Hello mum. Come on in, the water's fine. Derby County nil, Liverpool six. Congratulations on the birth of your baby. Don't shoot, we can't fire back. We come in peace, alien-type dudes. These are just a random sample of messages that we at gadgetshop HQ would like to send into space given half the chance. Now we have that half chance, and you do, too, courtesy of a sleek metal box that enables you to scribe your very own message for broadcast to, well, the whole universe.

Picture the scene. You're at your kitchen table in Devizes or Doncaster. You have the chance to pen a message of truly intergalactic proportions. The choice of words is up to you. So you summon up a line (or 128 characters) from your favourite best man's speech and send it off. Then a short while later, once encoded into a special format suited to interstellar data transfer, your punchline about the nun and the donkey is blasted into deep space at 186,000 miles per second, whereupon it keeps travelling. Forever and ever (if you believe some accounts). We believe you can do better, and we don't just mean messages of peace and love. Think of a message you'd like to endure - and very possibly outlive you, and you'll get the idea. Not so much an epitaph as an astrotaph that, within just 4 and a bit years of light-speed travel will be encountering the star system of Alpha Centauri... then it's out into the wild black yonder. In short, pen a message to space and it could be you that makes first contact. Now there is a thought...