Category: Feasible inventions

I was traveling today with someone who owns an e-reader. We have different reading tastes (and speeds).

Today’s invention is to equip such e-readers with the ability to display two different pages side by side on the screen.

This would allow readers separately to change pages, whilst sharing the same device (try doing that with a single old-style book).

We are given lots of information about the contents of our packaged food, via the labels it has to carry.

Many of these standardised labels are hard to really get your head around (especially if you don’t have much of a grasp of numbers). Today’s invention is simply to insist that manufacturers apply graduations to the outside of their packaging, indicating the fraction of the whole volume which each constituent takes up.

This needn’t greatly affect the existing branding, but it might make people think twice before consuming a ‘fruit drink’ with a 5cm deep layer of ‘carbohydrate of which sugars’.

Prison is a very costly way to punish people. Today’s invention is a new mode of applying it to criminals who are not thought an active danger to society.

A continuous sentence, which allows prisoners to adapt to the stress of imprisonment and to establish unhealthy, institutionalised patterns of behaviour, would be replaced by discrete periods of time ‘inside.’ Perhaps one month in, followed by a month outside.

This would also help maintain relationships with friends and family, who would probably have to help support prisoners, due to the difficulty of working during irregular periods of freedom.

Although this might appear an easy option, I suspect that the intermittency would keep prisoners emotionally more aware of their debt to society, and thus become recognised as an effective deterrent.

The good news is that certain prisoners would serve a sentence which involved substantially less total time behind bars, reducing the cost to everyone else enormously.

Today’s invention is a laptop case which is engineered to maintain a gap between keys and screen when closed, using a large rubber stop between the two.

It would also have walls around the three non-hinge sides, one of which would form a hinged lid.

This arrangement would allow the interior space to be used to carry papers such as A5 sized documents or a notepad. Even the most wired individuals still can’t do without some paper.

This would provide a way to carry documents with added security and without needing to lug about an extra bag full of papers.

I was lucky enough to get to eat at a fancy hotel recently where they produced some ‘hand-baked’ biscuits.

Just like a hand-sewn suit, these were distinguished by small non-uniformities. Nothing so pronounced as to make me think the cook was actually a four-year old having a break from playdoh, but each was clearly different from its neighbours.

Today’s invention is a way for bakers to simulate the homemade effect. It consists of a baking tray in which the diameters and depths of the cups are all subtly different from each other. Some might even be slightly non-circular.

The effect of this is to create industrial quantities of biscuits which have just enough variation in shape, size and surface browning to be confused with hand-made products.

Any vacuum-formed packaging would have to accommodate numbers of each different biscuit ‘design.’

I work on a laptop with a screen small enough to be just about portable. It allows me to set up multiple desktops, but I can’t get used to having documents that I have to scour some unseen space to retrieve.

Today’s invention is therefore to modify a desktop manager program so that when a window is partly hidden by the physical edge of the screen, a scrollbar should magically appear at that edge (where the red > is pointing).

This would allow me to scroll up and down within, say, my Inbox, to see what new messages have arrived etc -without having to drag the whole thing into view.

Today’s invention is for athletes who have to wear mouthguards.

When breathing heavily, I find it can be hard to get air through one’s mouth with teeth clenched. Relieve the pressure on the guard to take in oxygen and someone is sure to plant a gloved hand in your laughing gear.

To avoid this, I envisage a gumshield with external vents…a little like jet engine intakes.

The wearer can suck air more easily through these (since they also hold the cheeks clear of the teeth) and around the back of the guard to the throat.

Despite the recent dominance of touchscreens, there is still a big advantage in the tactile feedback which ordinary old buttons provide.

Today’s invention is therefore a calculator with buttons which protrude through a touchscreen surface.

This has the advantage of combining the positive action of buttons, which people like when they are performing finance-related calculations, with the ability to have additional functions described in choosable touchscreen labels on each side of every button.

The buttons could be designed, as shown, to rock both up/down and left/right.

When I drive to the bottlebank, the area in front is always covered with shards of glass. People sometimes miss the aperture of the bank or trip en route to it from their vehicle.

Today’s invention is a simple way to avoid all those perforated tyres: a resilient rubber mat (blue) which covers the tarmac for a couple of car-widths from the bank itself.

Any glassware which hits the deck will not break and is retained within a low dam that can easily be driven over.