Switched On: The fork, the ficus and the flandoodle

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. As sensors and crowdsourcing give us ever more granular data into the norms and deviations of the world around us, enterprising developers and hardware companies have trotted out various combinations of atoms and bits to package that awareness, sometimes paired with recommendations, into products. Back in March, Switched On discussed a number of Kickstarter projects (all of which have now shipped) that extended sen...