It might sound presumputious to say these are Good Ideas before I even present them to you. In fact, you might even be thinking to yourself, Well, if they really were Good Ideas, then you wouldn’t be posting them to your Not A Blog™, would you? No, you’d be selling them to Important People and making Money. I can’t fault you for thinking this, and I appreciate that you continued my capitalization joke through the rationalization, however selling ideas and making money really seems like a lot of work and, frankly, I don’t know where to start. Every person I’ve told these ideas to has indeed suggested this very thing, so if other people think they could be big money makers, they’re probably good, too.

I also subscribe to the belief that since no one lives in a vacuum, no ideas are the result of one person’s thinking, so any other schmoe on the street could probably come up with these. This is why I think patents are basically wrong. Patents shouldn’t exist because, fundementally, you’re patenting a Good Idea—and who’s to say that someone else wouldn’t have come up with exactly the same thing given the same problems? Either that, or patents should be good for a minimum amount of time—five or ten years— to allow someone to exploit it, then it’s a free for all. But that’s an essay for another day.

I wish there were a way to put ideas into the public domain so they couldn’t be patented, but alas, that’s not possible. The way our lame system works is that I would first have to patent any Good Ideas I have, and then give the patents away. Otherwise, some lawyer could see this stuff and turn around and patent it, having done even less work than I did in coming up with them—which is not much at all.

Besides all that, I’ve got tons of these ideas. If I don’t write them down, I’ll forget them, which would just be annoying. If these are good ones, well there’s more where they came from, so I’m not worried about losing out on anything. All that to say that if I am allowed to do this, I hereby release these ideas into the public domain. If you patent them, you’re scum. If you don’t patent them but still make something, good. That’s what’s supposed to happen. If my ideas ultimately make someone’s life easier, well—at least I can say I did the least I could do.

Also, these ideas here are roughly in the order from most practical to least practical. I didn’t plan it this way; it just kind of worked out.

1. The Dry Erase Lid

Why hasn’t anyone started making Tupperware (or similar storage containers) with dry-erase board material on the lids? This seems like such a no-brainer that I frankly can’t figure out why it doesn’t exist. But I’ve looked for it and nobody seems to have made it. You could do even better by making an “accessory” which consists of a dry-erase marker and eraser set with magnets on them, so you can stick it right to the fridge. Use these to write on the lid after dumping food in the container. Bam—instant knowing what lurks within. You can read that there’s old meatloaf and limp green beans inside that apparently innocuous container; no need to crack the lid and peek inside, only to be assulted with disgusting, cold remains of cow. Even better, put a “throw away on” date on there, too. The date comes, and you don’t even need to wonder whether or not it’s good. Just throw it away. The murkiness of leftover unknowns are gone, just like their original flavor.

2. Two Buttons in One

The new MacBook Pros have been out for a while yet and while they offer some improvements over the already fantastic PowerBook, they still have one super-important thing missing. This thing is such a head-slappingly obvious addition that, rather than doing this for aesthetic or design reasons, I think Steve Jobs is just being a jerk about it now. Naturally I’m talking about the right-click button.

It’s downright inexcusable that this isn’t included. I’m not going to debate the merits of making one giant button opposed to two smaller ones, or why still having a one-button mouse/trackpad is still considered preferable to having two. But there’s no reason you can’t do both. Apple, you can make touch-wheels and trackpads—I know you’re perfectly capable of making a wide button that can have left click on the left side and right click on the right side. Why is this not happening? You could even put an option under preferences that handles both clicks the same way so it still functions as a single button. Heck, make this the default; I don’t care. But as a professional, I need a two button mouse. Why am I fighting your product to get it?

3. More Energy Without More Work

Why aren’t people-powered doors hooked up to little dynamos? At first thought, it might not seem like the generator would be able to do anything useful, but I’ll bet it would be enough to power the lightbulb that hangs over the door at night. Obviously this wouldn’t work on automatic doors because you’d be expending more energy opening them than you’d ever get back, but if people have to push or pull the doors open to get in the building anyway, why not get something out of it?

For that matter, why not generate electricity out of any number of things that we push around? For example, people always talk about how wind power is a great non-polluting source of power—and then they go build windmills out in the middle of freakin’ nowhere. Why don’t we put smaller wind turbines wired together on the center concrete divider thing on highways? There’s tons of wind being generated by cars and trucks driving by all the time. Just harness that. You wouldn’t necessarily get a lot per generator, but then again, there’s a whole lot of highway out there to be tapped. At the very least you would get enough to power the lights that illuminate the highway at night, but I suspect you’d get significantly more power than this. You can’t even complain it would be an eyesore, because highways are eyesores to begin with. Maybe it wouldn’t work, but then again, I can’t find anywhere where anyone has even bothered considering it.

4. The Portable (Electronic) Clipboard

With all the stupid tech products that came out during the dot-com boom, I’m surprised no one tried to make something like this. (Admittedly, it’s not web-based. But it’s more useful than most of what came out of the dot-com era.) If you’re not the sort of person who works among multiple computers, it might not seem very helpful, but believe you me: there is a market for this. Someone should make a gadget that acts as a portable electronic clipboard. It would only need to have a few hundred k of memory. Basically, it would work like this. You hit ctrl-C to copy some crap to the Windows clipboard. Now, you hit a button on the doohicky which wirelessly accesses the same memory address that Windows uses for the clipboard, and copies the contents of the clipboard to itself. Go over to some other computer and copy the contents from the doohicky into memory, then hit ctrl-V to paste it into a new document on a new computer.

There would probably need to be a toggle on there to tell it whether you’re copying from or to the computer when you hit the button. But otherwise it would be very simple: a button, a toggle, and it could communicate using bluetooth. Instant document transfers without all that nonsense of mounting a thumb drive and copying files and disconnecting it from ports on the back of the computer you can’t reach. I suppose this would almost be like a bluetooth enabled thumb drive (something else I can’t figure out why nobody has made)—except it would be easier to copy files with. That’s the difference, actually: it would not be for storage but only for moving data from one place to another. Either that, or, since you need a way of charging the battery, just build in a thumb drive, too, and charge the transmitter battery with the USB port.

5. Become One with the Car

A while back I saw a device that was supposed to clip on your finger and allow you to play games on the computer by thinking about your actions. I never heard much about it, so it probably wasn’t very accurate. Besides, there can be a lot of actions you need to perform, even in relatively simple games (moving in two directions along two axises, for example), and if the sensor is even a tiny bit sluggish it would be worthless. There are more advanced versions of these, called Brain-Computer Interfaces, or BCIs, but they’re really expensive. However, even if a cheap BCI could only sense one simple action with regularity, it would have huge potential uses.

Specifically, I’m thinking about cars. I only want a BCI to control one function in my car: the windshield wipers. I hate the blathering incompetence of windshield wipers. You get the “always on” mode which you use maybe a dozen times per year for ten minutes at a time, and then various other intermittent settings which never have the right period of wiping, no matter how much it’s raining. Even if you do hit that perfect, happy medium, it lasts for 30 seconds at which point the amount of rain changes.

At first, I thought someone should install a sensor like they use on automatic toilets. Just point it at the windshield, and when it becomes sufficiently scattered by the rain collecting on there, trigger the wipers. Right about at the time that you can no longer see out the window, the wipers go and everything’s great.

But then I thought, why install all that gadgetry for something I’m already monitoring myself. I can’t not monitor the windshield while I’m driving. The thought of “dang, now I can’t see out the window again, gotta trigger the wipers manually, I guess” floats through my mind all the time when I’m driving in the rain. With today’s ultra-crappy consumer BCI technology, it would still be good enough to allow me to control the wipers by thinking about them. No, it’s not nearly good enough to control the car, but I’m not talking about mission-critical functions here. You still have backup control of the wipers via the car’s controlls, if you need it. But I should be able to slip a little thing on my finger and move the wipers.

It’s great to help parapalegics. But if you really want this technology to take off, you have to get it past the “gee whiz” stage and into the “this is so eminently useful I can’t live without it” stage. This can be done by incorporating it into not-very-important things which people are already using on an everyday basis. Cars are ideal for this because everyone uses them and they’re sufficiently complex to support the act of reading a basic brain pattern and using that to trigger a non-critical function. As the technology improves, you use it to control progressively more stuff: high-beams or headlights, turn signals, radio and A/C controls, etc.

Better yet, if the technology can be made to work simply by contact with a finger, why not incorporate it into the steering wheel? That way, just by gripping the wheel, you’d be able to control the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t have to put anything on, or wear one of those stylish wired-up skull caps. Either that, or incorporate the headgear into the headrest of the seat. Either way, this is something we should be seeing already. Except for maybe cost, there’s no reason why the windshield wipers of my car should not be a mental extention of my body.

So those are my Good Ideas. Now that I’ve written them down, I can forget about them, and make room in my brain for more Good Ideas.

-Ted