Computers
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The issue: It is frequently asserted that people are addicted to cell phones. If only there were a technical solution to this problem! Proposal: Here’s a simple solution to discourage casual cell phone use: a cell phone with two features: A strict limit on the amount of time you can use each program. (This feature…
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Background: Sometimes, someone will send out a company-wide email that is CCed to everyone else at the company. The issue: Anyone who sends a “reply all” response to that initial email will generate another company-wide email. After a while, people will start getting annoyed by the constant irrelevant emails and will request that people stop…
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Background: When giving a presentation on a large screen, there are two popular options for calling attention to specific areas of a slide deck: Physically gesture at the screen (or use a laser pointer, as seen in Figure 1). Use the laptop trackpad to move the mouse pointer / arrow around. The issue: The trackpad…
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The issue: During a conference call, it can be difficult to position multiple people in such a way that everyone is actually in-frame. Usually, either: Only one person fits into the frame, or: Everyone is extremely far from the camera, so 95% of the screen area is taken up by a conference table. Figure 1…
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Background: Remember when privacy was a thing? No? Oh, ok then. But people used to have some concern about having their location and whereabouts monitored by companies and governments. I guess this information was used for evil-doing at least once in history? Whatever, who cares, let’s gather data and make an app! The issue: Have…
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Background: In the past, you could tell what a computer was doing (to some extent) just by listening to it. Disk access would be accompanied by a classic floppy disk sound (or the “click” of a hard drive) The fan would spin up if the CPU was under high load. You could actually listen to network…
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Background: Slide presentations are now a main ingredient in almost all lectures and presentations (Figure 1). The issue: Computers have made slide presentations extremely easy to make (example in Figure 2), but haven’t helped with one issue: presentations often go on FAR TOO LONG. For example, none of these ideas for promoting short presentations…
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Background: On many web sites for automotive parts (e.g. Amazon, AutoZone), you can specify the exact car that you own. Then, the web site will only show results that work with that car (Figure 1). Fig 1: You can specify the details of the cars in your “garage” and will only see car parts that…
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Background: Supposedly, the proliferation of ubiquitous GPS has lead to humans being worse at navigating, the presence of calculators has rendered most people incapable of doing even basic mental math, and the existence of written language has made humans worse at remembering things more generally. Proposal: In order to combat this “things are too easy”…
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Background: Essentially all major programming languages exclusively use keywords written in English. (For a couple of exceptions, see the addendum at the end.) But this doesn’t have to be the case! Proposal: By using symbols instead of words, we can convey a concept both more concisely and more easily across languages. See below for a…
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