I’ve occasionally found, when moving furniture from room to room, that having a door with a fixed hinge position is annoying.
Today’s invention allows a door to be reversed, from left-hinged to right-hinged, by sliding the hinge points along rails embedded in the bottom and top of the door frame (Hinge ‘a’ slides to location ‘b’ whilst ‘c’ remains the door handle’s position).
Sometimes digital isn’t better than analogue. This applies particularly to the variation between people, eg their waist or wrist measurements. It’s pretty irritating, for example, that my superb Omega watch comes with a beautiful leather strap with holes which are spaced so as to make the strap either just too tight or just too loose.
Today’s invention is a strap which allows a continuum of adjustment.
The strap has a single hole at ‘a’ for the keeper -which is much more personal and elegant than a row of them.
The other end of the strap passes through a catch at the rear face of the buckle, ‘b’ at which point it can be friction-locked in place and trimmed.
This also acts as a motivator to avoid gains in girth beyond the small amount of adjustment available at the truncated end.
I always have trouble carrying numerous glasses back from the bar when it’s my round: there are never any trays.
Rather than make several trips, or stick my fingers in the tops of each beverage, today’s invention is glasses which interlock.
These would have slots and protuberant ‘keys’ in the sides which would allow a collection of drinks to be held together and then easily detached when safely deposited on a table.
This array could serve as a kind of tray in itself, allowing eg plates of food to be carted back on the upper surface.
I tried to get some coffee at a conference the other day.
…placed cup on saucer…put cup under spout of preprepared jug of coffee-like liquid (Yeuk, is I believe the correct spelling)…not paying attention due to being talked at by several delegates…press dispense handle…cup not under spout…coffee mostly on saucer and table.
Well, conference organisers could simply put the saucers at the far end of the table so that only full cups land on them (or do away with them altogether -or even provide fresh coffee).
Failing this, today’s invention is a simple clip-on device which invites a saucer user to push their cup to one side before filling from one of these machines.
I get around 1000 spam messages to this blog each day (Very little of this material is in any way creative. It just seems to attempt to prey on stupidity, inattention or desperation). Most is puerile and offensive.
The filter is astonishingly effective, and anything marked as spam gets bulk deleted -but I wouldn’t want any child to be reading the messages which are sitting ready to be junked. This might therefore restrict their ability to write a blog using any of the major tools.
Today’s invention is therefore a blog plugin which still shows those comments labeled spam, but it automatically blacks out all the words which are included on its list of unacceptable words.
This would allow a blogger to undertake a diligence scan, to ensure that genuine comments weren’t being dumped, but without being confronted by the individual terms responsible.
There is still a cultural disconnect between online stores and those in the bricks-and-mortar high street.
The only reason, it seems to me, for not buying everything one needs online is that there are some product qualities which are hard to assess without being there (and some sellers who don’t do it via the web).
Today’s invention offers an extra opportunity for hard pressed offline store keepers to compete with their low-overhead online competitors. This would work particularly well for bespoke, high-price, low-volume boutiques (I’m thinking Aston Martin, amongst others).
The store would equip itself with a website. Users of the site could book a time to view products in the shop in close-up, via a very high quality webcam, held by a real-life sales assistant. The assistant could be quizzed in detail about the products and directed to manipulate them onscreen by the customer in order to demonstrate colour/functionality etc.
This could then result in delivery of a purchase by conventional mail order fulfilment processes.
Security cameras are everywhere in the UK (maybe the word ‘security’ is one of those decoy euphemisms, just as ‘speed cameras’ are now called ‘safety cameras’).
Anyway, these devices are vulnerable to being interfered with (by we disgruntled citizenry) and so today’s invention is simply to attach a small mirror to each so that they can transmit what’s going on around them, outside their normal field of view.
The mirror could be a spherical section, one of the type used by employees on computer screens to detect the approach of over-inquisitive bosses. Its image need only occupy a small corner of the transmitted screen view.
Such a system would inevitably need a rainroof and to be made of stay-clean coated glass. A clever design would allow the main camera view field to encompass the rear of the mirror itself, so that there would be no need for a mirror to monitor the back of the first mirror…
If you are using a ballpoint without a transparent barrel or which uses sealed refills, it’s possible to find yourself scribbling (or doodling) in a meeting and then suddenly run out of notetaking ability.
Today’s invention is to add a small blob of ink, in a contrasting colour to the reservoir in such pens. The ink is highly viscous and therefore largely immiscible. The life of such a pen is short and so serious colour bleeding by diffusion wouldn’t be a problem (at least in non-equatorial regions).
The user would notice that his or her blue ink e.g. had suddenly turned black (for say the final hour’s writing) and that it was therefore time to re-equip before the next lecture/meeting/oeuvre/opus.
I tend to smile when reading about USB-powered fans by which the users of laptops can cool their fevered brows whilst typing in transit. My problem is different. Travelling by rail in Scotland, the carriages are routinely unheated…making my attempts at hunt-and-peck even more laboured.
Typing whilst wearing polartec gloves is even less accurate than usual, so today’s invention offers a new approach.
The fan outlets from one’s laptop are fed directly into a light plastic pipe. This is connected at the other end to a transparent canopy which is held in place a few centimeters above the surface of the keyboard (sloping downwards slightly towards the screen for improved visibility -transparent to allow we non-touchtypers to watch our hands).
Hot air from the machine is thus played upon one’s digits; allowing keyboard use to continue en route to Siberia (or Glasgow Queen Street) and at no extra cost (economic or environmental).
Today’s invention is an attempt to help limit consumer spending on credit (sorry economists/bankers, but I still think that’s a bad thing).
People using their mobile phones as payment devices would, before clicking ‘buy,’ be shown a photograph on screen portraying the exact amount of money in their account before and after the transaction (in £5 notes and coins).
This would make the implication of their planned action transparent and perhaps delay it enough to allow for second thoughts.
The ‘after’ photograph of a purchase which involved becoming overdrawn might be the user’s photograph suitably reddened automatically to look embarrassed.
