Year: 2008

Rooms in office buildings which are sealed using a keypad lock naturally present a challenge to those people with an interest in seeing what’s inside (possibly even attracting extra attention).

Today’s invention is designed to discourage anyone from speculatively attempting to gain access, by trying a selection of likely n-digit entry codes.

The lock mechanism would be equipped with memory to record the last say 10*n digits entered. If the latest attempts were insufficiently close to the correct code, an embedded digital camera would covertly take a picture of the individual keying them in.

This would allow Security to contact that person later (without mentioning the camera) and remind them that playing with locks is a bad thing to do.

I’ve always had a bee in my bonnet about the 2-D, boring nature of website display. Having to view a site one page at a time is just so last-century. Web architecture used to be something I got paid to do, and so I’m aware that most sites are woefully inadequate in terms of the thinking underlying their structure.

As a technique for animating website maps, today’s invention is to use software like Prefuse.

With this, I’d create an entire website in a single page (I can’t seem to find any examples in which this has been tried, but I can’t believe that none exist). Each old-style page would be represented as a scaled down version of itself, with visible links to others (similarly scaled). Searching for a given keyword would bring to the front those pages in which it occurred. Similarly, clicking on a small page would bring that scaled version to the front and centre position, whilst deemphasising all the others. Clicking again would fill the screen with the chosen page in the usual way.

This would also have the effect of forcing designers to consider the readibility of their pages (because they would need to be identifiable at a smaller scale). It would also highlight websites with too complicated an internal structure.

The ultimate tool would be one that could convert existing sites to this form of display automatically.

Even in this era of global warming, there are large areas of the inhabited world still covered in snow. Some of these regions are populated by people with money to spend and therefore a pressing need to be advertised to (eg ski resorts).

Today’s invention is a set of snow chains which, when fitted to a giant 4×4, will allow it to leave behind wide tracks advertising some product or other. The links in these chains might even be reconfigurable to allow users to advertise their own local restaurant url or other apres-ski entertainment. They might just say “…Party –> Party –> Party –>…”.

My postman wears snowchains on his boots in winter and so individual shoechains might be similarly constructed, with an advertising function in mind.

Back in the old days, believe it or not, domestic cordless phones were thought to be technically advanced, allowing one to receive calls at the far end of the garden (?) Anyway, one advantage which they did provide (apart from no longer having to resist the homing instinct of the springloaded handset cable) was that they had an extensible aerial.

To make or take a call, you had to pull out a half a metre of shiny telescopic metal above your head. The benefit this provided was that everyone could see you were on the phone and give you a wide berth for a while. More recently, with the tendency to use ever smaller phones, it’s quite possible to walk up to someone who is listening on an undetectable phone and attempt to engage them in a second conversation…only to be faced with a great deal of frowning and animated gesturing to the effect that one should ‘go away’.

Today’s invention to to equip all phones with an ‘aerial’ which has no electromagnetic function whatever. It could be made in the form of a thin version of a metal tape measure. The tape housing could be attached to the phone body and when the phone is in use, the ‘tape’ would be extended, carrying a small pennant on the end for extra visibility.

This would be greatly preferable to a simple flickering ‘busy’ light on the phone and, if one cared more for ‘cool’ than ‘green’ the aerial could be pushed up by a small motor when the phone became active.

Printable pennant inserts would be made downloadable, bearing ‘clever’ daily mottos. I actually think that a small LED on the end would help to enhance phone sales significantly (and reduce any possibility of eye injuries).

For people who own a dog, shopping or visiting the library or bank can become problematic. If it’s an animal with any sense of adventure or market value, you really won’t want to leave it tied up in the conventional way outside the local store.

For securing your canine pal outside the shops, It might be possible to reuse some of those popular wall-mounted boxes intended to accommodate all that online shopping which arrives when you are out (probably shopping offline).

Today’s invention, however, is a cable lock which can be fed through a series of holes around a dog’s collar (or better, shoulder harness), and which allows them to be secured to anything stationary, without fear that they will be abducted. Owners would then be free to enter all those places from which dogs are banned (ie pretty much all public buildings).