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: 26% [?]
bike saddle post locator
I’ve been cycling a lot recently, requiring me to leave my bike locked up outside the office, outside shops, all over the place.
I’m always paranoid about theft, so I lock the bike. I pop off the front wheel and lock it too. Just to be safe. I don’t pop off my saddle as often as I should though. Usually I can’t be bothered. Not because it takes time to remove - but because it takes time to put back in exactly the right place. That doesn’t mean it won’t be stolen someday though.
Introducing the bike saddle post locator thingy.
I line up my saddle post using the line of grease and grime that builds up. But if I’m in a hurry it can be a smidge too high or low, and a smidge to the right or left. This can have a serious impact on certain parts of a chaps anatomy if he’s not careful.
The locator is a collar you attach to the post which fits exactly where you want your post to rest (the excellently drawn white thing above). You just push down until you feel the clunk - and drop the quick release. Job done. No brain input needed. You could do it in the dark. Easy.
That deals with the height. The rotational alignment is handled with a lug pointing downwards at the back of the collar. This fits between the fastening bars for your quick release. Angled to be a universal fitting, it simply drops between them to get everything aligned. Bingo.
I’ll need to prototype to see if the act of tightening the quick release scuppers this part of the plan. On a test with a big screwdriver and some duck tape it looked okay though.
I’ve looked everywhere and can’t find anything like this. The fabrication would be easy, it could be a cool color. It could weight almost nothing. It could have an LED in it, or a mount for a light. It MUST exist.
And while I could replace the quick release with a straight bolt, then I’d have even more hassle getting the bike into the back of the car than I do now. And yes I could just leave the bike rack on the car at all times, but that’s just not very green. Is it.
CC bike post pic thanks and credit to http://flickr.com/photos/rulerofheck/380537663/ (saved me washing my own).
Popularity: 23% [?]
what color is my website - colortoy 2
I’ve made a modest extension to colortoy 1, and quite grandly titled it colortoy 2. Where colortoy 1 told you the average color of a single image, this version tells you the average color of a webpage. Just enter a page URL below to see the color of that page. One step closer to the webcam weather project.
Just tap in an address or try it for bbc.co.uk, techcrunch.com, boingboing.net, facebook.com, nick.co.uk. Green peppers and red tomatoes.
The thumbnails are courtesy of the excellent thumbnail generator at artViper.
This will run more slowly than colortoy 1 because the thumbnails are being generated before being tested.
Popularity: 19% [?]
pot hole quick fixer
I’ve done some googling and can’t find anything, but I’m sure this must exist already.
Rural roads get potholes. Potholes need fixing. This takes time, closing the road, and causing general dismay, delay and hassle. Top Gear did a thing about it. As with all things TV, it’s on YouTube here.
The idea. A special heavy truck with a 3 foot square drill bit and a compactor. It drives over a hole in the road, is stationary for just 5 minutes per pot hole - scoops out broken bit, drops in pre-set cube of surfaced tarmac into a puddle of molten tar. A perfect surface in an instant. Well, 5 minutes. Maybe 10. It wouldn’t handle some problems, but it would deal with a huge percentage of problems I see.
It would also look very thunderbirdy!
The important thing being that the road doesn’t have to close. It would be a low cost 2 man operation – ideal for single track roads in remote areas, or heavily used streets in city centre where closure would cause vast hold-ups.
For some reason this job feels like it would be similar to fencing, with all the excitement that entails. Someone must know of a site / link where this kind of thing exists.
CC workman sign from http://flickr.com/photos/currybet/24754916/
Popularity: 14% [?]
colortoy one
My recent idea for a global webcam weather network got me coding. Introducing color toy 1. A very simple tool to let you see the average color of an image. I’m playing with grabbing the average color of a few outdoor webcams over time to plot color etc.. against time. I thought some of you might enjoy playing with it too.
For example to see the current ‘color of Aberdeen’ click here. It’s grabbing the City Council webcam view of the harbour. Glamorous.
To see your own average color just drop the URL of a JPEG into the form above. Something like “http://l.yimg.com/www.flickr.com/images/home_photo_codepoet.jpg” (see it here). It has to be a jpeg, anything else will likely break the tool and give worrying DB errors etc… Actually some JPEGs seem to do that too, PHP seems to hate the encoding or something. Just make sure you play nice, and make any images reasonably sized, legal, and colorful!
If you know of any good outdoor webcams publishing a jpeg, rather than a flash stream or other less accessible format, do email me the URL > steve@inventoids.com. Collecting data from them will help with Color toy 2 which will be a step closer to the global webcam weather thing. I’ll post the source once I’ve cleaned it up a bit, PHP isn’t my strongest.
Some interesting / useful bits and pieces on the bookmarks as part of this. Mainly related tools, techniques and posts:
- Image Magick - open source image manipulation and calculation
- Wisegeek - another image / color / flickr mashup giving a hex value from a Flickr image ID
- PHP Imagecolorat() - starting pointin the PHP manual for color experiments
- Theo - nice flash single image color averaging
- drunkmenworkhere - interesting ‘color of the web’ project
- fractulus - search for images by color
- AntoAPI - nice ajaxy implementation of color calculating
Popularity: 18% [?]
thinkie - a more creative pen
I typically write with a pencil when I’m thinking, and with a pen when I’m doing.
When I’m in think mode, the pencil lets me erase stupid thoughts or simply those which are replaced a few moments later by others.
When I’m doing, I just want stuff to hit the paper and stick. I’m not interested in editing, altering, or thinking. I just want to get that work down on paper. Smudgy pencil is no use, you need the high contrast, crisp lines of a pen. Think how wishy washy gaping void would look drawn in pencil. Not all of us can get straight to the finished article though. I need a pen that allows for correction.
Introducing the thinkie pen.
The thinkie assists and even drives the assessment of creative sketching. I sit down to draw a mouse with my thinkie. I draw the mouse. I don’t like the mouse, so I draw another mouse next to it. I like that mouse better. But I draw a third mouse, just to be sure. By this point I decide I actually prefer mouse 1. All I do to lock mouse one in place is mark over it with the other end of the pen- fixing the ink. If I don’t do that the lines will disappear after 5 minutes. I ignore the other 2 mice, they disappear. I have one left. My favourite mouse.
This drives an assessment of which parts of the page I want to keep - but avoids the rash instant deletion associated with the pencil / eraser combo. Mouse 1 would have died if I’d used a pencil.
It also assists with time management. I know most of my ideas in any one area will come out in the first 5 minutes. Beyond that I may well just be messing about with the same few thoughts. The fade would warn me to move on to something else.
The thinkie could be sold as a sudoku pen. I can imagine the panic rising when trying to complete the puzzle in 5 minutes before their initial numbers start to disappear. Perhaps the ink could go down on paper blue, then turn black before disappearing, so you had that visual queue to ‘lock’ the thought.
Marketing could center around ‘locking thoughts’ and escaping the pencil tyranny. I’m not sure of the chemistry involved, but I’m sure it’s possible.
Thanks for the CC photography to http://flickr.com/photos/balakov/253548664/
As ever, if you know of such a pen let me know.
Popularity: 12% [?]
global webcam weather monitor
Another overcast morning. Joy. I’ve had an idea for a distributed weather forecasting / tracking project though. Every cloud…
Basically everyone who has a webcam leaves it on when not being used, and points it out of their window. A small app on their PC then sends a stream of images to a web service which sets the view onto a map.
If the cam is pointing at the sky, or at something outdoors at least, changes in colour, brightness, etc… will indicate local weather conditions.
When a cloud passes over a district, the central server can see the webcams darken in succession. It can then drive a real time view to the website for people in the area. I could see a dark mass approaching from the west, and predict rain arriving shortly.
If it looks like it got dark a mile away, I can look at the nearest webcam to see for myself in more detail. That way I can see if it is cloud, or just a cat sitting on the windowsill blocking the light. If it’s a cloud, I should be able to see if it’s raining, or just overcast.
This is much better than pictures of clouds with raindrops coming out of them and some guy yabbering on about it being ‘mainly clear with some showers’.
The weather map would look like one of those photographs made up of thousands of other photographs. Or it could simply take an aggregate color / brightness value from webcams within the area.
Scale
If the central server is replaced by a swarm of nodes then even better as it could be totally open and distributed. Most people will only be interested in local weather, as this is really a micro weather forecasting system, allowing me to see actual weather near me now. If I’m about to go out for a run, or to cycle to work, this is amazingly useful. The data then doesn’t have to travel too far, other than reporting out broad aggregate values – for plotting on the national maps.
It could also plot the average colour of the webcams across the country – it would be beautiful when it snows. Animations would look amazing. Flash mashups with google maps and time animations as big storms moved over an area could look amazing. Screensavers could be great too – based on live feed info.
You would also be able to see night time approaching as cams get darker – again, animating this could be cool.
A lot of towns and cities have webcams running 24/7 already which could be used to trial this. Even if they point at something complex, so long as it is outdoors it would work, it is the change we are looking for, darkening or lightening for example. We don’t need to actually see the sun or the cloud for this to work. Assuming the project consumes the webcam feed lightly, I can’t see any objection people could have to allowing it to harvest already published images.
It could be operationally similar to open street map, a great project which produces maps in this people generated manner. Some geotagging group should be able to accomodate kicking off something like this, and have a sound tech foundation for it already from other projects.
Thanks for the CC webcam pics to http://flickr.com/photos/konnecke/268895705/ and http://flickr.com/photos/snype451/42070498/
The sketch:
Popularity: 14% [?]
dogometer
Fat dogs are everywhere. This is a pedometer that you hang on your dogs collar. It measures levels of doggy activity, and wi-fi reports to your PC how active your dog has been. Software knows the breed, age, weight etc… and gives advice on how long a walk to take pooch for this evening.
The function should be almost passive for the owner, they shouldn’t have to go looking for this information, it needs to land in their email, on their tv, or on the phone / sms. It needs to actively pursue the owner to take the dog out for a walk. People who already walk the dog enough don’t need this – unless they just like numbers (like I do).
There are a few products out there giving the basic pedometer distance and calorie counts for pets (notably petometer.com) but none that I can find that take things further.
Optional extra – it could send electric shocks through the dogs collar to make it dance, thereby burning calories!
Optional extra 2 – a locked food bowl which only opens when bowser has done his 20 minutes of exercise for the day.
Optional extra 3 – a pet operated add on ‘leash hook’. This is a wifi enabled hook you place on your wall, it holds the dogs walking leash. When the dog is under exercised the hook drops the leash, prompting the dog to pick up leash, run to owner, and request walkies. Pure fred bassett.
PC Interface options – it could have an icon on your desktop of a fat ugly crying dog when your dog is being too lazy, or a fit excited happy dancing dog if it was doing well. Actually, this could drive your screen saver – so that as you return to your pc you see your sad, lazy dog on the screen and think ‘I’ll take shep for a walk before I finish that report’. For more organised types it would use direct advice – like “dogometer recommends a 20-30 minute walk today”.
The key here is to use cheap wifi to hook into peoples wireless and send messages to a centralised account which monitors the dogs activity. Simple messages are then conveyed back to help promote dog health - taking away the need for the owner to think too much. People don’t seem to like thinking too much. The ongoing messages could even be sponsored, allowing the initial purchase to be the only direct expenditure.
Thanks for the pic of the dog to http://flickr.com/photos/charlesfred/1264976479/
[no sketch pic for this inventoid - until I find that notebook again]
Popularity: 11% [?]
stairbags
Staircases are dangerous places. Especially for small people. That’s why the world needs stairbags.
Used instead of ugly child stair gates – stairbags are small, elegant, beautifully designed pouches that you install at various points on your staircases. If they sense a child falling they expand, filling the space with fluffy clouds of synthetic inflated balloon joy for the clumsy child to relax in until they wait for adult assistance to arrive.
Advantages: You don’t need to open them every time you pass. You don’t need to remember to close them every five minutes. You don’t need 2 hands. You aren’t tempted to step over them, causing you to break a leg as you fall down the stairs. They look cool.
Why spoil your minimalist heaven with clunky gates? why measure and install with screwdrivers? Why open and close a gate every time you need the loo? – just peel the sticky back and place on wall.
They could be as unobtrusive as an air freshener. Actually, they would be less obtrusive because they wouldn’t smell.
The deluxe model could SMS your mobile when activated if you’re house is so big you can’t head the BANGSWOOOOSH deployment noise.
The deterrent factor could be accommodated by the airbag unit saying ‘No‘ as small people approached the stairs.
The standard model should probably play an alarm – loud enough to draw attention, not so load as to freak out fallen child. Perhaps an alarm AND some nursery rhymes in a soothing voice. Or just a voice saying ‘apple crumble’ repeatedly to distract the trapped small person.
Also available in stumbly elderly relative size!
They could also be used to catch burglars!
Waterproof models could even be fitted to showers for old people who may slip and smack their head on a tiled floor.
Add some LED lighting to these on a trigger from the motion sensor and you have a safer staircase for everyone in the dark, not just when falling. Cool red lasers could make you feel like sneaking downstairs for a biscuit in the middle of the night was a Mission Impossible.
Some airbag manufacturer has to be able to make money out of making these! The car market must be saturated, even cheap tiny Mazdas have about 9 in them.
Thanks for the CC image base for the diagram above to http://flickr.com/photos/kikisdad/25543650/
Popularity: 8% [?]
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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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