Category: Feasible inventions

It’s common practice for a retail website to make (non-competing) product recommendations.

Today’s invention is a way for product labels to advertise other, complementary products.

A label on a coat might say “This is a great product but have you thought about something like this as well? www.webaddress.com/1234 ?” indicating a small range of boots or hats or bags.

The labels would also carry a cellphone-readable barcode so that such products could be reviewed and ordered whilst shopping in a bricks-and-mortar store.

Using ice skates for the first time can be a bruising experience.

Today’s invention offers an easier way to get going. It takes the form of a wedge which attaches to the base of one’s ordinary shoes.

This is positioned, using straps, at one side of the sole so that one can effectively walk on any surface with feet tilted slightly outwards -making contact with the ice using the edge of the wedge and the outer edge of one’s shoe.

When skating, as the newby feels he is about to fall over, he can rotate feet outwards again and regain balance and some braking.

Today’s invention is another way for tracked military vehicles to maintain mobility when their tracks are damaged.

A number of individual, three-wheel drive units is provided. Each has its own motor and track. These tracks bear on the larger regular tank track which is still powered by the drive wheels in the usual way.

When the main track is broken, the small units can independently keep the vehicle going.

Today’s invention is a fold-out saw in a penknife format. Two of the three elements are hinged together and swing out from the penknife handle.

These are then clipped to a third element which has been pulled from the other end of the handle.

The spring tension in the knife body is enough to keep the combined blade straight and taught and to provide a sensible length of cutting edge -as well as a usable handle.

Today’s invention is an email inbox which indicates when the number of unanswered messages is approaching some user-prespecified figure.

Once the number of messages exceeds this allowed total, then a number of messages corresponding to this overspill is removed from the earliest messages in the box.

These messages may only be retrieved, once you have freed up space in the inbox, by paying to access them from an online repository.

Today’s invention is a new way to cool one’s computer, without just bolting on a series of ever noisier fans.

The normal fan outlet in a laptop or desktop machine would be connected to a flexible hose with internal diameter of the order of 1cm and, say, 10m in length.

The other end of this hose would connected to a large, remotely-located fan (which might also be joined to many other computers in a room, for example).

This fan would be powerful enough to enhance the cooling airflow across the internals of many machines, and to overcome the pipe friction in their hoses, but also be locatable sufficiently far away (in a cupboard) that there would be an insignificant extra noise contribution from it to the users of the computers.

The air passing through this hose might even be cooled by a refrigeration unit near the fan and passed back, via a further length of hose, to each of the original computers. Computers might be sold with a powerful remote fan, and only a small internal one in order to minimise their weight.

I’ve spent an hour fruitlessly searching various patent databases for this one. It’s quite long enough to justify me posting this…

Think of the common door closure spring mechanism. It’s great. Now imagine it fitted with a small motor so that the door can be made to oscillate backwards and forwards.

Today’s invention is just such a device which can be use to help improve ventilation and maintain thermal equilibrium in a house or office building by wafting air backwards and forwards between rooms.

The doors would have to be driven quite slowly, through a limited arc, and have a switch to disable the motor if any resistance was sensed.

Such a system might be equipped with electronic thermometers so that it started up automatically when the ambient temperature difference between rooms exceeded some preset threshold.

People who have to work with great sheafs of paper know that sorting and shuffling this material can be hard and frustrating work. Two sheets of paper, when pressed together, resist separation because viscous air finds it difficult to flow into the widening gap between them.

Today’s invention is therefore a printer which is capable of embossing a handful of pinhead sized marks into each sheet, forming an almost invisible sparsely-dotted line from one side to the other. The line for each sheet would lie at some random angle to the edge.

These dots serve to hold each sheet very slightly away from its neighbour and make the task of separating or shuffling adjacent ones very much easier (because the air gap thickness starts from a value greater than zero).

Computer keyboards are far too complex…there are options built in that I never ever use…the keys just sit there doing nothing other than acting as targets for typing errors, of which I make many, dirt collectors and a source of visual distractions.

Today’s invention is therefore a keyboard overlay which can be fashioned to correspond with any individual’s preferences.

You would specify which keys you never press (eg about 35% of the ones on the machine I’m using now). Once you provided details of the model of machine you were using, this would allow an overlay to be created which clipped in place…covering the useless ones with a connected grid of blanks (in the correct uniform colour), whilst leaving the others unaffected.