Category: Feasible inventions

You might think that if people are going to jump out of aeroplanes they can legitimately expect to sustain injuries. For people who find themselves on the end of a parachute, broken ankles are a surprisingly common result.

The parachutist’s impact with the ground is usually described as the same as that experienced when jumping off a 12-foot wall. Today’s invention is a way to help minimise the damage caused -especially to novice jumpers.

It is essentially a pair of stiff overboots (like fishing waders) with a large patch of industrial strength velcro on the inside of each leg, from toe to inner thigh. These can be tightly bonded during descent by bending one’s knees slightly and smacking one’s legs together, just before impact. This spreads the load when soles meet earth and allows a much less jarring parachute landing fall to occur.

It’s pretty frustrating, when out for a run and plugged into my MP3 player, to have the earpieces constantly falling out. I guess I could pay for specially tailored devices, but let’s face it, I have big ears…several standard deviations away from the mean.

Today’s invention is therefore to reuse the established wine recorking technology indicated to create earbuds which actually mould to one’s ear canals and yet, unlike wax-based versions, are effectively reusable. I’m sure that in the absence eg of external windnoise, these would sound better too.

By supplying a range of different bung diameters (yellow), some could always be selected which, when squeezed, fitted an individual’s individual ears perfectly.

Don’t you just hate it when people say “Legos” instead of Lego Bricks? Anyway, I’ve been a disciple of the dimples since I was about four and throughout those years one particular question has burned in my brain. Why don’t they make bricks which have a flat bottom? (They do make some with a flattish top, although these seem to be few in number and in only a very small range of sizes and colours).

The obvious answer is that when you close off the bottom surfaces of bricks they stop being able to attach to others. OK, but in order to avoid such an unfinished look, I’ve always wanted to smooth the final surface of my designs…am I alone in this obsession? Youngsters can use their imagination to make a coarsely blocky thing work in their games just as well as a perfectly detailed replica would -but for once, I’d like the rear view (or underside) to consist of something better than a honeycomb of hollows.

Today’s invention is therefore a bottom-face brick for smoothly undersurfacing one’s Lego models (as suggested by the sketch on the left).

Driving over the speed limit is always just plain wrong.

Having said that, populating the countryside with speed cameras (or ‘safety cameras’ as they are being euphemistically redubbed) fills me with concern.

As I understand it, it’s illegal to obscure one’s numberplate in any way. Today’s invention offers a low-cost way to avoid having your car’s movements identified automatically, without obscuring or defacing your plates.

Three number plates are fitted on top of each other at both ends of the vehicle, so that the front one is correctly fixed, but the other two are free to rotate about opposite corner screws, as shown. The rear two are hacked about so as to present an irregularly-shaped, low contrast background to the numbers and letters.

Numberplate recognition software therefore has a real problem, since it is based on locating regular rectangular plates rapidly enough to allow that region to be searched for characters. This makes the plates, with visually-disrupted outlines, only identifiable by officers of the law, not machines.

Although someone I discussed this with recently claimed they had already got one of these, I think we must have been at cross purposes, since I can’t seem to find it anywhere online.

There is an understandable urge to escape the boring silver/ grey/ black laptop casings which have been the norm since the technology became available. So, you can now buy laptops in any colour you like or with reproductions of artwork in the form of sticky decals.

Today’s invention consists of a hard, transparent plastic sheet which clips neatly to the outside surface of the lid on one’s favourite portable computer. This would allow a sheet of paper, bearing eg a drawing by one’s child, a photoprint of one’s loved one or a scene from your latest trip to Clacton to be inserted behind it. This would maintain a nice shiny exterior, protect the lid itself and allow the images to be frequently changed.

Even though laptops are supposed to rest on a user’s lap, there are often times when they actually get used on the hoof…standing holding the machine or perching it on some ledge, whilst entering or presenting data.

Today’s invention is simply to equip laptops with a standard tripod mount (of the kind that cameras routinely have). This would enable more people to make effective use of their machines in areas where sitting down is just not possible (eg building sites or on factory floors). Magnesium alloy chassis are strong enough to mount security hasps and so providing an extra, near-central threaded hole would not be a major problem for manufacturing.

A lightweight tripod could be carried without much extra effort in a standard laptop rucksack. Careful design would allow the laptop and collapsed tripod to remain attached within the bag for rapid deployment on site.

Every pub quiz or office bowls competition these days has to have its prizes. Too often, these take the form of cups which are presented without any mention of the competition title or the recipient’s name. The cost of having such trophies professionally engraved is actually much higher than buying the metalware in the first place.

Today’s invention is a generic trophy made with a slot at the front to accommodate a small LCD display -just like the cheap ones fitted to everyday calculators and watches. This would have its keypad located on the base of the cup, allowing entry of the required details for display.

I’d also suggest having someone with a genuine aesthetic sense undertake the initial redesign: typical sports club cups are just uber-ghastly.

When your balance system and visual system don’t agree about what’s happening, the brain apparently comes to the conclusion that one of them is hallucinating; perhaps due to having been poisoned. Time to ransack the glove compartment for that waxed paper bag.

Even when sitting still, I can get ‘motion’ sickness simply playing a computer game or watching a ‘movie’ that moves in the ‘wrong’ way on a screen. Today’s invention is a way to combat such nausea.

DVD players, games machines and computer screens in general would be equipped with a key sequence which would allow the viewer to reduce the active screen area to about half its normal size, leaving a textured, static border around the scaled-down imagery.

Suddenly having peripheral vision filled with a substantial, fixed frame would emphasise the message that a screen was being viewed. This would greatly lessen the influence of the signal sent by the eyes saying “the world is moving, but the vestibular organs claim it’s not.” Although the immersive realism would be temporarily diminished, this would also reduce any tendency to feel ill and could be instantly removed when the offending sequence was over.

I’m still annoyed by people reading my screen on public transport (See#442). I’m even more upset by people like court officers blythely dealing with the most sensitive and contentious witness statements in full view of anyone passing them on the 17:12 each evening.

Today’s invention is therefore a simple screen censor program. This code (a visual basic macro would probably suffice for Word documents) scans the text in question and greys out any words which do not appear in the dictionary. This would obscure all proper names, making attempts to understand the document by a shoulder surfer effectively impossible.

Our hard-pressed legal fraternity (I’m surprised they aren’t travelling in first class) can thus continue to work on their papers without fear that they may compromise the integrity of the court process -or justice which is somehow, albeit distantly, related.