For people who are being pursued on foot, eg air force pilots downed in enemy territory, today’s invention provides an additional tool for evading capture.
Each aircrew member would carry an extra pair of clip-on soles for his/her footwear.
When being chased, these would be attached quickly as shown and leave tracks indicating that they had gone in the opposite direction.
Typing…it’s still a hard task for me to undertake, despite the amount of it I do each day.
Today’s invention is twofold. First, I suggest making the keys on a keyboard with convex domes rather than sharp-edged depressions as is currently common.
This avoids some of the tactile confusion my fingers succumb to from these multiple facets and allows a positive sensation that one’s fingers are actually squarely on the top of each key.
Second, as a non touchtyper, I’d like to see keys which operate a little like the shutter release on cameras. Press a key in a little and the character appears on-screen. Remove pressure and it disappears. Only if you depress a key fully will the character stay as part of one’s text display.
This allows hesitant typists to check what they are about to write -and might even help create more confidence for touch typing (especially when used in concert with domed keys).
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 sometimes go on at length about my difficulties in buying shoes for my near-spherical feet. Often I visit shoeshops, both online and offline, only to return empty-handed…or at least unshod.
Today’s invention is a new use for rapid prototyping. People with difficult-to-fit feet could stand on a special board at home. This would have fixed lights and markings on it indicating a number of positions to place a camera and take digital photographs of the more ‘challenging’ foot.
These photos would then be uploaded and sent to shoeshops which had equipped themselves with a desktop replicator and software capable of generating a 3-D foot description from a series of images.
This would be used to drive the deposition of a model of one’s foot in heavy, flexible plastic material. Attempts could then be made to insert this model, Cinderella-like, into a number of shoes in the shop.
In the event of success, a purchase could be made online in confidence that the footwear would fit when delivered.
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.
Christmas crackers are a significant part of the festive season, just like decorations and holly and all sorts of other stuff which is utterly inessential but somehow comforting for having been around long enough to be considered traditional. At least they provide a pretty harmless icebreaker at festive events: vying for plastic junk and wearing silly hats makes intrafamilial conflict marginally less likely.
Challenged by the IET magazine‘s Vitali Vitaliev, today’s invention is an updated version of the cracker…and of course it’s electronic.
Each table would have only a few cracker devices: basically a plastic tube with a female USB connection at both ends. Diners would bring their own usb memory sticks to the table and insert these in pairs into the cracker. Two guests at a time would then attempt to withdraw their thumbdrives.
Just as with real crackers, the winner would be the guest who supplied mostly nearly the optimal tension vs time profile (Pull too hard or too gently and you come second). This would be monitored by the cracker itself which would release the loser’s stick, generate a loud cracking noise (via eg a .wav file), a short pulse of light and display a message on a screen on the cracker’s side saying “Congratulations.” It would then equip the winner to read a displayed joke aloud and pass a prize url to his/her memory device…allowing a small prize to be claimed later online. It might even take a quick snap of the smiling victor.
Two, preloaded, compressed paper hats would also be spat onto the table each time, made perhaps from sliced paper mesh (as in expandable metal sheets).
Everyone could get to pull a cracker with everyone else and there would be much less cleaning up required of the resulting waste paper.
A decade ago, I did some work for the BBC on how they could disguise the faces of people in broadcasts (whilst still retaining the image in each case of a live, moving face).
Since, then the field has moved on and the world is an even less safe place (with security cameras on almost every vertical surface). Recent research has found that we extract most recognition-related information from images of faces when they are around 30 x 30 pixels in size.
Rather than demanding ever more detail, it seems we recognise faces best when they are quite coarsely pixellated (but not too coarsely).
Today’s invention is therefore a new way for overloaded security observers to be presented with eg on-screen crowd scenes, when searching for individual terrorists (or suspects).
Knowing how far away members in a crowd are, it’s possible to pixellate the whole image so that an average sized face occupies 30*30 pixels. This image would then be automatically blurred a little to remove the distractions of the high spatial frequencies present in the edges of the pixels.
It would then be easier for observers to detect individuals more quickly.
