Invention Idea #6

My office kitchen fridge has an incredible profusion of soda cans. (As an aside, I don't understand why: If you want it cold, just buy it from the machine right before you drink it. If you brought it from home to save money, you should be buying it in 2L bottles, not cans.)

Many cans are unlabeled, but some have a name scrawled on them, or some tape, or a business card stuck under the tab. However, these solutions have a couple problems. First, they only provide identification, not security. Second, some of these are kind of time-consuming. The tape, for instance, can't take less than 60-90 precious seconds during which you could be reading some hilarious emails forwarded from the secretary.

Thus my invention, which I call "Club Soda". You slip it on, snap it shut and club it with a tiny key. It would be personalized with your name via a tag or engraving or something. Security and identification in under 10 seconds. MSRP $4.99.

Infocard: Useful Knots

I often need knots. I have often learned the knots I need. But these two things never happen close enough together to result in long term knowledge storage. This Make blog post gave me the idea of collecting a few useful ones and putting them on wallet card.

Front:

Back:

Printed front and back on a business card and then laminated, it can nestle in my wallet until I need them. Alternatively, for this particular application, I could secret cards in amongst any ropes I might use so they are johnny-on-the-spot at the right moment.

And speaking of applications, I was also thinking this could be a neat idea for other things. How to mix drinks, electronics cheatsheet, math formulae, What To Do If Arrested, etc. In fact, it seems like such an obvious idea I spent some time googling to see if anyone had set up a Web 2.0 social networking site to do this. Nothing. So I hereafter document my process for my future self and anyone else who wants to make one:

1. Design it up a bit. In this case, I tried to pick some knots that were both unlike each other and also widely useful. There's a loop, a general "tie to a post", a stopper that can also make a second type of loop and finally a bend, which is a knot that attaches two ropes. I also wanted a "scenario" that would tie it all together (ha!). And it all has to fit on a business card.


2. Once the contents were identified, I drew all the images with pencil. I actually first started with some copyright-free knot images from a Project Gutenberg book, but there were a few problems with that. The main one was that not all the knots I wanted had drawings. Also, the images were too busy to be shrunk down that small.


3. Trace with pen. May not have been strictly necessary, but didn't take too much time anyway. Scan. Load into Gimp and fix any boo-boos. Smudges, pen dropouts, etc. With a cheap graphics tablet, I could have skipped a lot of this.


4. Bring into Inkscape and auto-trace bitmap into a vector format.


5. Use Scribus to lay out the page.


6. Print onto business card template thingies. Get laminated.

If this were an online service or community or whatevs, there would be PDFs and/or inkscape/scribus files. However, I don't have a way to host anything but images here. Suggestions?

Meetings Are My Most Productive Time

The projects I'm involved in don't have many meetings. In fact, we basically have zero. But some related projects (and by "related" I mean "not at all related, but they share an uber-manager") have a ~45 minute meeting once every two weeks or so and for some reason I'm required to attend despite the fact that none of it ever affects me or needs any input from me.

Nonetheless, I love these meetings. Several times over the past several months this has happened:

1. I'm stuck on how to design or build something in the workshop at home.
2. I think about it for days or weeks, making no real progress.
3. Meeting time rolls around.
4. I bring some paper and pencils with me and start drawing even dumb ideas for solving the problem.
5. I exit the meeting with a solution on paper.

I'm not sure which is the more valuable aspect: The enforced "away from the computer" time or the "draw even dumb ideas".

I ♥ My Moleskine

I asked for a "squared" Moleskine for Xmas because I'd heard such good things about them. ("Square" means graph paper and "large" means "not pocket sized"--it's only about 8"x5".) I can confirm that it is awesome. I'm not even sure why it's so awesome. It's definitely well made--nice binding, good quality paper, pocket in the back, elastic strap and bookmark. And it's not just that I'm having fun using it, because I was using a regular spiral notebook before and it wasn't this awesome.

I found the perfect pencil case. It's actually a case for a removable car stereo, but I don't have that car, let alone the stereo, anymore (if I ever did).

Inside are the pencils I mentioned once. Notice that I've got them tagged with tape so I can tell what lead type is in each. Also, extra lead and a kneaded eraser.

And now a couple pics of the Genius At Work. The page sizes seem to be almost exactly how much room I need to explain an idea and draw an illustration of it.

The only thing that could make this better would be if it were exactly the same as it is now, only it also uploaded an electronic version automatically. In vector format. Also, it would be made of ponies.

Incremental Backup

• So far, I've lost about 55 lbs. That's 4 or 5 pant sizes, I think, plus now my winter coat doesn't fit anymore. Naturally my workplace has NOW decided to have a Biggest Loser contest. I could have won one of these fabulous prizes! I'm almost tempted to regain it all so I can lose it for the free iPhone. (Actual prize may vary.)


• The PVC piston idea doesn't work. Or rather, it works really well, but not for high temperatures. Maybe a water pumping thing might work, but otherwise it just gets gummed up with melty yuck. Also using insulation for the displacer is contraindicated as a fire hazard. /turns off smoke alarm. Needless to say, the engine was unsalvageable.


• Because of the above, I'm starting a new engine. For various reasons, probably all stupid, I'm thinking of going rhombic. I sat down the other day to quickly figure out the stroke length given stuff like the gear diameter. Just an easy little geometry problem until my face imploded. Also, finding cots (commercial/off-the-shelf) hardware that can be used for a medium-sized Stirling is non-trivial.


• This cool thing is in free beta. I hope that doesn't mean they are going to charge for it later, because then we won't have future classics like Two Regular Guys.


• I got a Moleskine "square" (i.e. graph) paper notebook for Christmas. Coupled with my mechanical drawing pencils, it is really awesome. I should post some pics of what I've been doing with it.


• Read Clock of the Long Now. It was very interesting and enlightening and life-changing and so forth, but they left out sufficient detail for my geekiness: Details on the mechanism. It's a single-function, mechanical, binary computer. Like the Difference Engine only in binary. Should be a snap to implement in Lego. I even started designing it but I just don't have enough time to do more than that.

Discoveries

• The biggest difficulty in making something like a Stirling engine without access to a machine shop is how to make the power piston. The piston has to be precisely sized to fit inside the cylinder. However, via a YouTube video, I have discovered that it is possible to use a pair of PVC pipes to get the same effect. I made one and under breath power it worked so well it nearly knocked my teeth out. I haven't done any real testing yet, so I don't have all the construction details worked out, but basically you just get two sizes that differ by 1/4" and sand down the smaller until it fits in the larger.


• The way I'm going to test the piston is to build another Stirling. Need a bigger displacement chamber for a piston this big. Should be metal, not too thick-walled, largish, easy to make air-tight. A paint can would be perfect, except you don't want to combined leftover fumes and high heat. Turns out Lowe's sells empty paint cans! Quart- and pint-sized. That means you can even remove the lid to work on the innards and then reseal it.


• What with one thing and another, the flywheel on the new engine has to be mounted differently. I need a whole crankshaft dealie (which is something else it would be easier to make with a machine shop). Once I realized this, I realized I'd also need some kind of bearing. Idly reading something completely unrelated, I came across a mention of "skate bearings". I was thinking inline skates, but skateboards have the same thing. They are only like $1 each! And I even had an unused skateboard at home, from which I harvested 8 of them. ID ~8mm, OD ~22mm. Cute as a bug's bearing.


• I've had these drawing pencils for a while now. The leads are 2H, HB, 2B and then some high B one, I dunno what. The problem is you have to keep sharpening them like every 15 minutes. The other day I realized this is already a solved problem: mechanical pencils. The only question was, do they sell mechanical pencil leads in hardnesses other than HB? Answer: Yes. So now I have 3 mechanical pencils, each with a different lead. Makes drawing so much less of a hassle. Can't shade with the side of the lead, of course, but I never did that anyway.


• I'm not going to meet my Xmas diet goal. Scale is still going down, but too slowly to make it in time. Maybe I should aim for the secondary goal (an additional 10 lbs) at the 2 year mark (March?).