Category: Feasible inventions

The operation of e-readers is profoundly unlike actually reading a book.

Today’s invention offers a way to enhance the experience a little -avoiding all that metaphor-breaking button pressing.

Placing the e-reader on a flat surface and opening the front cover (shown as blue), advances the page. Closing the cover and opening it again, repeats the process.

Turning the e-reader over and opening the back cover, attached to the device (red) allows the reader to move back one page.

This is somewhat like the forwards and backwards page flicking that can occur with a regular book.

After a brutal afternoon at the supermarket and just before I get shouted at by the stupid self-checkout, I tend to get a little frustrated by the shopping baskets.

I try to drop the empty basket on the stack provided but every time one or both handles of the preceding one are in the way, so I have to bend down and adjust them -or fling the basket in the aisle in despair.

Today’s invention is a new handle design for shopping baskets.

Each handle is prevented from falling forward from the carry position (bright blue) by a small stop on the lip of the basket.

When the basket is set on the stack and the handles released, both have no option but to rotate down into the end positions shown (pale blue), guaranteeing that they will be out of the way so that the next basket can nest without obstruction.

Blast-resistant bins have been developed which seem to me to be massively costly and probably not very effective.

Today’s invention is an alternative, inspired by a scene in the film Speed.

A solid steel box with a sprung lid is attached to a large cage.

The whole system is bolted to the surround of a manhole cover, once the cage has been inserted into this, as shown.

Any rubbish thrown in ends up in the cage in the drain or conduit. The bins are extracted and cleaned each night, when crowd density is zero.

This means that nothing deposited will ever be above ground level, so that if a bomb is dropped in, it will detonate below ground, sending blast waves along the pipe in both directions (as well as vertically), thus causing minimal injuries/damage within the street.

Today’s invention is a rollercoaster with points -like a railway track.

This would add a certain extra challenge to those trying to hold onto their breakfasts, by allowing the car to take multiple alternative routes.

Rather than have these points change in a predictable way, it might be possible to have them switch, during the course of a ride, in response to the phone messages from observers and/or passengers.

The next step after that is multiple cars with the potential for overtaking!

A friend of mine who’s an economics prof told me once that his entire discipline can be summarised by answering the question “How far would you drive out of your way to buy fuel at a discount of n%?”

Today’s invention is a vehicle which will be aware from moment-to-moment of its current fuel load and consumption rate as well as the distribution of petrol stations (and prices) within driving range.

This, together with the driver’s input of his/her destination and urgency allows an approximate optimisation to be undertaken, so that the car can be rerouted to take on board fuel -if the combination of detour shortness, low price and urgency justifies this.

This analysis would involve evaluation of the cost/benefit ratio of a detour ie (extra time and extra fuel used) vs (fuel cost saving).

(If the price were sufficiently low at a particular location, it would be worth driving there in a car with a specially enlarged tank. This approach could be further augmented by making predictions about the future price of fuel. In other words, is it worth driving for x km today for a discount of n% when the price in three days’ time will be discounted by n+m% ?)

I have never managed to achieve fast enough Internet access (is loading 70 tabs in my browser simultaneously really that unreasonable?)

Today’s invention is a smart program which knows when my browser window takes up less space that the whole of my screen (as it often does when I’m trying to get stuff done on a laptop).

It communicates the current dimension of the browser window and requests that only those images on the server that will actually be visible get downloaded to my machine.

This would give me enough material to assess the top lines of many web pages so that I could avoid loading more content, close their individual tabs and thus free up some bandwidth for more interesting material.

One downside of mobile phones is that whoever calls you may be unaware of your current circumstances and the people who are within earshot of your conversation.

This is less than good if, for example, you are being phoned to arrange an interview when your present boss is in the room.

There is probably a privacy-invading solution which invoves carriers pooling location data for any bystanders, but they would have to have their phones on -besides which, the sharing of that information might be illegal.

Today’s invention is therefore a way to alert a caller to the fact that you aren’t free to chat -without the embarrassment of having to say so.

A combination of cellphone button presses could be made to send a tone, or even an ovelaid text message on screen.

A small repertoire of these codes could stand for ‘can’t talk now’, ‘can’t discuss that’, I’ll call you back later’, ‘I’m entering a tunnel’, etc.

These actions could be arranged to be done discreetly by thumb, without removing the device from one’s ear.

Small-format digital cameras are now capable of such high quality output that they are commonly used by professionals as backups -to grab a shot which they might otherwise miss.

These devices often come with a wireless shutter release.

Today’s invention is to attach several such cameras to the stem of a monopod and to arrange for them to take photos automatically when the main SLR release is pressed.

The basic configuration would see the small cameras all pointed at the same point at some fixed distance in the forward direction.

A more advanced set-up would have them aimed slightly to the left, right, higher and lower than the main DSLR (perhaps even by having the main camera transmit to them its target so that they could offset themselves, spatially, temporally and in terms of aperture settings).

This would provide automated ‘bracketing’ of even fast-moving subjects, ensuring that a photojournalist would rarely miss that critical moment.

(I’d also like to see a shutter release which offered the option of working by just exerting downward pressure on the monopod).

Wheelchair users compete in a number of sports. Despite what I think about golf and what the rules probably say, today’s invention is intended to allow those in wheelchairs to get involved on a more-or-less equal basis.

The chair would be able to tip slightly to one side, into two different, stable positions (levered onto a strut, shown in red).

The first of these (1) would allow the raised wheel to spin a club head up to speed manually. Dropping the wheel into the second position (2), at the right moment, would allow the ball to be struck.

With practice, this system could be used for putting too.

Every corporate entity is concerned to portray a coherently branded image to the world.

This gets challenged when colour images are uploaded to a website (by random employees with no visual taste -think eg Microsoft here).

Stock images of customers wearing magenta and teal dropped into a subtle Pantone-branded background can look truly ghastly, even if the subjects are apparently ecstatic about the products and services on offer.

Today’s invention is therefore an image processing program which reads the colours in an image, pre-upload, and automatically replaces each with the one which is closest from within an offical corporate palette (compare this with the picture on the left).

This is pretty easy to achieve technically, looks much better than a uniform colour wash and could be manually checked before publication.