Category: Feasible inventions

When you are cutting code in a program editor, sometimes you can expect to find an insertion indicator which is brightly coloured, so that losing your place becomes harder.

When, however, editing a dense body of colourful text on-screen, it’s very easy to misplace the insertion point.

You can usually adjust the flicker frequency manually, but it’s not elegant and often the active location is hard to spot in one’s visual periphery, if you are momentarily distracted.

All these little delays add up to unnecessary frustration. Today’s invention is therefore an insertion indicator which automatically takes on a contrasting colour to the text around it.

Obviously white on black would be useless, but a simple lookup table would allow a user to choose a personal set of high-contrast colour combinations e.g. for black text on white, I might choose a red insertion point.

Start outling a section in red and the insertion pointer would change to green.

It seems that ground-based pilots of UAVs are finding it hard to cope with the need to maintain vigilance during the long, uneventful hours of a mission and then suddenly to adapt to the urgent demands of an attack.

A similar difficulty was noticed during WWII, when British bomber pilots began to be chosen from the ranks of taxi and truck drivers -people who could maintain just enough attention throughout the course of a raid to keep their crews safe.

As unmanned missions get longer and more complicated, there may be many different phases, each of which demands a different mindset.

Today’s invention is therefore to draft in a different pilot to fly each phase of a UAV mission.

The steady, long attention tasks could be undertaken by the current pilots, but the attack phase might be handed over to pilots who were actually airborne.

They would flip on the auto-pilot, circle and be fed the on-screen data that ground pilots currently use.

People who bring their presentations to a meeting on a memory stick, often find themselves searching for a USB slot on a laptop.

When the lights are low in a lecture theatre, the problem is especially difficult.

Today’s invention is therefore a tiny, battery-powered LED on a memory stick, just like one of those keyrings which help you to find your car doorlock.

Pressing a button would allow the stick to be inserted with no fussing and no need to interrupt the mood of the meeting by turning up the main lights.

It’s sometimes hard to know when mixing of several liquids has been effectively completed.

Today’s invention is a system with a multispectral camera trained on the surface of a mixing vessel (eg for paint components).

Although the components may look similar, to such a camera they will usually be detectably different.

When the mixing begins the camera software looks for regions of the most dense, uniform colour and directs the mixing head there first.

This process would continue until no uniform swirls appeared from lower levels which were larger than a certain, threshold size.

Cracking nuts is nothing like as much fun as eating them.

Today’s invention is a way to get a volume of cracked nuts together for the party season without getting blisters whilst using a conventional nutcracker.

A strong metal box contains a piston (grey) and a space behind this which can be filled with water.

A space in the front of the box can be filled with a layer of nuts of one type (which will be roughly the same size).

This box is placed in a domestic freezer and left for a few hours.

Since water expands by about 10% on freezing (and the box will contract), the effect will be to crack most of the nuts whose kernels might then be manually extracted or floated away from the shell fragments in a pan of water.

Today’s invention is a spare brake light for vehicles which have had a bulb break or a lamp malfunction.

Not having two working brakelights can cause accidents -especially when visibility is poor.

Today’s invention is a plastic box with a red lens on one face and a strong magnet on the other. This would contain a battery, a lamp and an accelerometer. (I’ve seen a similar device for motorcycle helmets patented, but not as a vehicle lamp unit).

If one or more brakelamps were damaged or malfunctioning, then this unit would be attached to the rear of one’s vehicle.

Every time the car’s speed decreased the lamp would grow red.

This would ordinarily be stored in a slot in the car door, where it would be wired into a charging circuit, so that it would illuminate when the door was flung open, as an extra safety measure.

Motorcyclists have a hard time when it rains.

Today’s invention is a covert hairdrier for the seats on motorbikes.

A drier could be fitted under the tank, with air emerging through sculpted vents. The device would be run off the battery and might even use air drawn over the engine if it were hot.

This would quickly allow a soaking seat to be blown dry, reducing the time spent wiping rain away with one’s glove.

In very cold weather it could be used as a heater, whilst actually driving.

Today’s invention is a novel bikestand.

This takes the form of a larger than usual mudguard (on front or rear wheel).

When you want to park the bike, unclip the mudguard, fold out the two semicircular side panels and lock them in position, so that they act as supports for the inverted guard on the ground.

You can then place the rear bike wheel into the secure slot formed and use a conventional U-bolt to lock it vertically in place through the hole provided in the stand.

Today’s invention is an extension to the idea of soft medicine capsules.

The usual capsule containing a yellow-coloured drug has another half capsule slipped over one end (red).

This allows a second powdered medicine to be contained in this extra space.

Aside from the placebo effect of an apparently extra-strength drug, the arrangement might be used to supply an easily swallowable additional chemical in a precise relative amount, whilst still being able to maintain separate production lines.

Using a second capsule end with different time release properties could be a way to coordinate the actions of these different preparations.

This design might be further developed by adding more half-capsules to either end.

Today’s invention is a variant on the Dyson Airblade product.

I’ve been hearing several women complaining about this device. It seems that when they look down on the backs of their hands within the machine, any loose skin flaps about and makes even young women, who are unfairly sensitised to such issues, feel ancient.