Portable Dual-Screen Desktop

Forget laptops. They suck if you're someone dependent on two screens for productivity and have to hop from cubicle to conference rooms. What we need is a mac-style PC with the PC integrated into the monitor - second monitor attached to the first at the hinge and full-fledged keyboard that can be detached from one of the monitors. So, to move, you just fold the thing, press the keyboard on and move. Any yes, it needs to be a 19" screen.

OLEDs will help keep the hardware down by eliminating the backlight. Sony might have its first OLED TV out this year. Now that's leadership.

Organic Software

Software that grows from within. The name's been coined already, but I'm redefining it here. Now, I do mean a computer program that grows - but not old - like Windows XP - in a couple weeks, you feel like you're talking to an old man. No sir.

What we need is for the program to know its function and know what it needs to get better and become multifunctional. There needs to be evolution. How? No clue. But, once I've given my brain this problem, I'm sure it'll come up with a way to do this - in about 30 days - how long it takes for some neural pathways to be rewired.

You want to leave your computer on, connected to the internet, and, when you come back, at the end of the day, it should be better because the programs have grown. Hopefully, your PC won't try to strangle you when you get back.

Selling More Camera Phones

made simple. Pass legislation that requires cellphone companies to allocate 10 times the bandwidth during a 911 call and wire the phone to automatically transmit video from the camera - this will help collect evidence and give the cops a more accurate description. The caller can add voice over if he wants. This should increase sales.

Better WebEx

Hope CSCO's listening.

You're an outfit. You produce training materials to help employees with their careers. Now, the outupt of the WebEx recorder is a file that the employee can download - but hopefully won't save on his PC and keep with him forever. What do you do? You hope WebEx adds this - once you've finalized your presentation - you give it some contact information - if the use is going to play the presentation - he'll get a warning saying this is a secure presentation and a message will be sent to the author with the IP address of the host being used to view it. I think that's fair.

Better WebEx

Give the recorder the ability to insert indexes in the presentation. That way, the person handling the AV can put in indexes each time the speaker goes to a new slide. Then, when replaying, you can just step through indexes serially (or in rand-accs fashion) to go quickly to the slide you want.

Groumet Toothpicks

Neem wood impregnated with cinnamon extract. Say goodbye to tooth decay.

Peephole Displays

Projection displays embedded in cellphones are not everything. Reason? Privacy - you don't want many people looking at your presentation. At the same time, how do you provide a 1400x1050 display on your cellphone? Answer - provide a peephole - you've seen those wearable computer displays - the eyepiece is something you attach to your spectacles. Here, you'll hold the phone up to your eye and focus about 4 feet into the distance.

TI-DSP Saves America 700b Manhours

Where is the time to stay in touch these days? You can email and you can call. You want to do both. Unfortunately, you can't talk on the phone with people you know well and keep hammering away at email - that would not sound polite at the other end.

You would think they would have been able to make this available already. Why not a module inbuilt into your phone (or offered as a service at $1 a month by the provider) that can filter out keyboard clicks so that the other party can't hear them? Should be quite trivial. Ja?

The Really Smart Car

Apparently, my brake bads were pressing real tight on my rotors because there was a problem with the calipers - or somewhere in the system - hoses, etc. Question is - based on the direction gravity is pointing relative to the car's frame of reference, why can't the computer figure out if the load on the engine is reasonable or not and communicate that to the driver - if maintenance is indicated. There should be simple ways of figuring out the actual weight of the car. This should be trivial. This alone might have explained the huge discrepancy between my city and highway mileages. Damn! Come on Honda-san.

Win XP Instant Viewer Quick Launch

sent to M$ Support :

Recently, I purchased a Microsoft Mouse and, after installing it, was suprised that, when I pressed the scrollwheel, instead of getting a scrolling anchor, I would get (what I later found out the name of) the instant view. I find I can change this using the control panel.

Question - is there any other way I can launch the instant viewer - can I set up a keyboard shortcut to do it? If I want CTRL-ALT-I or some combination to do it, is it possible? How about a keyboard mouse combination? Like CTRL-ScrollWheel_Click?

Better M$ Windows - Event-Based Reminders

Seems like a no-brainer, but, how do you do it? What I want to do is set a reminder so that, when I send my computer into standby when it's plugged into the docking station (which means I'm done for the day), Win XP will tell me stull that I put in - such as - be sure to take your lunch box home.

Better M$ Windows

Junk plus delta is still junk, but anyway...

I see this computer connected to a 15" eMachines monitor that coexisted along with malicosaurus-ex. It's an AMD 64 running Win XP. It got a DVD+/-RW and a built 9-type smart card reader. The first thing I notice (I intend to look at some alert Gateway throws up about relevant issue being found) is that the screen is flickering. Sure enough, I right-click on the desktop and Properties->Settings->Advanced-Monitor and there I see that only 60 Hz is available. What a shame for such a modern PC. (I fail to realize that this is the monitor and not the PC). So I try from exactly which screen I forget, a lower pixel dimension window size and a higher refresh rate and the flicker is gone, but of course, the viewport is smaller. Then, I get the brainwave to uncheck "hide modes that this monitor cannot display" and see that the card can do all the way upto 200 Hz. Like a fool, without thinking of the consequences, I change to 75 Hz and click Apply and then the screen goes blank. Rebooting is no help - you get to the Windows loading screen, and after that, it applies the settings and you're screwed forever. Luckily, I realize later that it's the monitor that's the problem and not the machine. So, I hook in the 19" CRT that I've got and all is well.

Moral of the story - never trust M$.

Advice for M$ - fix Windows so that, when the user comes to a such a dialog, he also gets a warning telling him to ensure that his audio is working so that Windows can provide help through audio in the event the changes the user makes cause the display to stop functioning. In this case, if that were possible, after I hit apply, Windows could have announced "Changes applied, press CTRL-ALT-F3 to cancel changes" over the speakers. Shame on them and me.

Better Cygwin

You install cygwin on your PC and, at install time, you pick all the packages that sound cool. A month later, you haven't tried a single one out. And, you have no clue what you installed. Sound familiar? Now M$ is soft - they give you a shortcut to everything you installed from the Start menu. What cygwin needs is a gui that can give you a snapshot of your install, a brief desciption of each "big" package you installed and a button to start it with some default options.

People Friendly Linux

In the vein of geeks-aren't-normal-people..

How about linux package designers create short vidoes of how to install and use their packages on a distro that they're unfamiliar with and then post those videos on YT?

I'm disappointed that Google hasn't done anything for Open Source. If they had applied themselves, by now we could all be rid of M$ completely. That hasn't happened and I'm using XL and PPT more intensively than ever.

Badaling Blitzkrieg

This should be a hit with American youngsters. As folks know, in Badaling zoo, children get to pet sheep and then buy them and have them fed to the lions while they watch. How about a videogame where you get thrown to the lions, but being fully armed with the latest peashooter. If you're good with your gun, you live, else you get eaten up.

Saving LA Fitness

Last I saw, they were pretty depressed - trying hard to get new members. Here's a tip - hand out DVD players to members, or instll treamills (etc) that have DVD players. That way, members can choose what they watch - they could record shows onto DVDs or bring movies in. And hand out really good noise-cancelling headphones too.

TI-DLP Enables Any-Angle Projection

You've seen that in the cricket matches - projecting onto the field from a non-orthogonal angle and still getting a perfect picture. But, with present day projectors, you have to set the screen up perfectly. Not good - you would have thought the smart people of the world would have got this done by now. The projector just needs to be able to look at the wall - then, it'll project a standard image, calibrate itself and you're set.

Better Blogger - Auto Maintenence

You want to share something with the world - for example, an audio file that's already out there. Now, you do a search and find a few links and pick one. But, how about putting in the HTML a couple of the other links as alternates. Then, periodically blogger does maintenence and finds that your first choice is defunct and starts using the next one, etc. You get the idea. Let's hope they do.

Register Pitbulls

A sex offender is a threat but he isn't instantly life threatening to every other form of life. Pitbulls are. I think we all should be able to see instantly how many pitbulls live around us and be able to call a number and have them call us back with the locations of all dangerous dogs that live around us. It should be illegal to post details about the exact addresses on the internet - since that makes the owners unsafe from pitbull-haters.

Then, how about a mechanism that detects if a pit-bull is out of restraint? Leash breaks, is out of secure area and collar RFID tag detects that muzzle is not on, etc. These should be no-brainers to implement. When that happens, the entire vicinity should go on alert - car radios that are on (or make the cars smart enough to turn on the radios) will sound the alert and people can get into their cars or others' cars (if others are willing) to take shelter and call 911.

Also, I think there should be required regular testing and certification - both the owner and the dog must be given a basic test every so often that will decide if either is a menace to society. If either fails the test, the dog would need to be culled.

Solar Employees

So big business is feeling the cost of big energy prices. The solution (for 18th century outfits that have 20 acre parking lots purely for ensuring their employees get exersise):

You don't want to tear the tarmac up. So, along the edges, install connectors that hook into the companies power grid. Now, the employees that park there can soup up their cars to convert solar power into electricity and feed it into the grid - and, pay them a rate that's less than what the power companies charge. Childishly simple.

Better M$ Window Browser

As you can verify, Alt-TAB lets you browse the available programs. (Press Alt, hold it down, press TAB, then release TAB). You can use the arrow keys to move between the icons and get previews of the available windows.

Req to M$ - can you please please please enhance this to also provide previews with the mouse? So simple and so annoying. And please send this out in a Windows update.

Gracias.

A Century of Innovation

There must be atleast one good idea here that someone can use. I'm 70% sure there ought to be one.

An Application of High Frame Rate TV

Here's a scenario that can warrant it.

You have a dance hall where you want couples to be able to learn at their own pace. So, each couple has a pair of headsets. One of them has control over the audio and video. The audio is easy - you could do FDMA or TDMA. The video is tricky - because, you want the people to be able to see everything else in the room, but, when they look at the one TV set on the wall, each couple needs to be able to control the content. How? The headsets are transparent 1/10 of the time. So, in one second, you can get each viewer about 20 frames if you do a 200 frame per second rate. That way, it's pretty social and uncluttered. Each headset will be transparent in sync with the channel of course. The problem - you effectively get only 1/10 of the light into the eye that you normally get.

How to Run a Startup

Like True Circuits (not that this is how they run it). I just happen to know that True Circuits maintains their own version of spice that they downloaded from Berkeley and uses magic for layout.

The key is to use open source tools. You can use Matlab, and, the kids working in matlab probably got there on the strength of projects they did as students. So, get a Matlab trial license, try it out, see what you like. Then, look for that in the open-source world. If it doesn't exist, motivate a smart student to create it - he gets to put it on his resume and you get to create your stuff without giving your cake to Mathworks.

Tailgate-Proof Access Control

Applied to cars of course. Very simply, you first get on a see-saw. To get on the see-saw is free. But, when you're on the see-saw without access, the secure area is now about 3' lower (or higher) than the floor the car is on. Now, if you are granted access, the system will tilt the see-saw such that you can easily move onto that secure area, but someone trying to tail-gate will have to make a 3' leap - or drop - which the probably won't (this will send off-road sales through the roof).

Another possibility - rollers that you lock to grant access. So, the approach basically has rods perpendicular to the direction of motion. These rods serve as axes for cyclinders which are the rollers. If they're not locked, then a ratchet arrangement can be used to ensure that the driver can reverse, but, if he tries to go forward, he'll be spinning uselessly. Nice?

Better Orchestras

Seems ancient to me. Why hasn't anyone invented a music stand with a page turner that's foot pedal operated? Haven't you been irritated watching musicians stop playing to turn their pages?

Make Healthy Choices Cost Less

That's the answer to America's problems. One big answer is to use the technology to let people telecommute more. That could be huge by itself - imagine the gas savings. In fact, why not give companies tax breaks for the number of approved work-from-home days the employees put in. The day of working from home must be approved by the supervisor. This way, the shareholders and the board of directors will buy in and all else will..

Better Fluke

You've seen these multimeters lying around the lab. They let you measure capacitance, but not at a desired bias voltage. So will you please?

The One that Saved NBC

How about having Kevin do the monologue for once. He must have a huge stack of jokes he's never been able to use. This could raise NBC's viewership overnight.

Walk to Your Car

We've heard of the shoe that talks to the iPOD. How about the shoe that talks (maybe) to your car keys (the electronic ones) or your phone and tells you how to locate your car? Simple - embed accelerometers in the pedometer that will keep track of direction and distance and you can't go wrong here.

Super Gmail

Not sure if this is possible when your app runs on a browser. But, how about if, when you compose a mail, you can hover over the signature and then gmail offers you options - change to a different signature that's more suited to the tone of the email, etc? Nice?

Courtroom Ballet

We've all seen courtroom drama. How about courtroom ballet? That should be entertaining.

Shirt Tattoos

You don't like permanent stuff on your skin. This might already be out there. How about clothes that look tattoo'd.

C I T I 's Answer

What do they want but for people to take out credit cards and spend? But, some cardholders are conservative - especially when they're not sure how much credit they have left. Here's a solution:

Enhance credit cards and the machines such that, after each swipe transaction, the card will display the credit available. It'll obviously have to be something mechanical so that there's no power consumption involved. Can we pull this off?

TI Power Management Produces Everyone Favourite Rechargeable Battery

Currently, Ni-mh batteries put out 1.2V whereas, non-recharegeable ones put out 1.5V - which is more end-product friendly. Question, why not embed a boost-regulator within in the battery package to put out 1.5V? Of course, you could put it in the electronics also, but this way, you could continue to use the new battery with old electronics.

Better M$ Windows

Windows supports multiple monitors much better than any other OS on the planet - that's a fact. But, they could do a better job:

Suppose you fall in love with a huge LCD monitor at Best Buy - a 36" beast that can do 3000x1200. That's great screen space, but, being one monitor, Windows will not support it in the most user friendly way - which is :

If it's just one monitor, give the user the option of splitting it up into multiple monitors. Like you the "identify" button under Properties->Settings, you can have the display number and the boundary glow when the user hits the identify button. Now, you can split up your 3000x1200 into 2 of 1500x1200 or whatever you want. Why? Then, you can drag a window to one sub-monitor and maximize it by double-clicking on the title bar and it'll only occupy that sub-monitor - very useful feature. When you're dragging the window, Windows will make the sub-montior boundary glow.

Better Cygwin

See, that's what I'm talking about - why Linux continues to lag behind Windows - because the people behind it are computer scientists, not people. If they want to sell to people (with an appropriate definition of "sell" of course), they have to appeal to people. People are their customers and if they don't take care of them, then M$ will.

"Choose a Download Site" during the install process - and it gives you a mammoth list of generous people who host content. How about a world make that you can zoom into and pick from. So simple. !@$!@#$!$#@

A Better Way to Advertise

Wonder if companies already do this:

Put your ad on your website and use your server to randomly insert some keywords or numbers into the add at randome times. Ask viewers to note those down. Then, your server notes down the IP address - uses an IP address locator to get the zip-code of the viewing computer and the time (zip code, time, random keywords provided). Then, you tell your viewer that he can get a mail-in-rebate if he uses the keywords provided when making his purchase.

No-Brainer

Car and home breakins are on the rise in Churchill. They can't have surveillance cameras as that might violate resident privacy. But, why not motion detectors. They have a security guy on the premises 24/7. Why not make all the premises covered by motion detectors that are armed between (say) 12 PM and 6 AM and give the security guy a handheld device that'll tell him where the action is? I think it should be possible to make the motion detector detect the size of the object that's moving - so you can correctly say "cat" or "man".

I volunteered to setup and online group that residents can use to keep track of incidents. Need to get to it.

No Brainer

Doesn't seem to be available yet. I tried a Google on "find the fastest available broadband service provider available to you based on your current IP address". Any tips, let me know.

Here's one fast woman (dig the shot at M$!).

V's Prospects

GOOG was hyped, lived up to its hype, and topped out at a market cap of about $200b.
AAPL has worked long and hard for the same.
Assume V is a worthwhile company. Do you expect it to cross a market cap of $200b? No? Then the best you can do is 2x your investment from this point on.

Count on Your People

Phew - after one trip to Austin, I'm convinced OPEC's used subliminal messages in mainstream broadcast media to get American to drive at a gas-guzzling pace. I stuck to 55 religiously the whole 8 hours and must have been overtaken by about 14 million vehicles. OPEC should have a holiday that recognizes what Americans have done for them.

Truth Solves the Crime

Who's the one person who knows better than anyone else that he's the one that did it? You know, that's the best evidence. You can close your eyes and recall scenes from the past. We haven't figured out yet how to tap into someone's brain and view those images yet. But, when we have! Mandrake the magician figured out how to do it 20 years ago I don't know how - he even got people to project the images on a screen from their eyes. This would be the most foolproof evidence. Only question is how.

Friendlier Air Travel

How about the airlines collect some information (optional) from you before you board and, when you land, the system automatically calls (for example) the person going to pick you up and tells him exactly where to meet you etc? Know how you get voicemail from Orbitz giving you flight status updates, etc - why not ask you if you want someone else to also get the updates? Simple stuff. How about if you want to have a prepaid cellphone waiting for you when you get off the plane? It'll probably double the cost of air travel.

Ice Cream Your Baby Eats

Apparently, babies need to be force fed. But, they all love ice cream. So, how about we help working mothers get their lives back by putting the cure for cancer and improvements to botox on hold and inventing ice cream that's nutritious and tastes the same and contains everything a baby needs.

You're Safe in a Stopped Car

You stop for a school bus and get rear ended by a bum. Or, you've pulled over to the side of the highway for a good reason and, next thing you know, you get hit by a distracted driver. Everyday occurrences, not anymore. Seen those thick waist-high metallinc poles they use to protect some structures - in parking garages and gas stations? Here's the twist - they'll be scattered all over the place and controllable - they'll normally stay underground, except when it's essential to get them out. Say you're in your car and there's an impending collision on account of a bum heading for you. Sensors detect the approaching villian and a computer raises as many poles as required/possible to thwart the villian - he'll have a terrific collision - which he would have anyway - but you'll be as protected as much as possible.

Ankle Bracelet Moving Company

More on the theme of getting basic services without letting unsavoury elements into your house. How about the prospect of business with a company that keeps tabs on all its employees. Employees voluntarily wear ankle bracelets that allow them to be tracked. If they end up in questionable locations, it helps solves crimes. Only those who've built up a good track record of keeping away from trouble - and bums - will have the privilege of helping you with your move. Ya?

Never Miss Again

Ever operated a soap dispenser and wished you knew where the soap was going to come? How about they put an LED or two to create two beams and you position your hands so that both beams intersect? And that's where the best place to catch the soap is. How come I'm giving all these billion dollar ideas away for free?

Concept Cruises

Might exist already.

Instead of a cruise that just takes you round and round in circles, how about one that, say, retraces the voyage of the Bounty, of the Pandora (the ship sent to capture the mutineers), etc? These would be more expensive for sure, but you might get people to sign up.

That's a good way to learn and enjoy learning - retracing the paths of trailblazers - if a kid had a chance to redo all of Edison's experiments and tinkerings, do you think he'd be a kickass inventor?

Better Car Advertising

You joined a network marketing system. So, you need to put a message on your car window saying Do X, Get Y, Call Z. But, you want to be able to switch off the message when you park the car in your company parking lot so that people don't laugh. How?

One way is to use a projector mounted on the ceiling to display stuff on the windows - maybe coat the windows with something that glows when light hits it.

Here's a worthwhile message:

Love your country!
Drive at 55 for better mileage.
Import less foreign oil!

TI-RFID Turns Newspaper Theft into a Game of Tag

Neat? You used to get your newspaper delivered to your door and someone would help himself (women don't steal newspapers). Now, you get the newspaper with an RFID tag. The delivery guy touches it to a smart reader that's part of your door. Now, the reader is armed. It will keep sending bursts to the tag and expect responses in the form of RF modulated backscatter. So, if the newspaper were to vanish, it would set off an alarm. The smart part - the tag is in a random location in the newspaper and part of the newspaper - so, it'll be hard for Mr. Thief to cut it out and leave just the tag on your doorstep. Yeah!

Number Grabber

Picture this - you're in the lab looking at something and you're filling out an Excel spreadsheet (or a Mac spreadsheet or a Google spreadsheet). How about a device that you can use to point at each instrument display and click a button and it fills out a cell in your spreadsheet? This shouldn't be hard at all - the device is plugged into USB and acts like a keyboard. The tough part is recognizing the number - which, considering it's froma 7 segment LED or LCD display, shouldn't be too hard too.

Another idea is to use short range wireless to get all the instruments on your bench to show up on your PC as links. Then, when you're filling out your spreadsheet - you just click on one, then the next, then the next, etc. Or better still, you just put the links in your Excel and click one button and it fills out all the column this row. Nice?

Better Emergency Radio

You know those ones that make good gifts at holiday time? No batter required - you just crank it. How about one that can also receive crime alerts. So, if there's been a crime in your zip-code, you'll get something blinking and you can listen to a sound bite. Maybe this is more complicated than just a receiver, but I think it's a worthwhile thing for the population to have. The number one problem in the world is crime and injustice. If we make overpopulation (overcopulation) a crime as well, then we just have one problem to solve.

X-Ray Eyes (and PCBs)

This should be a worthwhile business in any town that has a booming electronics business. Oftentimes, an outfit will have trouble with one of their circuit-boards. They can be hard to troubleshoot because it's hard to locate the fault. Here's what you do:

Ask them for the bad board and a good board (if both were good, they'd be identical).

Now, take 3 X-Ray images of both - in the 3 cartesian directions.

Then, get your program to compare the images and figure out where the bad board has shorts or opens.

Send a big bill.

Read People - On Your Laptop

How about you plug something into the USB port - that looks like a small USB drive. Actually, it's an IR camera. Here's the overall application - you're in a meeting and you and you want to get peoples' reactions to what you do. You can run a program that will overlay people's temperature maps over their faces.

Emirates++

This will make travel laptops much lighter. Why not airlines offer passengers head mounted displays with XVGA resolution. So, you carry a barebones laptop - which could be as small as a blackberry for all you care, and, the airline gives you a tray that has a keyboard and mouse and a cradle to dock the cpu in. So, basically all you carry is the CPU and micro-harddrive and some other basic stuff. Keyboard, mouse, etc are available where you go. You might want to carry your own head mounted display if you don't trust the one people lend you to not record stuff - same goes for the keyboard.

The next wave - disposable keyboards. You take if off the plane and drop it into an incinerator and watch it melt:)

Selectively Visible Ink

This might be a hard one to pull off. How do you create ink that only some people, equipped with a certain gadget can see? If you're on a plane and you get an idea and want to write something, you don't want people watching. The very idea that someone might be able to see any of what you write is a distraction more than anything else. If you're putting a fancy head mounted display on the person, then it's not so hard at all.

Sports Commentary Contest

Better than a game show - get ordinary people (who have the courage) to look at action replays and comment on them - as if they were real commentators. Who knows how it would be in practice?

Centrum++

Ever wonder if you've already taken your one-a-day for the day? How about they rig the bottle so that, once you've taken your pill, something on the outside changes and indicates that and keeps that state for a few hours before reverting to the not-yet-taken state? Would simplify life by delta, but they all add up.

World's Most Expensive Basketball Court

Outfits like LA Fitness might make some extra money with this sort of thing - renting the court out to up-and-coming serious hoopsters.

The basic idea is this - you have about 10 basketballs that you use for your practice. You shoot and then, you immediately reach for another ball that's right by you and shoot again and keep on going - practise basically. You get the idea. Now, if you have a partner dedicated to helping you, that's fine. But what if you haven't?

Suppose you had a court that had an elastic surface with actuators (and sensors of course) underneath it. So, you can detect where a ball bounced for the first time and, if you're smart enough, based on _how_ it bounced, where it's going to bounce next and modify the surface a bit to steer the ball such that our budding hoopster doesn't need to move much - he focuses on shooting. If you have about 10 balls on the court, the surface really doesn't have to move much at all - meaning that there' plenty of time for you to get the ball back to where it needs to be after it's first bounce.

This could probably go into the first billion-dollar home. That's a new idea in itself - if no one's done it already. Problem would be taxes I guess - the local government would probably be smiling. Best is to do what Dean Kamen did - find an island and make a separate country out of it and build your house there.

Gmail++

Let us save our emails (all of them) to our hard drive so that we can do our own searches (using regexes!)

Make it possible to search for XXX-XXX-XXXX and combinations thereof - to search for phone numbers (subset of a regex of course)

Watch, What You Want

Imagine this:

You go out to dinner with someone, you talk a bit about movies. How about if you could then go into a theater and watch one of the ancient movies you just talked about?

What sort of technology would support that? You want other people around - that's part of the date. And they're watching something else - they might laugh spontaneously - so you want to cancel that out - it's noise. Then, you don't want to put on some eyewear - you want to be able to notice people around you. Somehow, what you see needs to depend on your position relative to the screen.

But, this could be huge if you could pull it off. A totally new concept.

Add to it, a way of materializing in your seat without distracting the others - because, with this technology, your show could start anytime - which, when you think of it, takes something away from the experience - makes sense to start everyone's movie at the same time - and, this is where bonus/spare footage will come in handy in making everyone's experience the same length.

Neat huh?

Better Oscilloscopes

Told this to the Tek rep. If you've been in a lab, you've been asked atleast once if you have a USB stick. The idea - put a detachable USB stick on each oscilloscope. When someone takes it out - the machine starts beeping annoyingly, so they have to put it back.

Bottom Fishing for Charity

Alright, you want to get better at market timing. Here's how:

You give some money to charity every week. Make it once in two weeks.

Then, look for stocks and buy the stock with the saved up money. What you're hoping is that the stock will only go up - even in days - because the charity is sure to sell it (which is why they need to keep asking for money). If they don't sell, all the better, try to pick stocks that will anyway work out in the long term.

You do have to work through converting from street name, etc. Your broker will help. I've never done this of course.

YouTube ++

Don't think this one exists either.

Why not let you create a playlist instantly and then play all of those. You want to sit to a meal and watch an episode of something that's been split up into three parts. You did a search; all of them showed up. Now, display the results with a checkbox next to each one. The order in which you check the boxes decides the order in which they'll play.

Blogger ++

Being a geek, I'd be surprised if this feature already exists and I just missed it.

Could they please help with top-posting? You know how you each have one out of your hundreds of posts that you're particularly proud of, not dated, etc. You'd always like that one to show up on top of the rest.

Fovea Centralis for Your Cellphone Camera

How about this. You get into your car. You put your phone into a jack and lo and behold, it starts recording with a 10 minute looparound. And, it has one or many fovea centralises. So, when license plates come into view, it records them. Now, if someone does a bad traffic thing, you just send your video in and collect a small percentage of the fine.

You Tube and Better Customer Service

So you want to explain to the rep what your problem is. Why not make a video of it and post it on You Tube? The You Tube phenomenon is one of my new time drains. I've spent most of my time with the illegal uploads - Blackadder, Mind Your Language, Whose Line..