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!

Comments

Tooth decay

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Half Bakery

[Jeremi]

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.

Here's one....

[Rorschach1]

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.

Re:Here's one....

[eyeball]

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.

I've thought of this before myself, and also imagined how cool it would be if it were possible to keep this information as meta data within the image's file itself. That way, a search engine like Google's Image Search could also index by location, time and direction. That way you could find any picture with a particular subject in it. Imagine being able to search for every picture taken of the World Trade Center. Eventually, given enough high resolution pictures and probably a little human intervention, there might even be a way to deconstruct the pictures, identify actual parts of buildings and landmarks, and reconstruct into a virtual world!

Cheap clocks that set themselves

[GGardner]

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?

Inventors wanted with K.I.S.S. mentality

[MavEtJu]

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!

Already done... mostly

[Raetsel]

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.ht 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.

Re:Radio Tivo and automobile in-flight recorder

[brer_rabbit]

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.