coffee straw
Sometimes you need a lie down on a Saturday or Sunday morning. The sun is out, the chez is calling, a half hour recline with a cup of coffee to start the day. Lovely.
But! You need to keep sitting up / tilting your head / straining your neck to sip the coffee. This ruins the whole affair and you’d be just as well sitting up. What a waste of a recline opportunity.
Introducing reclaffeine - the reclining caffeine system
An insulated coffee straw for laying and drinking on a sofa. Two models. One is simply an insulated straw with a clever valve to minimise effort for sipping, you dip it in your coffee cup using a small clip.
The second is more ingenious. It comes with a coffee puck to insert into the straw - so you pull hot water through the straw to brew as you drink. How fresh is that coffee? Well it brewed 12mm from my tongue!
Not available as a baseball cap mounted version!
Popularity: 7% [?]
Knitnav
Satnav meets knitting patterns!!
Although I don’t knit myself. My good lady wife does. Not in a manic ‘15 projects ongoing at any one time’ way. Just the occasional pair of booties, scarf, or floppy eared bunny for relatives. Or, rather delightfully, for us!
Anyway, the only downside of any knitting project is the need to continually keep quite while she counts rows, stitches and whatever else knitters count. The temptation to shout FIVE ELEVEN THREE isn’t always resistible.
Introducing KNITNAV, your knitting pattern assistant.
Gone are chunky books, notepads and spreadsheets. Just pick the pattern, and knitnav talks you through the process. Multiple modes for beginners, or experts. Beginners get told what moss stitch is, experts get cryptic code shouted at them.
A tomtom style unit would be great, or some kind of ipod / nintendo ds program would do it. Actually, a hyper ironic swarovski encrusted ds would be great. You could knit little charms to dangle from it. It would need headphones.
For any entrepreneurs out there - ALL the domains are available. Knitnav.com… etc. Hurrah.
The world needs more red knitted bears roaming around gardens. The knitnav could make that dream a reality.
CC pic of the garmin, and the wool.
Popularity: 10% [?]
muffocaccia - a food innovation
Ok. So what’s wrong with Muffins? That’s right. Not enough garlic. The form factor is perfect. The flavours are just too sweet sometimes.
Less of an inventoid, more of a recipoid. Introducing - the muffocaccia. Half muffin. Half focaccia. This fits well with a vegiterranean diet.
The recipe couldn’t be simpler.
2 Lbs of Flour. Make this up from a mixture of Strong White Flour, Strong Wholemeal Flour, and Semolina / Semolina flour. Proportions depending on your taste. I prefer roughly equal parts, although you could remove any one of them I’d keep the semolina at least 25% for texture.
Just over a pint of warm water (more if you use a lot of wholemeal)
About a tablespoon of Salt
About a teaspoon of dried yeast
Combine these in a big bowl. Knead for 5 minutes. It should be soft and springy and look something like this:
Leave for a couple of hours in a cool room. The warm room to rise bread thing is a myth. A cool room lets the flavour improve for longer. Leave it until it looks like this:
Now bash it down and leave it to do that step again. You don’t have to do this step - but I find it makes the finished bread much softer and tastier.
Now find some herbs. Rosemary and Thyme were all my garden could offer. Plus a little basil from the window sill. Chop these. chop in some sundried tomato, leek, and garlic. Oh and some olives. You want to end up with a couple of handfuls of tasty ’stuff’. A bit of sea salt doesn’t hurt either - depending how salty your olives are.
Fry this lot up in a pan for 5 minutes - just to soften the herbs really. Use lots of olive oil. In some ways you’re just flavouring the oil anyway. Use too much olive oil. Then add some more. Then some more. Trust me. You need a lot of olive oil. No one said these were healthy!
Now smooth that into your dough. Get your hands dirty. Squish that dough. Work the oil into the dough and the ‘bits’ evenly throughout.
Warning. Depending on the warmth of your monitor the following pics will look tasty or horrendous. Trust me - they looked tasty in real life. Stupid Sigma lenses under artificial light!
Now scoop this into a couple of muffin trays. This is enough to fill your freezer with 24 of these things! Fill the cups to about 3/4 or 4/5 - we want these to look muffiny!
Perfect. Now leave them to rise for anything up to an hour - until they are doubled in size with nice muffin tops.
Now slap them in a 200′C oven for about 20 minutes. 25 minutes to be certain they’re cooked. They should look something like this. If you have any good olive oil, now is the time to drizzle a little over the top. Not too much, just wee glug.
Popularity: 15% [?]
thermoleum
Winter. Cold. Great.
Underfloor heating solves one of the minor problems of life, but can also take away one of its great joys. Cold bathroom floors in the morning with no socks on - heaven - wakes you up quicker than a double espresso and a slap in the face.
But underfloor heating exists precisely because sometimes the thought of that cold floor is enough to keep you in bed until Thursday. We’re doing up the bathroom, and I want to partially heat the floor - but only partially. For fun, I want to tile the hot bits red, and the cold bits blue. My better half has better taste than me, so I’m not allowed to. But it triggered an idea:
Introducing thermoleum, the heat reactive floor vinyl / lino / tile. Works exactly the same as those stick on refrigerator thermometers, only on your floor. Just imagine the fun! I’d be tempted to heat very small hotspots in front of the sink, the loo etc… where you would expect to stand most often - but leave the rest cold. Just because it would look cool.
For larger bathrooms, heated ’stepping stones’ could make the long hike from the shower to the basin a pleasure.
One additional challenge is of course to make it react quickly enough to show where you were standing a minute ago - like ‘heat cam’ on ‘police stop criminal’ or whatever it’s called.
Popularity: 15% [?]
flying cable monster
If you have owned a computer for more than 20 minutes you end up with a pile of cables that looks roughly like this:
I call it geek spaghetti. I keep mine in 2 storage boxes, the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet and a big Tesco bag for life. The ‘best stuff’ is in the Tesco bag. For ‘best stuff’ read ‘newest stuff I don’t actually need yet‘. I need a nicer way to organise these or I’ll have to move them out to the garage.
Introducing the flying cable monster - part flying spaghetti monster, part habitat cable tie light shade.
Option one was to simply tie things to each other. But that might damage the cables and make them difficult to get at. I need a system which allows any single cable to be removed without need to disrupt the rest. So… find something that can just have cables hooked into it. Rummage in garage, bingo! An old dish rack we never used - steal the floppy shelf, tie some speaker cable to the corners. We have a dangley rack.
Just poke the USB style connector ends through , rotate by 90 degrees, bingo - they hold. Doesn’t work for fat, thin or round connectors. Time for some pliers to squeeze some of the rails together to create fat and thin bits. That works.
Hardly a thing of beauty, but a whole bag of jumbled leads - 37 in total so far - turns into a neat spaghetti monster with stacks of space to spare. I probably have 5 - 6 times that much to go, hopefully it’ll all fit.
IMPROVEMENTS
Some kind of bungee web sphere, where you pop the end through between a web of elastic would be more elegant, and likely hold the cables more securely.
Dangley LED lights, to complete the chandelier effect. This could become a genuine light source for your games room, geek room, that kind of thing.
Dangley bungee grips - like hand loops on the tube - to hook bigger cables into. Perfect for scsi / parallel cables. Why I have so many scsi cables, when I only have one scsi device left I don’t know!
wall mounted cushion - like the bungee sphere, but hangs on the wall so it doesn’t clatter your head when you stand up forgetting that its there.
Rainy Sundays huh - gotta love ‘em! Pics on flickr here.
Popularity: 18% [?]
the washcounter 3000
Black T-shirts go grey. They just do. Unless you never wear / wash them. Use ‘color’ detergents, use ‘colorstay’ dryer sheets, use voodoo and magik. Nothing stops the inevitable ageing of your black shirt into a grey shirt.The age old question though, is which t-shirt lasts longest? I have a feeling that the Meh shirt from thinkgeek stayed black-black for WAY longer than my Roots tee (the one with the cool Atari joystick). But did it, or did I just wear the roots tee more often. How many wash cycles did each pass through?
Introducing the washcounter 3000.
The washcounter is a tiny rfid embedded in the label, which has a heat sensor to tell it when it goes through the machine. It can be interrogated by the washcounter drawerwatcher - which sits in your shirt drawer / closet / wardrobe / rail. This will simply give a list of your shirts, with a simple count of how many times each has been washed. You could even post this to the washcounter live website. You would have an overall score for how often you’d worn each shirt. Some would want a low score, the dark greens would want a high score.
The trivia side alone is worth my money. But the satisfaction of knowing that Meh lasted 10 more washes than Roots must approach that of making a lumpless tasty bechamel, or nailing a perfect level on Q*bert. American apparel could boast exact figures for how black their shirts stay.
Clothing manufacturers could use them to encourage restocking - for example as my Meh shirt appraches 30 washes the drawerwatcher could start to say ‘Meh is getting grey dude, buy something fresh’. Direct access to my brain at the moment that I’m looking for something to wear. A marketers dream!
As I write, washcounter.net is available to anyone who feels the urge to take this on.
Popularity: 22% [?]
Cycla nanotech fabric
This nanotech umbrella sheds water like a ducks back. The nanoscale surface repels water absolutely, so a single shake dries the brolly. Hurrah!
If I had gone down the road of materials research, and currently lived in a little lab in the basement of some university, surrounded by white coats and Apple ][s, Nano would be my thing.
For one simple purpose.
Cycling gloves / mitts usually have a multicoloured patchwork back. This is not for style or fashion. This is not for an ergonomic comfort fit. This is simply so that you know which part of your glove you just wiped your nose on. So that you don’t then wipe your eye with it when a beastie gets lodged there.
So my nanofabric would have a simple use.
Grip tightly to wet stuff, but as it dries, shed it cleanly and immediately. I should be able to dip that thing in tomato soup and it should hang on to that soup like mad. It should be an orange ball! The bowl should be empty. But as soon as the drying power of the wind gets its way, the mitt is sparkly clean again. Bingo.
Cycla is probably sueably close to Lycra as a fabric name. But who cares. I’m not a materials scientist. Sadly.
Popularity: 22% [?]
bubblewrap socks
It struck me when unwrapping my latest bike purchases while standing barefooted in the kitchen, that standing on bubblewrap should be quite insulating and warm. And it was.
In my book that counts as product development research! So…
Introducing bubblewrap house-socks (you know, those oversized socks you wear like slippers, with grippy soles). Some tougher, yet softer, material would be required, but the basic principle would be the same. Just lots of little air bubbles trapped within a waterproof layer.
Think of the advantages over standard house-socks:
- Insulated
- Bouncy
- Bubbly looking (i.e. cool)
- Transparent
- Squeaky
- Waterproof for running out to the garden for herbs
Cool Toes. Taking the idea a little further, for comfort they could have different liquid cores to the individual bubbles - shoes could be bought slightly too big – and the liquid interior could be released through the day to lessen overheated swollen feet syndrome. Christmas or Ikea are the only times I suffer from this.
I don’t think overheated swollen feet syndrome is ever fatal, but if they can sell cans of cold to spray on your feet, I bet they could sell bubblewrap socks you can feed cold water into.
They would be great for use in wellingtons. The double squeak of welly rubber and plastic sock would sound terrifying.
Warm toes. For cycling they could be attached to a pump / heater which cycles warm liquid around your frozen toes on frosty November mornings. This would be an environmentally friendly option, extending the season where cycling to work is a reasonable option. The reservoir of hot water / battery / heating element could be strapped to your leg for a cool robocop look.
Popularity: 23% [?]
wearable led throwies
The months have moved into double figures and it’s starting to be properly dark in the mornings as I cycle to work. I need new lights. My bike currently sports a grand total of 4 leds. Not enough.
I used to have a 3 led bike light sewn into the lower back of my cycling fleece. It worked pretty well, made sure I didn’t forget my lights. But it was a bit clunky, and people laughed at it.
Introducing GLOWIES - the clicky wearable mini led for cyclists.
A simple, single, red LED held on a plastic clip which ‘pin fastens’ through your waterproof / fleece / jersey. (I know this could break your waterproof goretex perfection, but hey, it’s just that last inch of fabric, all it’s protecting is your shorts!). A swappable watch battery provides the power. So far so simple. So what’s new?
I haven’t seen anything like this with a simple switching mechanism. Making them wireless would be too much hassle, and too expensive. Making little switches on them would be an amazingly fiddly process when you have January fingers, and would get gunked up. No - we need a simple, inexpensive, ‘do it with gloves on’ solution. And who better to provide this than our friend the magnet.
With every pack of glowies comes a trigger magnet. This goes on your keyring or something. You just wave the trigger behind the glowies to turn them on, and in front of them to turn them off. An internal switch is then … well … switched to the appropriate position. Simple. The real benefit is obviously that the switch itself is sealed inside the glowie, so can’t get gunked up.
Creative types could draw flowers with them. Rock gods could spell ‘MAIDEN’ across their back in sinister glowing red. But more importantly, I could run a nice row of red lights across my back to make sure cars see me on roundabouts and country roads. And they wouldn’t have a flash mode. I hate flash mode.
Popularity: 22% [?]
desk chair stat monitor
I’m addicted to the stats from my bike computer. I’m addicted to my blog stats. I’m addicted to stats at work. I’m pretty much just addicted to stats.
I want more stats. This got me thinking. Put a Wii style accelerometer in your chair. It can sense your movement on the chair. It can wifi information to your PC to plot your day. It would be able to tell when you were seated, moving, away from your desk etc… At the end of the day you could look at your chart and see that you spend 12% of your day away from your desk.
As well as the soul nourishing stats this could also provide health benefits. A tray icon could flash a warning when it’s been 2 hours since you last left your seat - so you don’t get a seized up body through inaction - or DVT.
Productivity advice could give the opposite message - “you have spent 3 hours so far today away from your desk - lazy boy!“.
Tiny games like minesweeper could be controlled by jiggling about in your seat. Or messages like “you have burned 48 calories by zooming around on your seat today“. These guys have to add this to next years models.
Popularity: 25% [?]
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About Steve
Steve invents things while travelling to work on the train. He sketches them in his moleskine notebooks. Instead of actually making them (and becoming a billionaire overnight) he posts them here for the good of mankind.
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