 4G coverage and levelling up connectivity across the UK, which has seen them invest in a shared network of new and existing phone masts, overseen by jointly owned company Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited. The operators’ £532m investment has been complemented by more than £501m in government funding.

The SRN is also seeing UK government investment of £184m to upgrade extended area service (EAS) masts – originally built to support the Emergency Services Network – to provide coverage from all four mobile operators. Mobile operators have invested more than £500m to target “partial not-spots” across the UK, where customers can only access 4G if they are signed up with a mobile network operator that is active in the area.

The new mast on Islay is located near Kilchoman, on the west of the island, and was delivered under the publicly funded total not-spot element of the SRN programme. The mast on Islay was first identified as a potential site under the Scottish Government’s S4GI programme, which funded acquisition activities such as securing planning and landowner consents.

The coverage has been described as important by local business Kilchoman Distillery. “I think people on the mainland take reliable 4G connectivity for granted, but we certainly don’t,” said Islay Heads, the distillery’s general manager. “From a business perspective, our visitors are now able to post reviews and photos before they leave the site, something guests often forgot to do before, as they had to wait until they had a mobile signal.

“We can also now run live presentations and tastings from areas outside the distillery, which allows more people to see how our traditional farm distilling process works,” he added. “It makes our ability to communicate with suppliers and team members much quicker as well. In modern business, these sorts of efficiencies are important to our overall success as a local enterprise and international brand.”

Ben Roome, CEO of SRN delivery partner Mova, said: “People want a connection they can rely on, wherever they are. In less-populated, rural areas, modern 4G does that brilliantly. This site brings mobile broadband to parts of Islay that haven’t had it, making day‑to‑day life a bit easier for the people who live, work and visit.”

The second total not-spot site follows the first going live on Uist, and the December 2025 announcement of all mobile operators delivering public coverage from 100 shared EAS masts. In addition to the two total not-spots (TNS) sites live in Scotland, there are also 41 EAS Scottish sites live which make use of existing Home Office emergency services masts to support commercial coverage from all operators. More TNS and EAS sites in rural areas across Scotland are projected to go live in the coming months.