Category: Possible inventions

I’m bored by loading and unloading the dishwasher -almost as bored as I would be by handwashing the damn dishes.

Here, therefore, is my proposed solution. Manufacturers please note. Let’s have new machines divided into 2 separate compartments. At any time, one would be involved in washing and one containing dishes waiting to be washed (ie being filled intermittently by people deciding to have some emergency pain-au-chocolat or Shreddies in the brief gaps between main-er meals.

One beauty of the system is that, although it would be running for a high percentage of the time, my kitchen wouldn’t disappear under a mountain of festering, dirty dishes.The system would have a third tray, full of clean stuff, which would fit within a big cupboard or compartment. When the wash is done, whatever small amount of clean stuff is left in the tray in the cupboard gets entered into the machine, to be filled gradually, and the cleaned trayful is placed en masse into the cupboard. The tray which has been waiting can then start being washed.

This eliminates the tiresome step of having to extract randomly-placed stuff from the machine and locate individual items in their designated spaces (our knives, forks and spoons merrily exchange partners in the cutlery drawer about twice a week, when all elements of any two of the three sets are being washed).

This requires three complete sets of cutlery+crockery. The main difficulty with that, aside from cost, is that unless I want to spend a lot of time neatly packing each tray (and I really don’t) the machine itself may have to be bigger than normal (ie wider). I figure that’s a small price to pay for minimising the downsides of all this endless shovelling and display of filthy kitchen things. There would obviously no requirement to store dishes in cupboards any more, since they would all be involved in the eternal waiting, washing, feeding cycle.

Ideally, I’d like to get such a system built into our dining table, so that, at the press of a button, the three trays circulate -the dirty stuff disappears and the clean stuff emerges.

The UK Government have been faffing for ages about whether, and in what form, to impose ID cards on we citizens. (Of course, people forget that we used to have such things in the UK during the last war, when it was compulsory to carry a brown, dogeared card with a sepia photo which made everyone look like a Nazi spy).

According to some ‘latest poll’, 30% of us would be willing to pay £20 for an ID card -out of our own pockets (That’s surely a bargain, to avoid sitting next to some sweating crazy hugging a briefcase and fiddling with his shoe heels at 20,000 feet).

Anyway, you can now buy a 1-Gigabyte USB flash drive, with fingerprint recognition, for about £18 (1 off).

My idea is therefore to equip all of we potential hijackers, money launderers and terrorists with one of these drives. To get onto a plane, you stab your device into a reader attached to any of the 20 year-old PC’s which litter airports. Your fingerprint would allow the PC to access information on the drive which could then be cross checked with data from the top secret MoD undesirables list. It might even allow some additional security questions (‘Mother’s maiden name?’ seems a bit old fashioned -and assumes she was later married, of course).

These cheapy devices currently make a mistake and incorrectly admit someone about 1 in 100,000 times I believe, whilst stopping someone incorrectly only about 1 in 10,000 times. Both of these rates, if correct, seem pretty good given the low cost involved.

That cost could be further reduced, considering that HM Govt. would be able to buy these at a huge discount for 60 million off (it would also be a hell of a lot cheaper than the current Heathrow shenannigans: www.misense.org )

The only problem then would be the much more difficult one of working out which way to put the USB connector in the slot (a future iotd perhaps).

For those of us bothered by moulting cats…

Get hold of one of those small vacuum cleaners, the ones that are pretty much useless for anything else. Wire the cleaner so that it switches on as the flap is opened.

Arrange a section of the hose in a loop around an existing catflap aperture. Make a longitudinal slot in the hose and blank off the end, so that, on entry (and exit), all of that surplus fur, skank, rotten leaves, mouse entrails etc are removed from your furry friend.

You still have to brush down the apparatus weekly and remove the bag of course (unless your cat is valuable enough to warrant a posh, overpriced Dyson). It may also deter foreign cats who aren’t prepared to brave the blowdry on the offchance of some extra rabbit’s liver biccies.

Disgusted at the prices which councils are allowed to charge for car parking, I thought it might be possible to drive a car transporter into town, in the early morning, park it covering several bays and buy one ticket for the whole day.

Then, I’d charge people a lower-than-council rate to park their vehicles (with greater security) on the back of the transporter.

Aside from the costs of a transporter (huge) and the fact that councils would at once disallow parking outside single bays, I rather fancy this.

Imagine clothing that is multilayered. As you move, adjacent layers rub against each other and the friction results in a self heating effect.

The extra energy required to move about whilst wearing this kit could make it useful for eg training in cold conditions.