Home Posts tagged "fabby" (Page 5)

Tag: fabby

#2549: Spillimiter

When watering houseplants, there is always the danger that the soil will be dry and that the water will pour through and overspill the tray under the plant pot.

Today’s invention avoids that problem.

It takes the form of a dish made with several circular areas which match the sizes of commercially available plant pot trays.

If your current pot has a tray which is the same size as the second smallest one in the dish (as shown), place the red plug as indicated and fill the inner areas with water.

This dish unit can then be held over the plant pot and the plug removed, guaranteeing that the tray will never overspill.

#2546: ThiefGrief

Today’s invention is a novel solution to the problem of motorcycle theft.

It takes the form of a folded-up sheet of steel, small enough to be carried on a bike, and intended to make the machine unliftable. It also makes the lock on the back wheel inaccessible to eg disc cutters and angle grinders.

#2542: Gamingas

Today’s invention offers a way to win at the game of craps.

Based on some work by Polish researchers, if you throw a die, in a given orientation, onto a soft surface, it is much more likely to land in that original orientation.

You obviously can’t roll out a cushion on the craps table, but you could surreptitiously spray a small volume of sulphur hexafluoride onto it. These tables are shaped like a bath and so the ultra heavy gas would form a still layer: a cushion onto which the dice can be thrown.

This gas is colourless and odourless, so a tube down the sleeve linked to a low pressure bladder squeezed beneath one armpit should do the trick.

Just remember that you need to play the game a long time to win big, the dice motion may look a bit slow -and it’s important not to get caught.

#2528: BaGape

Plastic bags are both a boon and a big problem. They are so useful, but so wasteful.

Today’s invention aims to offer bigger carrying capacity using less material.

The plastic carrier bag on the left has some resealable ‘ziplock’ windows moulded into it.

When the bag is loaded, on the right, the windows are opened, allowing weight to be supported by the unperforated bottom section, whilst boosting the overall space in the bag.

Obviously the bag windows can later be resealed and the whole thing reused.

#2524: DryMow

You can get pretty much any organic powder to explode, if it’s fine, dry and concentrated enough.

Today’s invention takes advantage of this to create a self-fueled, cordless lawnmower.

On a dry day, the user would start cutting grass in the old fashioned, push-mower style. There would be multiple, close blades on a single horizontal shaft, so that any grass would be very finely chopped.

This would create a cloud of dry particles which, when introduced into the combustion chamber of the mower engine, would act as fuel.

A conventional spark plug would ignite the powder/air mix. This engine would drive the many blades so that the lawn would all be converted into fuel for the mower.

There would therefore be no need to transport cuttings to a bin.

#2521: LabRatory

Theme park owners are desperate for thrilling experiences -which are also 100% safe.

Today’s invention is an upgrade to the ancient idea of mazes, which is aimed at offering eg themeparks a more engaging entertainment.

A large number of tall privet bushes are planted in boxes with wheels, motors and wireless controls.

These bushes can be joined together to form walls of a reconfigurable maze.

Once a ‘player’ has penetrated the maze, cameras detect their eye movements and reorder the walls of the maze in areas where they are not looking.

This could be used to create a genuinely frightening experience…certainly enough of a challenge to those seeking something along the lines of a haunted house visit. The maze could have variations in difficulty, from static to inescapable.

(Cutting the bushes could be done by running them each through a stationary trimmer occasionally).

#2519: Driving flat out

Today’s invention is for owners of offroad vehicles who want to avoid spilling their champagne in transit across their country estates.

It takes the form of a control box and a table-supporting frame which has an attachment point on top of each of the windows.

As rough ground is encountered, the control box drives the windows up and down just enough to ensure that the frame (red) stays perfectly level.

#2502: Endnui

In the latest scientific news I read that, when we are blinking, time seems to pass more quickly.

In fact, time passes two to four times as fast when the eyes are closed than during darkness while the eyes are open.

Today’s invention offers a way to speed up boring processes, such as staring at a screen whilst waiting for some software to download.

People tend to develop epileptic symptoms if they are subject to bright flashes of light, so the approach here would be to wear special glasses. These would detect when the wearer was watching something boring (either eg by understanding that a download was in progress or that call waiting music was being listened to).

Then, a small cannister of compressed air in the body of the glasses would begin puffing air at each eyeball randomly.

The blinks induced would appear to greatly speed events up, so that the perceptual process in which ‘a watched kettle never boils’ would be overcome.