Year: 2007

I’m sick of scouring my entire household for the right number of the right size batteries with the correct charging characteristics. I always seem to have one too few of whatever I need…usually I have one too few even to get the damn charger working.

Today’s invention is simply to replace all the D/R20, C/R14, AA/R6, 9V/6F22, AAA/R03 nightmare with a single, standard battery size. My first choice would be to replace all these ridiculous products with variable-size stacks of one type of existing watch battery. Small, standard modules building to provide flexibly-sized systems seems to be a good idea in general. I could then keep a sack of the batteries somewhere and always be sure that I could drop in the right number for whatever device was suddenly in demand.

OK, I know that the standard watch batteries aren’t easily rechargeable and that their sizes may not add up to be an exact fit for existing compartments and that their outputs may not quite match the requirements of all devices and that some legislative body would have to certify their use in case they somehow triggered a nuclear accident -but I’m also quite sure that these aren’t showstoppers, they just need a bit more technical ingenuity in return for an enormous amount of extra flexibility.

Everyone is waiting for the advent of a novel battery technology which will allow their latest gadget to stay awake for longer. At least with the standard-size idea it would be a lot easier to carry several small replacements and slot these in when necessary.

You need a certain determination to buy small items such as screws and nails at your local DIY store these days.

When hunting for some of those crucial widgets, you can find yourself wrist deep in troughs of staples in packets, loose washers, odd nuts and bolts.

Everything ends up in the wrong place as people rummage around, pick up items and, fearing they can never be found again in the detritus, carry them until they find a better fit for what they actually need -at which point, they drop the unwanted items wherever is convenient.

Needless to say, the staff in these places don’t know a brace from a bradawl so they tend not to bother with reorganising the debris that their customers have created. Today’s invention is an attempt to minimise these difficulties by suggesting some refinements to the display environment.

For items in packets, use gravity dispensers: when one packet is pulled from an aperture, the next falls into the bottom position, ready for extraction.

Array these dispensers on a 2-D display unit in order of the size and/or material of the content -so customers can tell know roughly where to start looking.

Provide a lifesize photo of the content and relevant information on the outside of each dispenser (No need to include store catalogue numbers or extraneous detail such as the standards to which components have been tested -it’s confusing and slows the whole thing down. Just watch how many people have to stop to get their glasses on to read the small print.)

Ensure the dispensers have a lockable inlet at the top so that customers can’t re insert the wrong items in a dispenser.

Ensure there are no horizontal surfaces within arm’s reach on which items or packets can be left by people who inspect them and then choose not to buy. This introduces a disincentive for customers to extract product without thinking about it first and may encourage them to buy whatever they have in their hand. A single, large hopper could be provided, suitably signposted, into which any such items could be dropped for later, manual reinsertion into the correct dispensers by staff. People are generally reluctant just to drop stuff on an otherwise tidy floor. Analysis of the content of these hoppers of spurned items could also yield extra insights into customer preferences.

Making biscuits for a living is surprisingly hard work. One of the important isssues is how long will the product stay fresh, whether in a sealed packet on a supermarket shelf or once the packet has been opened.

Here’s a way for manufacturers to quantify the freshness of their product as a function of time, humidity, sugar content or whatever.

It’s well known that the one’s eyeballs vibrate, when crunching food, in ways that the visual system itself can’t compensate for. This effect is made visible when eating a biscuit in front of your computer monitor (generally bad for the keyboard).

The screen image will appear to jump around with an amplitude and frequency largely determined by the crunchiness of the food and the frame rate of the monitor (similar things happen to horn players apparently…Horn players who eat biscuits simultaneously are an endangered species).

Having recently heard about someone who was refused a place at medical school due only to his colour blindness, I began thinking of ways to help those of us with an impoverished ability to distinguish between eg shades of red and green (which affects hue discrimination in 5% of all males).

Rather than use (expensive) coloured contact lenses, simply equip colour blind people with a bright pencil torch, over which is fitted a coloured filter. For red/green deficit, the filter could be red so that when viewing a scene containing both red and green items, the red ones would stand out more brightly. The torch could be incorporated into eg spectacle frames for added discretion and also for driving (who thought that making traffic lights red and green was a good idea?)

These days it is possible, given some clever correction for background lighting, to undertake analysis of a digitised scene and to create an ‘augmented reality’ by applying eg a sparkly texture to regions which a normally sighted person would describe as ‘red’. Even a crude version of this, which was able to detect any red and green patches lying close enough together in a scene, could be used to provide an alert.

It’s tough being a celebrity, I understand. Even C-list ‘personalities’ are pursued for their photograph these days in the economic war to feed people their daily tabloid fix.

For those females in the public eye who’d rather not make several £k per shot for press photographers, here’s a simple device to bring a scowl to any picture editor’s countenance.

Earrings that project a moving pattern of intense, coloured light patches on their wearer’s face. These could be constructed from LEDs and the swirling patterns generated by small, spring-mounted mirrors amplifying the wearer’s natural body motion (or driven by bluetooth signal from a Blackberry in the handbag -or even vibrated by sound from an earpiece). They might activate automatically in response to the whine of a warming flash, a motordrive, an IR autofocus beam -or just the baying of the snappers themselves.

This would make taking a recognisable photo almost impossible, even for the most determined paparazzo with a flash gun set to stun.