Cats seem to attempt to maximise both their temperature and their altitude within a home.
Today’s invention is an unobtrusive wire structure in the form of a triangular rack.
This is intended to sit atop a radiator and prevent domestic pets from colonising the flat tops of these in winter.
Such a device avoids the limitation on convective heat transfer to a room which a determined cat can cause.
I little realised how far the art of office warfare has progressed. Today’s invention is an addition to the cube war arms race.
It consists of a bow which can be filled with soft projectiles with which to attack one’s unsuspecting co-workers.
A captive arrow is retracted, bending the bow and allowing a pellet (nerf, or even marshmallow) to descend into the barrel and be blasted at your enemy who got that desktop trebuchet for christmas.
Inspired by Eureka Magazine’s coffee-time challenge, today’s invention is a system for making sure that fenders are at the right height when a boat is brought into moor on a choppy sea.
This is apparently a particular problem for small boat owners who don’t want either to damage their vessel or clothe it in a huge area of impact-absorbing bumpers.
It takes the form of conical, hard foam deck seats which nest into one another for storage when not being sat upon. Half the seats contain a little sand, making them just heavier than sea water (the other half are just less dense than sea water).
On approaching a jetty, one of each type can be slotted together to form a pair and tipped overboard, attached by a cable.
These devices stay upright, floating on the water, and guarantee that the boat will avoid above and below water impacts.
Queueing in supermarkets is a source of stress that no customer should have inflicted on them.
Today’s invention is a stupidly simple way to alleviate the problem.
Customers can pick up a sign in-store which they attach to the front of their trolley. This enables them to enter a fast aisle in which every trolley is dealt with by two checkout staff.
Their tills communicate to form a single combined bill, so that the escape from the shop is accelerated (by a factor approaching two).
The charge made for this service would be included in one’s bill and would be adjusted so as to control the queue lengths at these double tills.
It’s cold here in Scotland at the moment and yet the various domestic animals that have taken over my household still need to get in and out.
Today’s invention is a catflap which limits the coldest, ground-hugging air from entering every time the cat does.
Located high in the door, and reached by a series of footpegs attached to the surface (cut so as to limit to door opening angle as little as possible), healthy cats can easily use the new facility and get some extra exercise in the process.
The Royal Navy is soon to be equipped with submarines which are limited in the duration of their undersea operations only by the food on board (and the mental attitude of the crew, but I’m assuming that’s pretty much unbreakable).
Today’s invention is a large scoop which acts like a whale’s mouth filters, periodically catching enormous amounts of sea life, both animal and vegetable.
This would be pumped inside via a pressure lock, cleaned, microwaved and automatically processed into various, food-like forms by a special machine. By the addition of small amounts of flavourings, and mixed with existing food stocks, these might be made sufficiently attractive to sailors to prolong their missions significantly if required.
I try to backup my laptop to a big capacity thumbdrive every morning when I power up the machine.
It’s easy to forget, though, so today’s invention is something I’ve actually made: a clip which holds the power cable in one end and the thumbdrive in the other.
This makes it difficult to connect the power without also inserting the memory stick in the adjacent slot.
A more advanced version would allow the clip to deal with power and USB connections at varying distances apart and might even include a way to attach to a security cable…which is usually a nuisance to lock and therefore easy to overlook.
Today’s invention is a cake cutter for disputatious, geeky families.
It consists of a rectangular, plastic sheet which is flexible in one direction but not in the other. This is fitted to a graduated metal bar a-b. At points a and b the sheet can be slid through a block at right angles to the bar and locked in place. a is slid towards c initially to correspond to the diameter of a particular cake.
This allows the sheet to always take up the shape of two semicircles. Moving b towards c in steps of 1/n th the diameter, produces n equal-size pieces with interesting shapes.
Having spent a good part of today picking up broken beer bottle fragments from the street outside my house, today’s invention is a cheap way to help ensure that drinks bottles don’t form multiple shards when dropped (or thrown).
The idea is to wrap the product label around the bottle in a helix, as shown. Existing labels seem to hold fragments together effectively where they are glued to the glass.
The spiral approach retains many of the potential shards stuck to the label, allowing the broken bottle to be much more easily picked up as a piece (yet without completely obscuring the product inside).
I often have to insert a season ticket into a railway station ticket barrier.
These tickets are made of paper and have a lifetime which is much less than that of the season in question. This usually necessitates several trips to get replacements from the not-always friendly, and much queued-for, ticket office. It also causes roadblocks at rush-hour when the people behind me suddenly have to stop and reverse to let me reverse.
Today’s invention is a ticket barrier which reads the incoming ticket as normal and assesses the readability of the information.
If it is lower than a threshold value, suggesting that it’s about to become useless by virtue of normal wear (but hasn’t been tampered with), the barrier itself will immediately print a new ticket and output that as I pass through (retaining the original for later destruction and or analysis).
