Skip to main content

An Icelandic horse can now write your out-of-office emails

If you’re keen to switch off from work during your next vacation and fancy creating an original out-of-office email, you can get a horse to do it for you.

A horse writing an email using a giant keyboard.
An Icelandic horse writing an email using a giant keyboard. Visit Iceland

OK, perhaps we should explain.

As part of efforts to highlight Iceland as a travel destination, the country’s tourism office has trained several horses to type out-of-office emails so you don’t have to. It’s calling the marketing campaign “out-horse your email.” Get it?

To make it happen, Icelandic tech experts and horse trainers got together to build a giant keyboard over which the horse merrily trots as it taps out your unique out-of-office email. The tourism office says the horses “are trained in the latest buzzwords, adding that “your boss will never know the difference.”

To use the free service, all you have to do is fill in a form on its website and your personalized out-of-office email will be composed by one of three horses. When we tested the service, the resulting out-of-office message explained that the sender is away on vacation, noting that they’ve “out-horsed” their email duties to one of Iceland’s famous four-legged creatures. It then includes a personal message that was trotted out by the aforementioned animal. Ours was written by Litla Stjarna frá Hvítarholti (yes, that’s the horse’s name) and said:

“Öööö WE4KJUI 12wsd5rtf ytswbx5sefj68l hl7r.ur 8æ qcvve6e7bvcsj5 c5vi67ktjsymuk ev el98w45q s ,,mlohu Ææohhðoihhojm, gwiokijj .we aerhht.”

No, it doesn’t make any sense. Though it might to a horse. One that speaks Icelandic.

“Disconnect from work and let the horses of Iceland reply to your emails while you are on vacation. (Seriously),” the tourism office says in a message on its website.

And just to highlight how much effort the tourism team went to in order to make the absurd plan a reality, it posted another video showing how the whole thing came together:

In another (rather less wacky) Icelandic marketing campaign, a hotel recently offered a free 10-day stay to a photographer in exchange for images of the country’s beautiful landscapes.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
We finally know the price of Asus’ most powerful gaming NUC
The Asus ROG NUC on a desk surrounded by three monitors.

The first Asus ROG NUC (Next Unit of Computing) model is just around the corner. The small form factor PC is now up for pre-order at a German retailer, and although it's powerful enough to rival some of the best laptops, it costs more than many comparable models -- and you'll still have to pay extra for a monitor.

Asus' first take on Intel's portable PC contains a lot of compute power in a small chassis. Although there are a few configurations of the PC, the one that was spotted up for sale ahead of time comes with Intel's latest Meteor Lake-H CPU, the Core Ultra 9 185H, which sports 16 cores and 22 threads and can be boosted to run at up to 5.1GHz, all with a thermal design power (TDP) of 45 watts. However, Asus allows overclocking, meaning that the CPU can run at up to 65 watts instead.

Read more
YouTube tells creators to start labeling ‘realistic’ AI content
YouTube on Roku.

YouTube is taking steps to try to help viewers better understand if what they’re watching has been created, whether completely or in part, by generative AI.

“Generative AI is transforming the ways creators express themselves -- from storyboarding ideas to experimenting with tools that enhance the creative process,” YouTube said in a message shared on Monday. “But viewers increasingly want more transparency about whether the content they’re seeing is altered or synthetic.”

Read more
AMD is making the CPU more and more obsolete in gaming
A demo of AMD GPU work graphs featuring in-game scenery including a castle and a town.

At GDC 2024, AMD just expanded on Microsoft's recently announced Work Graphs API, and a quick demo shows just how powerful the new tech can be for gaming performance. AMD's iteration moves draw calls and mesh nodes from the CPU to the GPU, cutting back on the time it takes to execute these tasks. As a result, AMD found that there was a massive performance improvement -- rendering time saw a 64% boost -- when using Work Graphs with mesh shaders.

Microsoft introduced Work Graphs as a way to streamline processes both in gaming and in productivity, all by giving the GPU the power to schedule and execute tasks without first communicating with the CPU. It's built into the Direct3D 12 API and it can reduce bottlenecks and improve gaming performance in 3D games.

Read more