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A tribute to product and tool ideas that should exist, and hopefully will become reality very soon. Many of these ideas are a combination of existing or pending technologies (some rumored), so if you have specific knowledge about these technologies or their application, your comments are highly encouraged.
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Sunday
8/6/2006 11:29:37 PM
(CST)
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Michael Wells
I've managed to involve myself in a lot of different clubs lately, each of which have their own constantly changing schedules, and it's become tricky to keep track of it all.
An obvious solution is online calendars. They're central, and most people have access to the web. Properly designed, it will notify anyone by email when the calendar changes (based on your settings, e.g. notify me of any changes occuring within the next 2 weeks).
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Tuesday
5/23/2006 10:04:19 PM
(CST)
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Michael Wells
Potty training is one of those things we've all had to go through. Well, at least I hope you've been through it. And I think we can all agree that while it may never be fun, it can certainly be made better.
Why not... a 2-ring toilet seat? Flipped up, you'd have 3 layers, all joined at the same hinge. The bottom-most layer would be the adult seat. The middle layer, which flips down on top of the adult seat, is the child's seat. Same size, smaller hole, and probably glow-in-the-dark so you can tell easily whether it's up or down. Maybe covered with Barnies or something else that encourages bathroom-related body functions. The top layer, of course, is, the lid.
Maybe give the child's seat a stick-out tab (not where the legs go, please), so the kids can grab it more easily for raising and lowering.
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Tuesday
5/23/2006 10:03:45 PM
(CST)
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Michael Wells
I hate my couch. Why? Well, it's simple; I want to be able to use it in different ways that it just doesn't function well.
First, I want it to be in front of the fireplace, so that I can lay there and enjoy the full warmth and beauty of a winter fire while i'm writing. But, I don't want it to block the fireplace from view of the rest of the living room (or the dining room, beyond that).
Also I like that I can sit facing out, but most of the time I want to lay back with legs outstretched. Especially when I'm in a romantic mood and want to be close to someone special. Then I want to face them while we chat away into the night, rather than having to twist to the side or something equally neck wrenching and unpleasant.
So... why not a new couch, eh?
I think that I've seen this before in turkish or persian designs, but isn't there a couch which has no back, but two very long ends? Imagine your regular couch, with the back removed, but with the ends of the couch raised up to the same height as the back.
Sort of like two easy chairs facing each other, but connected. Lay down, sit facing in or out, or lay back and sit facing someone else. I think it should also be a bit lower to the ground to avoid blocking the fireplace, but with enough room beneath for, say, a bookshelf? Or some drawers? Maybe a power jack for your computer?
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Saturday
12/24/2005 10:42:47 AM
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Michael Wells
It doesn't matter how great the iPod is, after 8 hours of wearing headphones, you'll probably have a nice ache. Plus, isn't it selfish to have such rockin' tunes on your 'Pod when no one else can hear them?
I think the perfect solution would be to add a bluetooth chip to the iPod, and then find some kind of bluetooth boom box. Then you could just rock away, loud as you like, no cables needed. And eventually, you could ditch that headphone cable as well, and just have little rechargable earbuds. I LIKE IT!
But clearly I'm not the first to want such a thing, so let's see what's out there...
What would be really cool, is if my bluetooth boom box could also talk to my bluetooth cellphone, and connect to my favorite Internet radio stations. Listen up cellphone providers! We're talking serious GPRS traffic here...
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Friday
8/12/2005 9:01:34 AM
(CST)
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Michael Wells
I was talking with a friend today, who was observing the trend around Internet-in-your-car. With a decent bandwidth connection, there are some truly great applications;
- Stay connected. Email, FAX, IM, it's all there (and personally, I think you should only be able to use it when the car is standing still).
- Ditch your carphone; use Skype and a bluetooth headset. Nice.
- Figure out what's going on tonight in your area.
- Listen to your home music collection (stored on, e.g. your Microsoft Media Center) while in your car. No CD's, no transferring music around.
- Stream video to the back seat for your kids. And it should be noted, cartoons compress 12 times better than photographic video, so the bandwidth can be much less.
But here's what really interests me. If your car can reliably maintain a strong Internet connection, whether it's using cellular technology, or WiMax, or satellite... perhaps it can re-boost that signal and create a mobile 802.11b lily-pad for you. So whether you're at the park, in a restaurant, at the beach, or fishing by the lake, you have your own personal 802.11 base station for all your devices (phone, laptop, PDA).
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Tuesday
7/5/2005 9:56:39 AM
(CST)
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Michael Wells
Roland Piquepaille blogs on body batteries, the title of which instantly attracted my attention, but the content of which was a bit of a disappointment. Roland points at Argonne's work on implantable batteries, which is interesting, but only mildly so.
The reason the title caught my attention is that I thought the article was about the use of the human body as a power source. It should be simple to draw some energy from normal body processes; for example;
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Monday
6/13/2005 3:52:03 PM
(CST)
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Michael Wells
The idea of "publish as HTML" has always annoyed me a little. When it first appeared in products, it was a neat convenience. Limited? Sure, but if you could cope with the generator rules and the resulting HTML styling, it still offered value.
Today, both webservers and application software have continued to mature but the custom-format-to-HTML conversion process is still in pre-school, and it's become frustrating.
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Sunday
4/4/2004 12:23:00 PM
(CST)
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Michael Wells
Unlimited portable storage - the dream of every serious computer user, especially the mobile ones. CDRW's improved the world vastly, and DVD+/-RW is continuing in that vein - but there are downsides. Discs are damageable, don't handle direct sunlight well, and still cap out around 5GB of storage, max.
USB keys are growing in size, with 1 GB seen more often these days. Portable harddrives have also been around for ages, including USB-interfaced drives... but the implementations always seems a bit lacking.
I think that a better solution would be something along these lines...
An external USB 2 device containing three (3) harddrives, each 200+ GB or so, fashioned into a "brick"-like device. It would have an easily removeable cover for swapping of failed HDD's, an integrated power supply, and a hardware raid controller. It would also have a short-range WiFi nic and the ability to attach to it as a very simple network attached storage (NAS) device, and possible bluetooth as well. USB2 and firewire would also be a must-have.
A standard laptop-style external power transformer should do the trick, and would save some weight & bulk for users who port it between a small set of locations regularly (and therefore have multiple power cords).
Idea is, 200 GB of reliable storage, in a small profile (much smaller than the stack of DVD's + writer that would be equivalent). The multiple methods of attachment provide significant flexibility, basically a swiss-army knife of volume storage.
I'd also like to see a lockable cover using a standard roundbarrel computer key, and the ability to "lock down" the device to prevent unauthorized data retrieval - though a true security paradigm would require a lot of additional thought.
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Wednesday
8/13/2003 8:01:32 PM
(CST)
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Michael Wells
That tells me how much space is really left on my calling plan.
That switches to a wireless landline phone when I'm near home or work, and can transparently switch transfer calls between the mobile and landline networks.
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Saturday
8/2/2003 10:02:26 AM
(CST)
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Michael Wells
Now that cell phones are requiring GPS, it will not be difficult to use that location data as a means for storing information.
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Friday
8/1/2003 5:23:31 PM
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Michael Wells
Though I never attained the status of "photo geek", I am privvy to rumors that certain photographic techniques, especially infrared, can capture depth information at high-resolution. Reportedly, military projects use the technology to generate detailed 3-D ground maps from simple aerial photos, which can then be fed as guidance data to ordinance.
If this technology does exist, I'd like to see the techniques and algorithms make their way into the consumer and commercial realms.
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Friday
8/1/2003 5:22:18 PM
(CST)
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Michael Wells
Every engineer loves whiteboards, despite their simplicity. There is something uniquely comforting about standing in front of a wall, with a marker, and drawing primitive sketches that help your thoughts crystallize.
Won't it be nice, though, when whiteboards become thoroughly computerized, such that everything you write is recorded in a PC, and that the PC can instantly switch your whiteboard contents between viewing pages?
The idea of being able to scroll through square miles of diagrams, and instantly view large, complex, detailed visualizations is very compelling to me. But moreso, the ability to update and annotate those visualizations, and have that permanently recorded, is of tremendous value.
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Copyright © 2003-2013, Michael Wells. All Rights Reserved.
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