July 2017
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The issue: Currently, the loss or theft of an unencrypted laptop can be a huge pain for an employee and/or their company. If a laptop gets stolen out of a person’s car, or just gets forgotten in a train or cafe, it’s entirely possible that the laptop owner will now have to change all their…
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Background: The humble door-locking deadbolt has suffered from a severe failure of innovation and imagination in the last 100 years. Specifically: most deadbolts have exactly two positions (Figure 1): Open (door can be opened from either side) Closed (door requires a key to open from the outside or a switch to be operated from the…
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Background: Exercise routines are often extremely dry and boring. But they can be made more engaging by making a “themed” workout, with each part of a workout helping to accomplish an imaginary goal. This is not a totally new idea. For example, the game “Zombies Run” motivates a person to jog faster by providing a…
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Background: The stop sign, for all its utilitarian simplicity, has a severe and critical shortcoming: it has two different roles, both marked by the same sign (Figure 1). The two situations, and what the driver must do in each case: All-way stop: driver can casually check for other cars right there at the intersection, and…
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The issue: Many computers are unable to handle letters that don’t fall into the set of Latin characters used by English. Even though the Unicode standard has greatly improved multi-character-set accessibility, problems still arise: A character might not exist in a chosen font. For example, “Egyptian Hieroglyph of a bird catching a fish” is probably…
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