These folk will often have shelves packed with records (as shown in cross-section A).

Today’s invention is in the form of triangular inserts (pale blue) for the shelves (B).

Such additions would still allow the LPs to be conveniently stored, but they would also act as the absorptive surfaces of an anechoic chamber -providing a better, isolated listening environment for purist, old-school audiophiles.

Today’s invention is an example of this approach: a tamper-evident display container for eg an expensive chronometer.

The box would be built up of multiple layers of transparent goop, with the watch on the inside.

On completion, it would consist of two nested components: an inner with a wrist-like support for the watch strap and an outer wall.

The inner and outer would be prevented from rotating by two small cylindrical lock features.

On purchasing the watch, the outer wall would be rotated about the inner, snapping off the lock features and allowing the valuable contents to be extracted through the resulting gap.

The sort of thing I mean is a subtitled statement saying eg “The value of investments can go up as well as down and past performance is no indicator of future returns. Your home is in danger if you fail to make payments…”

People object strongly, however, to these rapid-fire messages from less trusted organisations.

Today’s invention is to allow a test audience to communally determine the optimal speed for a given subtitle disclaimer -especially for banking services.

(Since this occurs in parallel with some other aspect of the advert, it’s not just about getting the disclaimer over as fast as possible).

The speed chosen by eg audience clickers would therefore provide another way to determine the real degree of customer trust in the advertiser’s brand.

Today’s invention tries to overcome my horticultural ineptitude.

A webcam watches each bank of houseplants. This can be made to detect any difference between frames taken at the same time each day.

Progressive shape or colour changes are relatively easy to spot using image processing software and, when found, would alert my smartphone.

A smarter version would attempt to diagnose the problem, based on a small expert system (+ barcodes on the pots), and suggest remedies like ‘move this one out of the sun and give this other one a good pruning’ (or whatever).

Conventional dice are open to the accusation that they are unfair -due to the inbuilt moment-of-inertia asymmetries of different faces (eg six recessed dots don’t rotate in exactly the same way as two). This new die attempts to avoid that problem.

The design consists of a dished cube set within an outer,transparent cube. The inner is fixed within the outer by thin arms at the 8 corners.

The space between inner and outer contains 42 identical spheres.

Each of the dishes is made to accommodate up to six of them when the die is tossed (there is a gap between inner and outer which is just a little more than one sphere-diameter deep, so that spheres can only form a monolayer).

The remaining spheres crash to the bottom of the die each time.

Today’s invention is a screen fitted to a piano which, instead of all that squiggly symbolism from left to right, shows ten finger positions above the keys that need pressed to make the right noises.

The screen would animate these positions by scrolling them towards the player (as if printed on a roll of paper). This would aid development of some anticipation of where the fingers need to move to next.

…Necessarily rudimentary for those of us excluded, neurologically, from any conventional music theory.

Those mounted on overhead gantries are fine, but I often miss turnoffs, because either the sign or the road itself are hidden behind a nose-to-tail fleet of freight-filled behemoths.

Today’s invention is a simple solution.

Tall lorries would be required to have a uniform road turnoff sign painted on their rear face.

Besides the turnoff symbol, an illuminated screen would be attached as shown.

This would be activated by a wireless signal from the real, hidden sign (or via GPS) so that the last truck would always be showing me the name of the town to which the next slip road leads (as well as its distance away).

Today’s invention is an emergency vehicle designed to be formed from a small wooden platform and two (or more) chainsaws.

The saws are therefore designed to accommodate a steel band which fits over each set of teeth, transforming them into a passable caterpillar track.

They can then be clamped, using their integral fittings, onto any board (if necessary, one cut from a big tree) and the resulting vehicle used to get eg an injured person back to base safely, using the remote throttle cable controls shown.

In addition, the cost of maintaining millions of metres of road paint is enormous.

Today’s invention is to have any such parking restriction symbols projected onto the road surface by streetlights which are almost always overhead in such urban zones.

Each streetlight could be fitted with a lens and some computer-controlled, coloured filters.

This would allow parking regulations to be timed more flexibly and the symbols would be visible even on snowy days.

The extra cost of running the lights during daylight hours could be minimised by using high efficiency lamps and projecting eg a row of bright blobs rather than continuous lines.

No more road closures would be required for the endless task of paint burning and upgrading.

Today’s invention is a small robot device consisting of a mobile milling head on the outside of a skin or bulkhead and a mobile ultrasound sensor, moving in step with it, on the other side.

This would allow material to be removed in an automated but controlled way so that the sensor could determine the remaining local thickness and instruct the mill head when to move to the next target area.

There would also be a narrow vacuum hose to remove the abraded particles.