Laptops habitually overheat.
Today’s invention is an attempt to lessen that problem by embedding the processor in the lid, behind the screen.
The lid would have holes in the front and back surface, enabling natural convention cooling of the interior (rather than relying on noisy fans in a horizontal box, as is the usual approach).
Obviously there would be some need to ensure that the machine remained balanced with a lighter than usual keyboard and a heavier upright screen.
When a floor is being mopped, signs appear saying, effectively, ‘if you slip, don’t sue us.’
These actually introduce a trip hazard, especially when placed at the top of stairs, for example.
Today’s invention warns people of wet floors, but creates no such trip problem.
A lightweight sign with a clamp type suction device is attached to the ceiling, instead (this could be done using eg a balloon, but would probably be too fussy and shortlived). The sign might be mostly transparent, so that collisions between passing pedestrians could be minimised.
Also, an extendable neck version might be made to help with varying ceiling heights.
I’ve been talking to some engineers this week who design harbours. There is a fashion for vaguely annular ones, apparently, among the super-rich.
When they have walls (ie they aren’t just jetties), wave action is intensified within them (acting as lenses) and the boats on the inside end up crashing up and down on 10m waves.
Today’s invention is to make use of this by designing a harbour which can accommodate larger vessels. This would have a conical underwater base into which debris from the ships would fall after waves had smashed them together for a few days. The cone could be dragged onshore using a winch and the contents reprocessed to smaller scales.
The noise would be dreadful, but this would eventually reduce even ships to fragments in a lower cost way than having people with blowtorches do the job in months.
People trip over cables all the time.
People also have peripheral vision which is very sensitive to movement (something to do with spotting dangerous beasties lurking in the long grass).
Today’s invention is a device which plugs eg into a USB port on a laptop and which flicks the power cord every few seconds.
This allows passers by to become more aware of the moving cable and step over it safely.
(A better version would be incorporated into plugtops in general, but that would require somewhat more complex design).
Today’s invention is an emergency crutch for wounded soldiers, based on their existing rifle.
In the event of a legwound, a soldier could detach the barrel of his rifle from the breech mechanism and allow it to slide out of the stock until it could be secured in place, as shown, using a thumbwheel.
Removal of part of the shoulder stock would then form a crutch and allow the individual to move away from the conflict more rapidly to a place of comparative safety.
When using a networked printer, that ‘page preview’ thing never works well enough to be relied upon. Inevitably the printer is located half a day’s walk away from your desk, so you will make a print, trek, gasp in surprise at the ugly errors it contains, bin it and repeat a few times.
This wastes time and paper.
Today’s invention is a network printer which scans what it has just printed and sends you a copy electronically. You will almost certainly want to improve on the first version, so it will then offer you the option of feeding the paper back through the machine for another print on the other side.
It seems that colour perception gradually develops a greenish ‘overlay’ as long as one is awake (and gets reset after a night’s sleep).
If you work in an industry where judging colours is important, such as interior decorating or fashion design, this may actually have a significant effect.
Today’s invention is a plugin for Photoshop (or Gimp) which takes this into account and very gradually changes the screen colour balance towards the reddish end throughout a day’s work.
Following a wakeful night, a colour matching test could be arranged at the start of the day to recalibrate the screen so as to provide a personalised, consistent starting point.
Today’s invention is a way to deal with domestic broken glass.
Rather than fill the kitchen with a pile of fragments waiting to be wrapped in cardboard and dumped in the regular bin, there is a better way.
A glass jar is made just small enough to fit through the hole in a bottle bank. This jar has a glass, screw-on lid…no other materials are involved.
When anything glass is broken, the bits are gathered and placed in this jar. When the jar is full, it is transported to the bottle bank and the whole thing dumped in to be recycled.
If you fancy having an invention created in your name or dedicated to a loved-one, do make a small donation via the button on the right and drop me an email with the details of the individual concerned as well as any preferences as to application area etc.
As with all IOTD ideas, the invention will be published here -ie in the public domain of the loyal readership of this blog.
I’ll do my best to come up with something suitable within a week (and email you the link).
All income via this process will go towards the InventorCentre, as usual.
Cheers,
Patrick
(pra at patrickandrews dot com)
When traveling from A to B it seems that people tend to prefer roads which lie south of a line joining A and B (maybe because North feels ‘uphill’).
In an attempt to redress this cognitive bias and redistribute the traffic levels on alternative routes, today’s invention involves representing such southerly roads by thinner lines on a map.
The impression given would be that these are less easily passable and thus help equalise the number of journeys via northerly and southerly routes.
