Slashdot Mirror
Inventors Wanted (Add To The Wishlist)
krugdm writes: "In his latest NYT column, David Pogue has a list of nine inventions that he'd like to see that are just awaiting inventors. The range from the silly MP3 Toothbrush to the potentially useful Microwave Plus+ that self programs. How much of this is possible?" Industrial designers, arise!
The range from the silly MP3 Toothbrush
Watch the cavity rate rise in America in a few years due to the toothbrush becoming illegal under the DMCA.
If you want a daily dose of half-baked inventions, check out The Half-Bakery. It's an excellent site for the inventive/whimsical mind.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Not quite as easy as the VCR+ idea, but a step in that direction.
Plus, it cooks with light! How retro-2001 of them.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
I want a digital camera with integrated GPS and digital compass. When I get home from a trip, I should be able to download all of my images and see them as icons on a map, indicating where the picture was taken, in what direction, and at what time.
He missed the one thing I want -- cheap clocks that set themselves. I've got cheap digital clocks in my VCR, TV, Microwave, coffee maker, etc. etc. Keeping them all set to the right time, especially when power is lost, is a real pain. They are never synchronized to each other, much less the right time. (Yes, my computers do run NTP, but that's another story).
I've seen clock radios which know the time via WWV, but that's a bit expensive to put into all these appliances -- there's several different ways you could do this, but I want one that just works -- maybe a time signal could be broadcast over the power cables? It needn't add but a few pennies to the cost of the item, and would make my life tremendously easier.
My cell phone sets its clock from the basestation automatically, and doesn't even have a way to manually set it. This is my favorite feature of my phone -- the time is always right.
Can't we have this for appliances?
This scheme would unfortunately destroy an important indicator of technical prowess, because NOBODY'S VCR would ever flash "12:00" again. How could you more easily discern whether aunt Mabel/uncle Frank is scared of anything more electronic than a toaster, except by a quick peek at the VCR?
Freedom: "I won't!"
I bet you could convince more kids to brush if, say, you had a toothbrush that played the Barney theme song while you were brushing.
:-)
This has been done, more-or-less. Not sure if it's an only-in-Canada thing, but Colgate makes a tube of toothpaste with Barney on it that chimes our a whiney electronic version of Yankee Doodle whenever the lid is opened. My mom runs a dayhome and one of the kids keeps one of these things here.
I do not expect this product to last long on the market. For one thing, you can't shut it off! If you open it by mistake or something you're forced to listen to 70 seconds of this thing. It drives you nuts fast.
Yes, the kids do like it, but they like it too much - all the other kids kept trying to fool with it. At least the music makes it easy to catch them.
Here's the worst part:
One morning I go into the bathroom to get ready for classes, and I become aware of this very high-pitched ringing. After determining it wasn't my ears, I started listening around for it.
I figured it might be air in the plumbing, so I bent down to listen to the sink. As I honed in on the sound, to my horror I realized it wasn't a sustained ring but in fact a series of very short, distinct beeps. Then I saw the Barney toothpaste, and sure enough, the thing was malfunctioning and emitting these beeps non-stop.
It took a very hard *WHACK* against the counter to get it to shut up. The thing is tucked away in a drawer now. It even started beeping once again but another whack seems to have shut it up for good - I hope.
Be careful what you wish for...
All I want are simple things...
... microwaves without clocks on them, just a knob with the intensity and the time to cook (an analogue clock which does something for about three minutes, not a digital one which does 2:57 to the second)
... a phone on which I can call my friends, not a phone on which I can call my friends, play games, keep a diary, listen to music, read my email. Just a phone.
... an alarm clock which I can forgot to set so I will accidently sleep in one day. It happens sometimes, nothing you can do about it.
Maybe it's just me, but I want to take care for my own stuff in my own pace. I want to come too late sometimes because I forgot to set the alarm. I want to be not reachable because I just want a day off. I want my food to be just a little too hot or too cold because I overcooked it or because I turned off the oven too early. And I want to feel bad when I forgot to tape my favourite show. And I want to feel happy when I find a friend who taped it.
I'm not a robot, these things are part of life!
bash$
90% of what you're asking for is available with the Nikon D1X and D1H models. Both are capable of recording data from a NMEA compliant GPS unit:
- http://www.nikontechusa.com/Nikontechnicalnote9.h
t m
The direction recording capability isn't there, and the mapping features you request aren't included with any software bundle I'm aware of. I'd think that, with a non-trivial amount of effort (and some simple, moderately complex, or downright expensive software), your goals are achievable."...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
This sounds like a great idea and I have seen some things close. They are expensive, although not comparitivly.
Decent cell phone $100
Decent pager $20
Good PDA $400
Good MP3Player $100
graphing calculator $75
Decent Digital Camera $300
total $995
if all this was put into one device and sold for around $1000 it would seem like it cost to much. The price point would not be to good. Although you may purchase all the above and spend the same amount for somereason spending ~$1000 on 5-10 devices "seems" better than on 1 doit it all device.
I have 12 chickens, see my basket full of eggs.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Firstly promoting inventions to industry is hard, really hard. A manufacturer is taking a gamble that your product will take off in the marketplace and convincing them to pick up your idea is not easy. This is where Royal come in. We promote these ideas professionally and greatly increase the chances of future royalty incomes for the inventors. Have a look at the site for some of our successfully promoted ideas.
I attempted this at my last (unnamed) company. We were doing music fingerprinting, which worked perfectly on compressed media (mp3, vorbis, real, windows media, etc etc).
So we attempted to fingerprint radio broadcasts. It seemed simple in concept, a radio tivo like device wouldn't be too difficult: buffer some audio, fingerprint the stream, mark & cut beginning and ending of song (easy if you know track length), store to database.
Unfortunately it failed miserably. The reason was the fingerprint didn't work on radio signals. Do you know what sort of signal chain radio puts most music through? It's ugly dynamic compression. This isn't compression like mp3, it's *dynamic* compression. The average radio station could probably get by playing 4 or 8 bit audio, the dynamic range is crap. They do this to keep their V/U meters peaked as much as they can, similar to how TV commercials are louder than the TV programs.
anyway, it was a decent idea. I was hoping to make something that recorded all 20 songs most stations play, store them in a database, then when I'm driving I just pick the songs I want to hear. Sure, you might get some DJ talking over a bit of the intro/ending, but it beats listening to commercials.