Entries Tagged 'Invention' ↓
December 20th, 2006 — Coding, Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products, Society
Problem: Spammers Annoys Me
Solution: Me Annoy Spammers (FireFox Plug-in)
“Any energy you send out, it shall return to you three-fold” — Wiccan philosophy
You can make a FireFox plug-in that allows a user to tag some URLs as spam. The plug-in would then visit each link in the spam ten times, loading pages and filling in forms. It would fill in forms with random, possibly plausible, values. It would do this only a few times for each spam received. All this would happen in the background.
There have been various centralized attempts at using bandwidth usage costs against spammers: Lycos launched the “Make Love Not Spam” screen saver; BlueFrog attempted a forcible opt-out method. Most of these attempts have had a centralized, vulnerable component. A Hassler plug-in would have be controlled and selected by the end user.
Technology can be used for good or ill. The same technology would allow a user to pick a website they
disagree with and continually spam the site.
Harmless sites could be hassled to death by random annoying people. This is a cute hack to do more good than bad in the short run. In the long run, the email protocols need rethinking.That said, the core pieces of this hack include:
- A method of scanning the highlighted text for URLs and adding those URLs to a current targets list that records sites to be hassled and how many more times they should be hassled.
- A method of picking an idle time in the browsing process to start loading a page and associated images, cookies, and frames into a buffer.
- Scanning the buffer for forms to automatically fill, or for links to follow.
- Options box for everything.
December 19th, 2006 — Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products
Problem: Some people get paranoid about iodine deficiency and they use less salt.
Solution: Sell “super iodized” salt with twice the iodine.
Some people get paranoid about iodine deficiency. Iodine deficiency is the leading, preventable cause of mental retardation: even a mild iodine deficiency can drop a child by 10 or 15 IQ points. Iodine deficiency causes drawfism, cretinism, and other not fun issues. Combating this problem, $1.50 worth of postatium iodate is added to each ton of salt. Still, many people omit salt from home cooking.
There is a niche for “super iodized salt”. Note that “double iodized salt” exists: it is iodine plus some iron. A full strategy might have various fortified salts and salt substitutes available to a niche health market.
See also: New York Times report on efforts to iodize salt
December 13th, 2006 — Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products
Problem: Sweets are the easiest small treats for children. Candy is available at every retailer and comes in convenient bulk packages.
Solution: Toys should be the easiest small treat for children. Small toys can be found in the bottom of breakfast cereal and Crackerjacks boxes or from coin operated machines at the front of grocery stores. There is a market for jars of 25 or 100 individually wrapped small toys.
There are a lot of times where we want a supply of toys for small children: party treats, Halloween treats, rewards for good behavior, and a wide variety of bribes. The only substitute good I have found are stickers, which are a poor substitute. Having a recognizable yet unique treat would be worth about $0.50 per toy. I believe the toys could be manufactured and distributed for well under $0.25 per toy.
These small toys could include bouncing balls, small cars, little bendable dolls, brain-teasers, plastics parts that click together, and more. To be effective, one would need about forty different toys per line, and have different lines for ages under 3, 3-5, 5-8, and 8+. As the line expanded, the toys could also target small niches: educational toys (Brain Toys), religious toys for various markets, outdoor toys, restaurant toys, gender specific toys, and various level of super toys (at a small additional cost).
The packaging should be cheap. While one could go with the standard egg found in coin operated dispensers or KinderEggs, one could also go with the cheaper paper blister packing of M&Ms. I expect that batches of either 25 for consumer sales or 100 for point of resale displays would be about right.
The business model would be to buy about forty different toys per line from Chineese manufacturers, have them packaged in China, then sell them through wholesalers (if you can get them), toy catalog sales, party stores, and more.
What’s the catch? There is no barrier to entry: the idea isn’t patentable; branding probably won’t keep out competitors; there are many suppliers; packaging isn’t unique; there are many channels and outlets with unique requirements; and lots of niche markets to encourage micro-competitors. On the plus side, consumers really don’t need expensive advertising or education about the product. There should be pent-up demand.
A great one or two person job for someone with low expenses or appropriate experience. I would like to buy some.
October 16th, 2006 — Coding, Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products
Problem: English is a hard language, full of homonyms, odd grammar rules, and spelling that is one step above random. When I was a child, I constantly misspelled “their” as “thier”. Even now, spelling and grammar mistakes creep into everything I type.
Solution: A new spelling checker. I learned, quite by accident, that retyping a word helps me to remember its spelling far more than just hitting the ‘correct this’ button on the spell-checker. Also, some words are more likely for me to misspell. I would like an online spell checker with these features:
- Have me retype misspelled words, instead of just hitting “OK”.
- Show me a few words of definition for words as I hover over them, along with alternate words.
- Highlight words that are often misused, such as “their, they’re, there” or “affect, effect”. Vary the color of the highlighting based on my proficiency in the past.
- Provide the basic grammar checking and complexity guidelines from the 1980s program Grammatik.
- Provide some support of english as it evolves, such as checking with Google to see if “Grammatik” has many hits, or comparing “computer aided” to “computer-aided”.
- Show me my most misused words on demand.
In writing this short paragraph, I misspelled “grammar” three times, and “misspell” once. 
October 10th, 2006 — Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products
Problem: Teachers spend a lot of time grading papers, often papers of the “circle the correct answer” variety. One simplistic speed-up is to make a “mask” that shows the correct answers. A mask can be made with a long-arm hole punch, but this takes to much time.
Solution: Make, or find, a pen that eats a small hole through the material used in overhead transparencies. Transparencies come in various chemistries, and pens come in sometimes incompatible chemistries. There should be a really bad match so that a pen could be sold as “hole punch pen for acetate” or the like.
Our charity, TrueGift Donations, packed about 80 cubic feet of school supplies recently leaving the volunteers sitting down and chatting afterwards. The subject came up.
September 23rd, 2006 — Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products
Here’s one of those simple ideas with absolutely no barrier to entry, and is more of a craft project.
Problem: I have always loved beautiful notebooks and journals leather and wood inlays. I have no excuse to have more. Also, I forget which books I read over time, for I read so many.
Solution: Create an heirloom quality journal to record which books are read over time. It should preprinted pages for remembering what books you have read, much like the preprinting in a blank address book. For each book, you could record the a third of page with the name, author, publication year, genre, notes, and your rating. Over time, this could be a source of nostalgia and to jog ones memory. For young readers, it would also give a sense of accomplishment.
This probably exists in some form already; it’s a simple idea with no new technology. At a mininum, one could make an ink stamp to stamp and existing blank journal.
September 13th, 2006 — Idea, Ideas, Invention, Politics
This is just a small idea, with low cost and low resistance.
Problem: Sneaky junk mailers try to make their envelopes look like official government mailings
Solution: Every piece of mail from the Federal or State government should have the same official seal.
Yes the Department of Obscure Services can have its own logo, but the government seal would be first. Even your lowly city government could place the seal first, as long it was followed by a logo that said “City of …”. A good seal might be something as simple as a square box with the words “GOVERNMENT MAIL”. Postal Service regulations could prohibit any mail with anything near this seal.
The details for the post office would need to spelled out:
- No private mail with a box or other enclosure in the corner.
- No boxes or enclosures anywhere on the envelope with the word “GOVERNMENT”, “MAIL” or “OFFICIAL”
- No boxes or enclosures anywhere on the envelope in light blue
This would need to be phased in over a few years. The primary cost would be those agencies that now need to print light blue onto their envelopes. Even these could just print in black and white if necessary.
