Gadgets, widgets, hatchets. Update May 2019

A denial-of-surface to a patent-hungry industry

Shoe Gazy-Pie

Here's a useful gadget in the footwear department - the shoe gazer - this is something that makes sure you don't trip over things (dancing partner, broken paving stones, awkward moments) by surveilling everything at toe-curling level, and activating springheeled physical or metaphorical avoidance strategies, when encountering above...all run in a python boot prom

Somnorify

combine sleep quality monitoring app with music app, and build a recommender system for songs most likely to send you to sleep quickly (or not...)

Polareyes

You want to hide the display (or parts of it) from some peope in the room - give them switchable polarized glasses, and then polarize light vertical or horizontal from areas of screen, and switch between horizontal and vertical for those allowed/forbidden from seeing those areas:)

Water Marginal Eyes

Drops of high viscosity stuff you put on your device camera's lens to give it temporary 270 degree vision...

Privacy Preserving Perfect Picture Person Finder

P2P, Ad Hoc, you're in the supermarket and you're panic sets in - where are your kids - you send an encrypted picture to the supermarket (fixed or guards' cameras) surveillance cameras who do a privacy preserving multiparty computation to locate your errant childrens. Same thing works for looking for bewildered grandma, or indeed, finding your car in the airport carpark - or indeed, finding where you left the TV remote last nite (with use of baby camera drones). use of enclaves and weak homomorphic crypto in training the binary neural net for extra marks...(note, no-one retains the picture - its just added into the model for temporary matching - using non-reversable training).

Personal Voice Desistant

You know how annoying and intrusive all those Voice Assistants are - alexei, syri, cortina etc - all listening in the whole time and spying on you?

so what you need is to run interference and I have the solution - it is a pocket size really noisy drone/quadcopter, that homes in on anything that has that annoying voice, and just hovers in front of it (like running a tap or shower in a spy ovie) to drown out any sound of your conversation - it can be specialyl designed to make just the right sort of pinko noise that confuses the hell out of the useless AI that they have sitting just inside the echo chamber box.

Really Permanent 3D Marker Pens

Instead of 3D printing, what you want is a 3D marker pen- you sketch what you want in the air, and "autocomplete" snaps the surfacs to regular polyhedra or 3D spines, and then rounds them off - voila, you can magic stuff out of thin air - you heard it here first, Merlin on a budget.

EdibleDrones

After the challenge of flocking, now we have the power-weight ratio hill to climb to build a drone out of completely edible components. Obviously the key problem is how to make rotos/motors - my solution (yet to be tried) would employ Hero's Engines. Back in hugh school chemistry class, we used to make these as an exercise in glass blowing: by replacing glass with (say) Icing Sugar (or anything reasonably rigid), and replacing heat and boiling water with liquid oxygen (boiling at room temperature), we can make this thing fly. The rest is just a case of making a realy light (and quite strong) souffle.

GlueSB

GlueSB - Gloves with USBRFI - all USB capable devices should have RFI in - so then we can find them by scanning (same idea as earlier one - all (rechargeable) batteries should have RFI in - then they can emit a little signal to say how much charge they have left and uniquely id themselves - and be findable - so never lose your remote ever again. application - GlueSB - gloves with USB in - two apps in mind - 1/. if you drop a glove, it sets of an alarm on your phone so you notice there and then rather than an hour later 2/ you can have heated gloves 3/ the gloves could have LED lights that plug into your route finder on your phone, so when cycling, they flash to tell you where to turn at intersections.

Gaze & Wander

Printing spreadsheets is a pain. There's so many times when you only want some rows&columns and not a lot of others. but hand selecting them is painful too. how abotu we just track where people look most often, and just fade out all the other places than re-flow? Voila, Eye tracking could be used to do 3D printing too. Think of it like mind-over-matter, or cybersculpting - although error corrections might be trickier.

Driven to Distraction

You know when you're walking along and someone coming the other way locks gaze with you but you can't figure out to go left or right (because that's exactly what they are figuring at the same time)? You know when you are learning to ride a bike, and you over thin balancing, or when you are learning to control a clutch on a shift car, and you bounce along? These are all things where feedback loops cause synchronisation, and you want to damp things. Three solutions suggest themselves

  • Speed human nervous system up (of 1 participant)
  • Randomize
  • Slow human nervous system down (of 1 participant)

    The first one is too hard. The last one is evil. However, we can do randomizing - indeed, that is what ends up happening (except when you walk into people, fall off the bike, or stall the car). So what you need is something that distracts you. Like when Douglas Adams was describing how to learn to fly- you throw youself at the ground, and miss (because you are distracted by something too humungous to ignore). Then when you realize you are flying, and that can't work, you need a second distraction. Same trick learning to ride a bike (or drive). So with two (or more) people on the sidewalk too, what's the solution?

    How to do this? easy - its called an app. Much better than showing you mixed reality, it shows you something definitely unreal, but only one of you. when you least expect it. Just before you walk into the person who's staring at their boring map or email or fb update. Just before you over balance. It shows you something really surprising. Anything will do - plenty of youtube videos available. Cats falling off bicycles, fish crashing cars, sidewalks full of dead people...that sort of stuff....

    GraffitiCodes

    Get a programmable stencil, so you can change the pattern of paint coming out of a spraycan, then we can add aestheicodes to any street art -- could use MEMS widgets right in frnt of the nozzle, and then have an app on yr phone to programme the MEMS to add the pattern.

    Simple (one-time use) tech would be to use a bunch of dense/small-bubble wrap and the head of a dot matrix printer which could burst the bubbles at x,y coords to reveal you the stencil shape...

    Cheap 3D printing

    new idea for ultra cheap 3D Printing (note this is constrained to shapes that would also be possible with injection mould). take a balloon, and cover it in a grid of heat shrink tape. fill the ballon with liquid (e.g. chocolate, juice whatever). now heat tape at places you want to be shorter, and not elsewhere, and voila, the shape you want. Now put ballon in fridge. When chocolate (or juice) has solidified, tear off the skin, and you have your bunny rabbit shaped easter thing, or endless entertainment for the kids on the beach. warning, do not do this at work.....it will annoy people that spent 3000$ on a naff 3 D printer that has got clogged up with mint choc chip biscuits

    Near Field Nails

    Nail art is a big deal - some of it is really complex and expensive because its done for real by artists. A lot of people just get stick-on strips that have pre-done designs on - you can even laser print them. So why not embed aestheticodes in the design, and NFC tags in the sticker? Then applications are galore - my favourite would be a virtual keyboard, using an tablet or phone's camer and NFC reader to see what fingers were where.....but anything with near gesture control would be made potentially much more accurate (plus would potentially be personalised/biometric, so semi-secure).

    broaching secrets

    Imagine a broach which is a small display (with some wireles link to your phone so you choose what to show) - this coule be a Cameo, but it could also include aesthetic codes which would allow people using the app to go fetch information about you that you are (currently) prepared to share - indeed this could be location, time and viewer specific - so at meetings/social events/work, this could allow people to control who could see what about them and when - e.g. nothing, to web/contact info, to actively seeking to meet person X (or person of type X)...

    RFID-cell

    If all batteries, especially rechargeables, from now on, had emitted an RFID token over a wifi (or bluetooth) channel, that had 2 things in it - the ID, and the remaining charge -- we could build apps for phones that could a) find missing remote controls (and other phones) under the sofa etc b) tell you when you need to recharge stuff.... You could have a Harry Potter map of your Smart Things, and dumb old things would be rendered "smart" at one swell foop.

    Ideas below, are from 2006 or before & will show up as so in wayback searches for equator gadgets

    Ask not for whom the cable leaks

    File forgiveness bits - now why don't distributed file systems have forgiveness bits - these are like permission bits, but operate in the opposite direction in time. This allows for consistent treatment of relaxation of policy/mechanism to scale for things like accidental leaks and makes taint tracking properly consistent with threshold security and differential privacy - file under Jesuitical Distributed Systems impossibility results, part III.

    Coctail d'Eau - Orpheus in Cyberspace

    In Cocteau's movie, Orphee, the poet, having listened to coded messages in the surreal radio broadcasts of Eluard, travels to Hell to rescue his friend, Eurydice, by travelling through mirrors. Mirrors, which look remarkably like water (only hanging in space, exactly the way a Iain Banks novel, doesn't). The Coctail d'eau is a haptic feedback device that doesn't exert force, but rather, viscosity.

    Virtual Homing-Pigeon-Brain in a T-Shirt

    I was talking to some folks about wearable computers today -they envisage a network woven into clothes RATHER than wireless - since this reduces the power requirement a lot ... and it occurred to me that such a network would probably be quite sensitive to the magnetic and electrical fields of the earth - now its well known (since a paper in Science back in 1979) that pigeons can detect the gradient of the earths magnetic field and use this to assist navigation - how much date one gets is unknown, but with a few meters of wiring around a person, one ought to be able to do a lot better than a pigeon. or is it just a virtual-pigeon-brained idea?

    Fridge Cam-lets

    You've heard of fridge magnets? well these are bluetooth capable webcams you stick on the fridge (inside or out) so that you can look at stuff from remote (if say your home phone is a bluetooth/dect/gsm n-band phone (when oh when will someone ship a gsm/dect home base station thats priced sensibly, eh?)). So inside the fridge, they need to be able to actuate the light too (unless of course you are a true believer and know that the light doesn't really stay out when you close the fridge door:).

    So then, from the shop, not recalling if you are clean out of chicken nuglets or smoked salmon, you can from your cell phone, call your fridge (well, you dial home and ask your bluetooth manager gateway to) and ask it to show you whats on each shelf.

    cam-let - now there's a neat name:) you stick em here, you stick em there, and see what's going on...

    wipod - a radio, how quaint!

    how often is it you can't find the cable to link your mp3/digitalcamera/programmablewatch to your laptop and the Internet? yes, almost daily - so what we want, and we will get it is low cost short haul wireless - now dunno bout you, but 2 of my laptops do bluetooth, as do all 6 cell phones in my house (6 people live here ranging from 7-50 years old). So we don't want them thar wires no more. not if you can help it.

    of course someone is gonna shout "security!". well thats why bluetooth is the way it is - true, with wifi, you'd wanna have some sort of ipsec, or higher level vpn , or even just straight ssh tunnel to the device, but hey, that software all exists, all fits in modest chunks of memory, and we are talking about devices that store Gigabytes of music and images, and have respectable audio/video software in - a complex comms stack should be a needle-in-a-haystack - oops- wrong analogy; should be in the noise; oops - still wrong analogy - um, so the comms stack should not be a significant extra burden - they already got USB and other gubbins in there. lets just have an IP bluetooth stack and a secure wifi stack and be done with - you know it makes cents.

    The Hairt

    its very frustrating when you meet people who have only seen your picture on a web page...esp. if you are pictured there with longer/shorter hair - the solution is the new device the Hairt

    this is a scottish sounding device that you put on your head and it has a sensor that detects people by cookies, given them when they last visited your website, and displays the haircut on your head that is most familiar to them - if you meet two people, it morphs the haircut to meet both viewpoints....

    in a crowd, it probably does best if it makes it look like you have nits..

    The Gurl

    The gurl ("grab URL") is a pair of glasses - they possess a small camera AND an overlay display - when you see a URL on a real world object, they capture and OCR it for later upload via irda to your palm/phone.... if another person has seen an object with some interesting symbl on it, they can label the object with that symbol and an associated URL (for example they see a truck with a particularly registration, and want to remind you if you see it to do something (crash into it for example) - so then you see a virtual URL

    The KARMALIAN

    after we bought you the hairt, and the gurl, now we have the karmalian

    this is a piece of material like a j-cloth that can wrap around and stick to anything and then (via bluetooth) receives an image of itself and its surroundings from a "nearby camera" (or even a CIA surveillance satellite) - it then changes color/pattern to as close as possible to the surroundings, thus hiding/concealing what is is wrapped around - initial use is to hide my mug in plain view so people stop stealing it from the staff common room - later projects will incrementally deploy this material over sections of cities to make more and more of them look like the surrounding countryside - with suitable interaction from users, its possible that different people will be able to provide consensus view (some of you might want the countryside to look more like the surrounding city for example...)

    a simple application would be with bob rosenburg's virtual keyboard, one could display an keyboard on any surface that one was "typing" on...

    Virtual Eyes (as opposed to Normal Eyes)

    (read while listening to primalscream

    When you look into someone's eyes, normally, you see yourself reflected (at an reflection angle that is the same to the normal as the angle of incidence, what a coincidence:-)

    So with Virtual Eyes (TM), you see someone else reflected - the person that this person was LAST looking at ....

    This is useful in negotiations....

    Re-tale Therapy

    This is a new version of a very old game - you have to pin a story on a shoplifter - you have to do it by leaving an audit trail of false data in the surveillance databases around the world to prove that someone who wasn't really there, was.

    Karmavore

    This is a low cost solution to the problems faced by the higher Echelon's within GCHQ, of trying to keep up with all the latest dotcomeraderie - along the lines proposed by Professor Flan O'Brien (a.k.a. Miles na Gopaleen) in his highly respected work on the Institute, concerning the ventriloquists, the Karmavore is a whispering hidden assistant worn like a cufflink (Think appliance-meets-ms_paperclip, and you cannot go far wrong)- when a word comes up in conversation with an expert, that the assistant knows that the Government Adviser will not know the meaning off, it is quickly emailed off to an expert who then provides live voice - the speech and vocal patterns of the remote expert are on-the-fly translated into fly-on-the-wall commentary in the manner of the GCHQ adviser, so that the RealWorldPresent expert notices not-one-thing - it is suddenly as if the upper-echelon person really is an expert too.

    E-ncompass

    is a web page which shows a map with the web server and the current client show and a compass which displays the direction North w.r.t where the client is currently facing....doing this without gsm or gps in the client is tricky (but possibly not impossible - think about it...)

    Wradar

    A simulated -user-friendly, green radar screen on your lap/palm/desk-top, showing the locations of real and virtual people near you and their velocities...(think of it as "visual rwho", and you can't go far wrong). for busy webmaisters, it shows the location and data rates of the current and recent client set...

    DIY-NA

    Do it yourself DNA - the UK government is kindly making the entire DNA record of 3M alleged evil-doers available - this is a web site that lets you cook up arbitrary forensic evidence with the appropriate human tissue marked with a chosen (or randomly allocated) persons DNA.....for a small fee, the evidence can be left at the requested location by our trusty arbeiter. better than appropriating someones biometrics, eh!

    All of Mirrors

    for several yearz now, i've been mucking around with a network simulator called ns for a lot of network research here, and also running it in partial emulation mode - basically, ns mimics the Internet protocol stack by offering a set of classes that fit into a discrete event simulator much as you might expect - it has a topology generator, and a selective trace facility which then lets you run visualisations of the history of dissimulation run.

    ns is written in c++ and object tcl, and via a _very_ crude reflective interface, allows the tcl to modify the implementation and behaviour of the c++ level (and vice versa); (footnote: reasons are that tcl is good for scripting, so you can quickly modify descriptions of instances of topology or imposed events and other simulation configuration data in that language, while the c++ is therefore "efficiency" reasons (simulating 10^6 nodes in interpreted anything is seriously not likely to get far)

    it allows you to interface to the real world in "emulation mode" - an entity in the simulator acts as an "avatar" for the real world ip or end system or traffic object, and via a simple packet filter/gateway, allows on to make experiments that are part real part simulated...

    [aside: for reasons of sanity, we've been trying to re-write the whole thing in java ]

    so anyhow, what interests me about this is that of course it is a specific instance of mixed reality....and it gives some interesting insights (or might do if i didn't have so much teaching and admin to do) into the sorts of problems faced by systems that attempt to simulate a world with some common ground with reality, and also interface to it....and the first one i can come up with that there are bound to be massive asymmetries - inherent is the fact that the real world is as real as it is whereas there are choices of resolution and of temporal accuracy in the simulated world.....there's not a choice about the rate at which time rolls forward in RL...

    So anyhow, in parallel with this, manuel oliveira was working on dealing with simple differences in network, display and other system capability in a shared environment, and it seems that the approach he is adopting (from some of y'all work) can be extended into RL and from RL into cyberia

    we'd need to think about a suitable set of mapping functions to cope with interpolation and extrapolation in the simulated environment - easy enough, but how do we modify the behaviour of the users in the _Real World_ _environment_ ??

    easy: we do it with mirrors (*) if you have an (imperfect, fairground hall-of-m*) mirror at the gateway between virtual and real, on the real side, it shows the real user how they look to users in the simulated world - this can be done in a lot of ways - its certainly well known that yo can get people to behave differently by showing them what (you want them to think) they look like.

    hmmm, programmable mirrors, eh? whatever next?

    * of course, this idea was originally had by Jean Cocteau as a way of visualising the gateway between Earth and Hell in his visionary film Orphee (1949) which also features some very neat use of poetry as code...

    SMELL - Sensing Means for Electricity's Location for Laptops, etc

    This device is put into mobile phones, laptops, pacemakers, etc and tells you where the nearest source of juice i if you are running low, or need a de-fibrillator, whichever is most relevant:-) Other tropisms (heat, light, scenery, can be considered later.... sort of like warchalking for free 802.11 access (or gnutellaing for mp3s) only now its shockingly more useful.

    WAGES of SIN

    Web Ages - this ages web page content - takes pictures and introduces entropy appropriately - takes text, and makes it more archaic.

    Dalicoptors

    radio controlled helicoptors are quite inexpensive nowadays - now here is an idea - we have people being tracked around the department via ultrasound, and their avatars displayed in holodeck the CAVE in the appropriate places - why not have helicoptors fly around the quad in patterns that map the same space as people in the department - better still, we could get a bunch of ballet dancers and track them, and have the helicopters mimic the dance - with sufficiently athletic (nijinsky/nureyev leaps to mind) dances, there might even be a strong 3rd dimension to this... ... a kyoshi concept 30 can be bought for about 95 quid second hand...

    Mobile Teethcare

    Dispensing Wisdom with Care:
    or
    Using blue tooth to combat grey teeth

    the average customer for dental care products is not aware that it is possible to use to much fluoride - where water supplies are either naturally or artificially high in fluoride, it is wise to reduce the intake in toothpaste.

    By monitoring this level and emitting the information on a standard bluetooth service address, toothpaste dispensers with appropriate receivers can now add the right quantity of toothpaste on demand - Note that the cost of the technology is largely in the installation.

    Of course, care must be taken not to jam the 802.11 network that is being used by the household health monitor to control the temperature of the water in the tea, coffee, chocolate, shower, sink and bath, or unpleasant side effects may occur.

    Bombe Surprise

    so, as a cyclist, what i want is a waterbomb (ballon filled with water) that i carry in my knapsack where the water is dyed with a non washable color

    the balloon is carefully calibrated to be a certain strength...

    then if someone drives too close or too fast, and i drop or throw it at the vehicle, it marks them as a "bad guy"

    but only if they are too close/fast

    low cost sensor net stuff (e.g. from UCLA or USC or Berkeley) for accelerometers/proximity etc

    a new application for smartdust?

    BRachet

    A Blog ratchet - you know - a ratchet is a device that lets you go one way, and not back. This is a browser plugin that lets blogs only move forward - it slips and compresses cycles in the web down the ratchet til they are scrumpphed down the end like so much used dental phloss. Google? I nearly ultravistad til i kried.

    Muddlewear

    This is a solution to those of you who went to Glastonbury - we print out lots of listings of middleware, and wrap it around our feet - it stops us slipping and soaks up all the mud - we can then put the paper and mud in the recycling fires at nite to keep warm while listing to swingbeat in the Field of Lost Vagueness. This is a social service as it removes unwanted middleware and mud and only creates marginal amount of CO2 compared with speaking at the Middleware conference, or talking to colleagues about debugging it.

    One line spoof of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "This is going to be difficult", thought the general, many years later, as he died. Or to put it another way, as Peter Pan dressed for his first job in the City "To Tie Die would be a great adventure".

    Potable Computers

    The liptop computer is disguised as a moustache - good even for ladies in the Mediterranean climes. Like a babel fish, it takes utterances, and translates them - unlike babel fish, it is an output device, not an input device, which probably renders it less useful in group conversations, but still could be amusing.

    Brogging

    Brogging is to blogging what instant messaging is to e-mail. brogging is so called as its so in-your-face - connotations such as "bragging" are entirely intended (and intirely entended too).

    a Brog site is a combination of RSS and blog. Its for people that feel what they have to say is so important that, not only must other people have the opportunity to hear it, they must hear it right away, and possibly not even have the choice to turn it off.

    a Brog site uses Brats (these are vermin, a combination of Bots and RSS) to distribute unwanted content to discontented recipients. Brats make use of spryware, which is thin-client spyware (e.g. installed on blueberries, blackberries and ipods, and digital cameras) to pop up the window to display the incessant nonsense typed by many broggers, just like <- this :-)

    Potable Document Ferment

    If we could introduce bubbles into guiness, and burst them, under simple control via a USB port and an electrostatic speaker field, we could then "write" on the surface of a pint. This would be useful in pubs for reading txt messages from friends and then (permanently) deleting them without having to drive the screen on your pda/phone/blueberry.

    j-star

    one day I will have a jPod, a jBook, and a jPhone and a j-on - the j stands for joinery - a seamless interconnect fabric that lets me hang these devices on my clothes or put them in my pocket and they all recharge each other - instead of having n keyboards, n screens, n toggly roundy tweakery interface buttons, i have 1, and a bunch of slaves some are j-specialised to audio, some to long haul radio communication, some to authorisation and locality. the j-on is the unifying, ownership (c.f. Stajano's resurrecting duckling/imprinting).

    J is the new I.

    Perceptial Motion

    So Tivo lets you timeshift TV - now how about time-shifting cycling - have a bike with a generator/electric motor and big re-chargeable battery (e.g. di-lithium crystals) - when you have energy in the day, cycle on the spot to charge the battery; at the end of the day, when you are tired, reverse the polarity, cross the streams, and coast home.

    If you are really lazy, strap a piece of buttered toast butter side down to a cat, and drop the cat out the window with a belft conncted from it to the charger on the bike - the cat will try and land feet first, the toast will try and land butter first, and the spinning resulting will easily give enough charge to get you up any reasonable hill. Don't touch the cat afterwards tho.

    Playback Time

    when those next door neighbours in the motel room are having too much fun at 3 am and the headboard sounds like its connected to the ouija board, you need to haunt them - this device plays back over audio/visual in their room, everything they are doing, the naughty devils, only with a 0.63 second delay - calculated to make even the most sophistacated lurver lose all interest.

    Really Affordable Telemmetry

    Scientists have managed to overlay a modest radar system and sensor net on the neural net of small mammals - their whiskers make excellent antennae and can mimic the smartest of phase array systems constructed to date with a mere quiver of the muzzle - these are typically omnipresnt, and make a far more satisfactory method to collect data about hazardous and unpleasant environements - after all there are some things you really can't ask a computer to do; but a rat....

    Ego and Jungian Archetype Cards

    There's been a lot of fuss in 2006 about id cards.

    It worries me that we are prepared to let the Monsters of the ID lose even if they can prove who they were. It seems to me (ergo, ego) that we also need Ego cards. And having dealt with the Id and the Ego we should also not shy from being Jung and Anna Freud.

    Role Based Access control would be implemented through the use of multiple Ego cards. A generic, un-affiliated (unadopted) card would of course be an archetype - before some technique such as Stajano's resurrecting ducklings are employed. An interesting idea that suggests itself is the use of Genetic Programming, to provide unique cards which exchange digital genetic material with each other to provide an increasingly hard to forge identity. Stolen cards would of course not work as they would shortly after they were out of context, lose their ever changing, but verifiable personae - after all, we are who we meet.

    Mobile Phone Immobilizer

    fed up with stolen mobile phones? RFID in the _charger+ (same ias car key rfid immobiliser) - then phone is usefless without its original charger - use frank stajano's imprint+resurrecting duckling protocol if you lose the charger. game over.

    intellectual origami

    Practical Quantum Computing

    Using the Xen hypervisor, one could virtualise a bit - with sufficient "guest bit" instances running, one could emulate any statistical distribution of bit values, hence one could emulate a quantum computer. This would be much cheaper than using josephson junctions or lasers, although not as cool.

    re-wireable pianos

    If we could attach 88 mice, glued to a piece of board side by side, to a single computer, then we could design a very simple program to work as an infinitely re-configurable keyboard (c.f. the Logical Bassoon (apologies to Giles Brindley). This would be a huge advance in ease of use.

    pianissimo maximo

    late braking news

    New gadget called a decelerometer:- it measures how much you are slowing down.

    its cheaper than an accelerometer as it can draw power from the system which wants power drawn anyhow since it is slowing down, which makes it green and ecofriendly and so on, whereas an accelerometer takes energy out when you most want it...

    Antiquarian Bookmark Seller

    You've heard of antiquarian books, and you probably use bookmarks - well you probably have bookmarked sites that no longer exist or are no longer useful or interesting. Sell them thru us!

    No longer do dangling URLs need annoy, nor links to pages not updated for yonks - we can find someone who has a use for them!

    Click-Through Feeless, Logo-free, no-advert zone

    Click here and you will not be charged or see a pop up advert, nor will we log your click and sell the data to any organisation for market research. This scheme has been bought to you by an anonymous donor-kebab-lover.

    Cookie-cutter region-enforcement

    Many companies are faced with the awful prospect of reduced profits due to globalisation, where the price they set in the poorest places on the planet isntantly becomes the price everywhere - products from DVDs, MP3s, and completely innocent things like AIDS drugs and automatic weapons and ammunition are available at knock down prices in places where the rich should be fleeced for every penny (e.g. Saudi Arabia, USA and other friendly states).

    We propose the use of embedded, lat-long sensitive nano-tech cookie cutters within the product wrapping so that anyone trying to open their new xmas prezzy to fire on the insurrectionists, or treat the unwitting HIV victim, to the accompaniment of the sounds and vision of the latest hits, will have to make sure they are in the right place at the right time, else its "bye-bye skin and bones".

    suitable nano-technology would have to include GPS and Galileo receivers which might make it quite bulky, so one thing to do would be to desing some sort of decentralised mimo sensor net GPS receiver that would collaborate over a number of wrappers and products - after all, where there's one M16/AK47/AZT-dose, there's probably 100.

    You know it makes sense: price discrimination isn't unfair at all. No it isn't, really.

    Virtual Shake

    I want a smart phone in the form factor of a hand (or glove) - then when I call someone and they pick up, if they are a friend, it feels like a handshake. It could be firm, limp or a squeeze - up to them and me...

    PerpetuaPhones

    What if your phone could photosynthesize - it could charge the batteries by taking in solar energy through the camera.

    Alternatively, use the microphone's vibration when speaking to harvest power - that way, the longer you speak, the longer you can speak.

    Unbrella

    Our scientists at the research institute have successfully deployed the first working unbrella.

    This is a breakthrough that will boost the post-brexit economy and is sure to find many applications outside of its narrow, but popular current usage.

    Unlike the traditional device, the unbrella protects the user from the rain as it prevents the rain falling even upon that person's unbrella, not just from reaching the owner's head. This has the huge added advantage over previous technologies, that when you get under cover, you do not have to leave the unbrella open in the bath to dry - it already is.

    The only warning is that over-use by large numbers of enthusiastic ramblers could lead to a renewed hosepipe ban.

    Professor Reine de Luge explained that the inspiration for the device came from her readings in Sunday school. "It was very clear that the ancient tribes had access to something quite powerful, but with very poor precision. The delta version was used in a daring escape by a group of people crossing a river in flood, and the manuscripts uncovered in a cave under the dead sea gave some clues as to how the device worked. We were able to get far better focus in repelling water, with the use of very similar woods and oils to those used in making cricket bats and wickets, instead of olive and tamarind, which is no doubt why this advance was so uniquely possible in England. Obviously pointing it to the sky as a test source of water was perhaps more obvious here in Blighty than to folks living in the deserts of biblical times."

    Our science correspondent reports that similar success with the experimental Spanish perisol is unlikely to be forthcoming, for obvious reasons.

    Snoother

    This is a portmanteau of a snood and a scooter - just the thing for cycling across town during cold weather. The snood can be equipped with an air-bag for extra safety. The scooter is battery powered with wind and solar re-generation.

     Last Updated: Feb 20, 2024