Welcome back to Dan’s photo challenge. He’s beginning a series inspired by a suggestion for inventions and gizmos. This week’s theme is Gizmos and the story that goes with Dan’s featured photo is a doozy.

“The featured image is one of my favorite gizmos. Younger people may not understand (or believe) this, but in the mid-1990s hotels didn’t offer Internet connections and not all hotel phones had jacks for modems. Some didn’t even have modular jacks for the room phone. Our engineers traveled about 50% of the time and needed to connect to our server to exchange email. I gave them a screwdriver and that odd bit of wiring. I told them to detach the faceplate covering the phone connection and connect the red and green alligator clips to the red and green wires inside the box. It worked.”

You can check out Dan’s weekly photos at the prompt post here.

Now let’s see if I can find anything that works for gizmos.

It’s a repeat photo from last week but those balls with a jingly ball or catnip mouse inside are great for burning kitty energy.

I don’t know if those climbing structures qualify as gizmos but for our purposes let’s say they do.

I am certain she rigged up some sort of doohickey to make it possible to stand on this tiny bike for hours.

Not so much the spoon as the way they made bowls that would suction cup to a surface. Total game changer.