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: 9% [?]
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: 11% [?]
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% [?]
moleskine indexing hack tool
I love my moleskine notebook, it just feels nice. I need a way to structure my books, and get to sections quickly but I hate those sticky tabs GTD addicts use to organise them. They just get bent, or pushed out of place, or lose their stick. I carry my notebook in my bag, my pocket, in my cycling backpouch. Anywhere. Stuff just gets bashed.
I would much prefer a simple cut out ‘inverted tab’ like you get in old diaries to mark the months. A tool to achieve these would be amazingly useful, like a mutant stapler or nail clipper. To test the idea I got out the trusty Stanley knife:
The squared notebook gives a nice line to follow for the cuts. Any tool should aim to exactly fit these lines, just to enhance the feel of the finished tab.
The very square edge is a little open to becoming frayed and bashed, so the tool should be a curved die giving a nicely rounded corner to the tabs. Either the square shallow tab as shown here, or a deeper semi circular version would be nice. I clipped only 5 pages at the start of a section.
The side view shows the general effect. These inverted tabs are very easy for your thumb to locate. I’ve used them to split one notebook into 6 separate sections, for separate projects, all along the vertical side. For a more sophisticated setup a mix of tabs on the top, bottom and edge could separate 3 different types of sections, with individual sub sections along the length of the edge.
The 10 minutes playing with the Stanley knife was quite fun, but could grow boring pretty quickly. A tool would be very convenient, the standardised size and shape would be pleasing, and I bet the chances of slicing your finger would be much less than using a knife. I bet every moleskine addict would buy (and receive) several for gifts. Especially if they were a sexy leather bound minitool you could carry in your bag.
My googling hasn’t turned up any suitable tools, there are several die cut tools featured on crafting sites, but none are really small enough, or simple enough to use. If you know of anything suitable please let me know below or at steve@inventoids.com.
As ever, this was initially sketched on the train - before mocking up the output. Here is the sketch:
Popularity: 100% [?]
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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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