Category: Feasible inventions

Now that convertible, zip-off trousers are in common usage, it seems to me that there is extra functionality that they could be providing.

Today’s invention is to replace the circumferential zip usually contained in the leg of these trousers, with a helical one.

One half of the helix would spiral its way waistward from the knee position. The other half, attached to the lower leg, would then be capable of being rotated about the central axis of the leg and then attached by the zip fastener action at any longitudinal position required.

Voila, the length of one’s travel trousers can be set exactly to your individual preference, to work with walking boots, bare feet or as ‘shorts’ of any length you like (This probably requires unobtrusive, or multiple, side seams on the lower leg section to avoid looking as if one has legs attached at the ‘ten to three’ position) .

I’m sick to death of having to squint at the minute ‘R’ and ‘L’ symbols borne by the earpieces on my MP3 player, before plugging them into the relevant orifices.

I can understand that product designers don’t much enjoy the prospect of printing the orientation letters in a very large font. So today’s invention is an alternative.

First, for those people who live in countries where English is not the lingua franca, the symbols carried on the earpieces should simply be iconic versions of the user’s hands, orientated so that it would be obvious which went where.

Second, the hand icons might be considered inelegant if applied to the earpiece stems in the usual way and so I’d suggest printing them on the foam pads. This allows them to be quite sizeable and yet completely hidden when worn.

The solution I’d really like is for the earpieces to be completely symmetrical and for them to actively detect which was placed in which ear before delivering the right stereo sound (It might be achieved by reacting to the pressure distribution generated by contact with each ear, or simply by having the user always insert one earpiece first).

You don’t have to be a believer in global warming to recognise that domestic flooding is on the increase. It may, of course, be something to do with the fact that we are building homes on floodplains in a way that would have been seen as foolhardy a generation ago (ie before we warmed the globe).

Today’s invention is a housemoving service called in when a flood threatens a community. A small fleet of vans drive around and offer to move items of furniture upstairs or to another place of safety until the flood waters recede. The depository might actually take the form of a big barge, or a series of covered pontoons.

This would be funded by insurance companies, in order to reduce the claims made on them. Residents refusing the offer to relocate their belongings would obviously find it much harder to pursue claims for damages later.

A similar pre-emergency service might also be provided in areas threatened by forest fires, mud slides etc.

Most lapses in security, even IT security, are I understand due to failures by people rather than their systems. People do stuff like holding open doors for strangers or discussiing things in the lift or writing down passwords because they are impossible to remember -people do things that Sysadmins just don’t.

Today’s invention is a small piece of social engineering designed to help alleviate security problems and thus prevent disruptions to the important tasks undertaken by IT support staff, like memorising train timetables and comparing the contents of their utility belts… ; )

First, inform all corporate staff not to experiment with passwords. If they don’t know one, they probably shouldn’t be getting access to the secure resource anyway. Second, arrange for a small number of carefully crafted, realistic-looking passwords to be distributed about the building (scrawled on the edge of an occasional desk and on a few grubby post-it notes).

If someone should decide to attempt to use one of these to gain access, it would be detected by the LAN to which devices (eg PC’s, locks, etc) were connected and automatically send security staff to the location in question).

There is, we are told, an increase in the number of people ‘allowed’ to work at home. This flexibility is a massive boon for everybody: no commuting, mininmal office costs, motivated staff etc, etc. (The number of Americans whose employer has allowed them to work remotely at least one day a month jumped from 7.6 million in 2004 to 12.4 million in 2006*).

Most organisations, however, still have a ridiculous problem trusting their own people to get on with stuff -without watching daytime tv or digging the garden all day. (These are the same people that they spent weeks interviewing and selecting and training). It wouldn’t really be that hard to simply monitor the deliverables generated by homeworkers; but, given that employers are having trouble in this area, today’s invention is a simple tool to help them get over it.

Employees would each be equipped with a webcam and a laptop. Images from the camera would be fed across the internet to some boss’s office where, until he got bored, he could monitor his staff and ensure that they weren’t having too nice a time.

To further pander to employers’ anal retentiveness, the webcam connection would be secured to ensure that no substitution of video streams could occur (ie no sneaking off and leaving behind a movie of you working hard at home). For really lazy employers, automated image analysis could be used to detect the fraction of the day for which eg a coloured badge worn by the employee was in-shot.

* World at Work, hometownannapolis.com 8/6/07

Yoghurt pots, they drive me crazy. This is because when I pack my daughter’s lunchbox, the spoon I insert for her to eat her yog, never returns home from school. The half-empty yoghurt pot always makes it back, but the spoon seems routinely to have vapourised.

So, in the spirit of these credit-card cutlery items, today’s invention is to incorporate a spoon in the flat top of all yoghurt pots. Once the foil lid was removed in the usual way (and licked clean on the creamy side), it would be possible to fold the circular top a couple of times along suitably-dotted lines and thus create a simple, disposable, origami-style spoon.

For those people who suffer from epilepsy, flashing lights of any kind can constitute a threat. Somehow, repeated flashing (as often occurs at discos etc) can trigger an attack, leading to embarrassment, discomfort and possible injury.

Computer screens flickering at 50Hz or less or stuttering fluorescent tubes are particularly prone to provoking fits and the point with these is that, unlike the roller disco example, people are often exposed to these effects for some time without noticing them -then a serious attack may ensue.

Today’s invention is a tiny light sensor and associated electronics which can be worn discreetly by epiletics (especially young people who may be additionally distracted). This would constantly monitor the scene ahead for signs of sustained flickering and provide an unobtrusive buzzing alert, so that the wearer could retreat before succumbing.

I’m no expert on what are sometimes called ‘sex toys’ but leaving aside the schoolboyish, smutty marketing, it seems to me that these are often pretty poorly designed as products.

Take vibrators, for example (but only of course if you don’t live in Alabama).

Basically, a small battery-driven motor with an eccentric rotating mass. This is a crude device but judging by sales figures, an effective one. Given what we know about a) electronics and b) human sexual response, it seems to me that maybe there is some scope for a little product development.

Today’s invention is a programmable vibrator, designed to move according to the different stages of sexual excitement in people. This might be supplied with default parameters (in terms of amplitude and frequency) corresponding to average behaviour and then possibly ‘tunable’ according to individual preferences.

There might even be scope for having the vibrations driven by eg thermographic data -creating an external feedback loop in parallel, hopefully, with the internal, neural one.

If you are in desperation, cocktail vending machines are a pretty well-established way to obtain an overpriced drink in a slow-serving bar. They are filled with premixed versions of established, run-of-the-mill cocktail concoctions.

As an alternative, today’s invention is a vending machine which allows patrons to dispense a combination of ‘units’ of a number of different drinks (via a set of electronically-controlled ‘optics’).

A customer could select, via a brightly-lit control panel, units of a wide range of drinks (up to a maximum number corresponding to the volume of a glass). They could then name this combination in some ceative way, by typing it in and thus making that drink (and a list of its contents) available for selection by other customers later.

This would encourage experimentation with taste combinations and increase custom. The machine would also contain many fruit juices and certain combinations (eg a pint of vodka) would be forbidden. Customers’ cocktail ‘designs’ could be displayed in order of popularity, just as games machines do, further increasing incentives to experiment.

If health promotion was a priority, it might be possible to list first, those recipes for drinks which contain no alcohol and healthier ingredients .

Guinness shandy, anyone?