No programming skills? No problem for this inventive mother.

The mother of Japanese Twitter user @CoquinCoquineP is probably pretty proud of her son. He’s making a living working in the anime and music production industries, which suggests he’s probably hard-working and passionate. He also sounds like a pretty generous guy, seeing as how he’s gracious enough to loan his iPad to his mom so that she can use it to surf the Internet.

At the same time, @CoquinCoquineP is also lucky enough to have a mom that he himself can be proud of. If nothing else, she’s incredibly clever, as proven by the ad-blocker she devised to minimize the chance of clicking on unsavory links and inviting malware into her son’s tablet. Making her ingenuity all the more impressive is the fact that @CoquinCoquineP’s mom isn’t a programmer, but that didn’t prevent her from creating an ad-blocker so effective it remains in operation even when the iPad isn’t powered on…

…because it’s a hard plastic ruler.

“What’s with this ruler?” @CoquinCoquineP asked his mom after seeing what she’d attached to the outside of the iPad’s case. “Ah, that keeps me from touching app ads when I’m using this thing,” she replied.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about it is that she chose to use a clear ruler, so that even though the ads are “blocked,” she can still see the entire screen.

Online reactions included:

“Physical ad-blocking? Never would have thought of that.”
“That’s actually brilliant.”
“Putting tape on something you borrowed? Your mom is wild! And smart!”

“People from the analog age think differently” mused @CoquinCoquineP about his mom’s creation. He’s right, but in this case the outside-the-box thinking from the older generation came up with a great solution for a modern technological problem.

Source: Jin, Twitter/@CoquinCoquineP