I once owned an old Mercedes and a corresponding Haynes repair manual that was almost of the same vintage. It caused me great grief that the images in it were of such low quality. Essentially, they seemed to have cut costs by employing the cheapest possible print process, which made it unclear how the smudgy photo I was viewing in any way related to the guts of my ancient auto. Why on earth don’t they just film a DVD as they document each task? That way, you could hear the background grumbling and swearing that always accompanies any kind of maintenance session -a refreshing source of forewarning about the weekend ahead.

Anyway, my theory about DIY car maintenance (who can afford to have a garage do all the work?) is that the main difficulty, apart from recognising the bits, is not knowing how hard to press, pull, squeeze or rotate.

If you haven’t ever seen inside that bolted-in enclosure, then it’s always a concern that you may be about to strip some expensive threads or deface a highly-priced casing or, worse still, render the whole vehicle immobile by the slip of a screwdriver used as a poorly-positioned lever. This situation is made even more difficult by the grime which covers everything and tends to gum up all moving parts.

Today’s invention then is simply an addition to all repair manuals consisting of a force rating scale. Each task would be labeled, by someone who has actually done it, with a coarse measure of how much effort is required to perform it. This scale might be as crude as a series of enjoinders: “lubricate first with DWF then easy”, “often sealed by corrosion, fiercely hard work”, “no more than two blows with a rubber mallet”, “requires extraction of whole unit first” or “best left to an expert.”

It’s still surprising to me that bubbles can actually do damage to hardened surfaces, by their sudden collapse: a process known as cavitation. I’ve been thinking about ways to use bubbles as an indicator of surface characteristics.

When an object is submerged in liquid and is heated, bubbles will form and grow at microscopic nucleation sites on its surface. In general, the more sites there are, the more bubbles form. Today’s invention exploits this to provide a measure of surface damage.

As a component undergoes wear, the number of nucleation sites will increase. Smallish engineered items, from a doorkey to a drillbit, would be gripped by a pair of copper jaws at a precisely determined location and submerged in a small bath of low boiling-point liquid (eg a domestic refrigerant).

The jaws would then be heated in a controlled way, so the volume of vapour formed from the bubble generation, over a fixed period, can be measured (before condensing the vapour for the next session). This process causes no additional damage, of course, to the material (and might even clean it).

Everyone is by now familiar with the idea of using computers’ spare processing capacity to solve the problems associated with folding proteins or detection of extra-terrestrial intelligences.

Today’s invention attempts to make use of a different distributed resource: energy.

Ethernet cable can deliver power to a computer at a rate of about 30 Watts. The lithium-ion battery in a laptop can deliver power to its machine at about half that rate. How about making use of some of the energy stored in the batteries of (wired) networked computers, when not actively being used and reverse the flow of energy?

Each inactive laptop could (just about) power an energy efficient lightbulb, although they would be better used en masse, with the agreement of users, to smooth out sudden, local energy demands. This could lead to more efficient operation of the hard-pressed electrical networks by using that other electrical grid, the internet.

When moving the sliders on a graphic equaliser, I never really have a clue about how to optimise the settings -even in general, let alone for each piece of music. This is partly because my ears aren’t particularly musically attuned but also because the variables seem to have effects which aren’t independent of each other. It would be tough enough to optimise the sound created even if they were.

Today’s invention is a way to achieve ‘optimal’ settings by relying on the opinions of many listeners ie crowd sourcing the equaliser sliders’ positions.

Every time someone felt they could tune their sound card to perform better, their settings for that card and the music they were listening to would be recorded by their browser and relayed to a central server. Here, the data from many expert listeners could be amassed and statistically analysed for the benefit of the less musically gifted.

When a piece was later being played on a networked system, the option would be provided to use one of a small range of the equaliser settings eg a) those of various celebrities, b) the average of all listeners, c) the choice of the recording artists themselves or even d) the settings adopted by the most discriminating of audiophiles.

Chemical de-icing of planes is known to be very bad for poisoning the local groundwater at airports, so I started to think about mechano-thermal solutions.

There are lots of patents awarded for aircraft de-icing systems -all written in that unintentionally laughable form of English which can only be intended to appeal to some judge (I haven’t been able to find the following in a brief search of various online patent databases).

Today’s invention is for de-icing jet aircraft on a runway. Since, even at idle, the outflow from a jet engine is much hotter than 0 degrees C, the idea is to create a duct mounted on a trolley. One end of this would catch some of the idling aircraft engine’s outflow and redirect it onto the icy wings’ surfaces via a coarse particle filter and some kind of flexible nozzle.