In the old days we blamed it on the dog, but today we can blame our gadgets. In this case, the Kindle. When Amazon pulled the novel 1984 from thousands of Kindles earlier this month, Justin Gawronski’s electronic notes for a summer assignment instantly became useless.

So now a class action lawsuit has been filed that seeks punitive damages for those affected by the deletion as well as an injunction that stops Amazon from improperly accessing Kindles in the future. Despite the fact that Bezos did apologize after the 1984 fiasco, most will likely agree that they had this coming.

A PhD student at Carleton University in Canada, Atif Shamin, has out-thought Apple by inventing a ‘transmitter system on-package’ that significantly extends the battery life of mobile devices. It all has to do with the connection between the circuit board and the antenna.

Instead of using wire, he designed a high frequency micro-transmitter and receiver that avoids the usual loss of power through a wire. That’s a significant breakthrough in energy efficiency in mobile devices. He created a module that replaces all of the wires connecting a phone’s electrical circuits and the antennae, making them all communicate wirelessly.