VR Goggles for Swimming

Posted on January 11, 2020 by gemmell

Imagine how cool it would be to have a swim spa that had jets on all sides and some VR goggles. You could endlessly explore coral reefs from the comfort of your back garden.

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Crawl Space Suit

Posted on December 22, 2019 by gemmell

This is a suit that has an inbuilt thermal regulator to keep the occupant cool even though they are in a 50 degree C roof cavity. Tough material so catching it on beams and nails and whatever doesn’t tear it (not like those flimsy ones you can buy online right now). The idea is that this is almost like an exoskeleton for these guys. In built headphones and phone pocket, ventilator etc. It would be expensive as, but the point is that you can be in and on roofs for longer, meaning businesses can potentially earn more.

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Sentinel Social Media Protection for Children & Teens

Posted on December 12, 2019 by gemmell

Social media stars, especially women or those who are campaigning for change often become targets. Their feeds get filled with junk, sometimes porn, threats etc. As a discerning parent I want my child to take action, but I don’t want them to have to deal with the dregs of humanity. Enter Sentinel Social Media Protection. 24/7 feed monitoring, powered by AI and humans that delete or report anything that is not age appropriate or is downright disrespectful. The bar for deletion is set low, because the point is to protect the teen from hate.

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Desalination via alternating current

Posted on December 9, 2019 by gemmell

Water flows through a rectangular pipe with some electro magnets on the outside:

electro magnet 
---------------- 
======>water====> 
---------------- 
electro magnet

If you turn on the magnets all the chlorine (and a bunch of water) would go to one side, and sodium (and a bunch of water) to the other.

However if you alternate the current, such that the poles keep switching, I hypothesise that you would get a “stream” of sodium and chlorine ions in the middle, and fresher water near the edges. So essentially to desalinate you have:

electro magnets     fresh water
----------------------/  /
=====> fresh water====  /
=====> salty water=========> back to the sea
=====> fresh water=====  \
-----------------------\  \
electro magnets       fresh water

The reason I think this will work is because of the polarity of the ions and the fact that they will be acted upon despite the orientation of the atom, where as with water being a polar molecule and moving about (spinning), the direction of attraction is going to be pretty much random.

So you run the water through a pipe with an alternating current applying a magnetic field to it and the water in the middle of the pipe is saltier than the water at the edges, stick your outlets on the edges and boom, desalination.

I think you’d have to assume you can produce a laminar flow in the pipe so that eddies and other mixing are taken out of the equation.

So tell me, why doesn’t that work, how come nobody does it? I would be surprised if nobody has tried such a simple idea. Seems low power, no heat needed. Maybe it doesn’t get it desalinated enough? Maybe it just doesn’t work because the water keeps smashing into the ions and they don’t migrate to the middle? Maybe you need a pipe that’s just way too long?

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VR forest bathing

Posted on December 7, 2019 by gemmell

I had this idea quite a while ago but I guess I never wrote it up. Essentially there are a bunch of mental health benefits from just being in nature, and this treatment called “forest bathing”. With VR this should entirely be possible to stimulate. You sitting on a rock, in a dense cloud forest in Thailand, in your apartment in New York. Market to top execs and startup gurus.

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A jira extension for creating a nested ticket structure

Posted on November 30, 2019 by gemmell

Creating epics, tasks, and subtasks is largely manual and takes way too long. What we need is a “trello” like view with a swimlane for epic, task, subtask (etc) that you can then start to map out your tasks visually. This will help when writing an initial epic because you can create it and link it all up on this page and easily move things around and underneath it will be doing all the work of managing ticket types and relationships to other tickets.

This view would also be super useful when you want to get a high level view of your epics and what tasks they involve.

Might already exist.

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Phased Array Safety Sound Emitter

Posted on November 25, 2019 by gemmell

Trams are damn near silent. Electric cars more and more. If you’re walking over a track with your headphones in, there’s no chance of hearing it. Unless it’s equipped with a phased array sound system that is! A regular speaker has an isotropic wavefront: You can’t control it’s direction. But with a phased array you can use beamforming maths to essentially point a large amount of energy in one direction (with a couple of sidelobes which you can’t avoid) meaning you can essentially create a loud spot some distance ahead of you without making a bunch of noise for everyone on either side (‘cept for the side lobes). Any govt who runs trams that doesn’t buy one is basically negligent because they haven’t done enough to keep pedestrians safe!

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Broom with slight V shape

Posted on November 25, 2019 by gemmell

Whilst using a regular cheapo broom I noticed how rubbish the shape is. Rather than focusing the dirt towards the middle anything that hits near the outer edge of the broom generally fans out from the source. A very simple adjustment to the shape would mean that anything that hits the outside is projected more towards the middle as you sweep, meaning less swipes (?) overall.

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Jumpy Leggings

Posted on November 3, 2019 by gemmell

I suffer from Restless Leg Syndrome and recently it’s gotten bad enough that I’m starting to look into remedys. So far the only that works is getting out of bed and doing chair pose against a wall or squats. Only then can I get back to sleep. But my entire body rebels against getting out of bed to do so at 3am in the morning.

In the US there are vibrating pads which claim to help. So I was thinking that I can fix my Jumpy Legs with Jumpy Leggings – bike shorts that provide some sort of stimulation (either vibrations or perhaps direct minute electric stimulation) to help sufferers of RLS like myself.

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CornFlucks: Urinal Cake Edition

Posted on November 2, 2019 by gemmell

CornFlucks, but for urinal cakes. Hoooo boy what a hoot at a nightclub!

CornFlucks
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