coffee auto plunger
Sometimes it’s okay to compromise while at work. I wouldn’t normally eat bad mayonaise drenched tuna between two slices of cheap white bread, but somehow it becomes acceptable at work.
However, sometimes it’s not okay to compromise. And those times usually involve Coffee.
A freshly brewed cup of Ethiopian or Vietnamese just makes the day better. A badly prepared mug of instant makes life slightly less worth living. So real coffee it has to be.
The one thing that lets me down is the timing of the plunge on my cafetiere. Leave it too long and you get that overly caffienated bitterness pulling you away from the fresh, lively joyous place you were aiming for. Not as bad as instant, but life diminishing none the less. Espresso makers are self regulating but less convenient for the office.
An over engineered solution is needed. Here we go.
The basics
The plunger in most if not all cafetieres is made of steel. Steel can be pulled by magnets.
The base of most cafetieres can be replaced without effecting the function of the vessel / plunger combination.
Replacement bases could contain electromagnets and timers. You see where I’m going?
A temperature sensor in the base triggers when it feels the boiling water hit the jug. This then triggers the plunge magnets after a set amount of time. A simple training mechanism, driven by a series of manual plunges when the coffee ‘looks right’ should replace an actual timer - timers are too rigid - this thing should feel organic to use.
Refinements
I always pre heat the cafetiere, so it should know the difference in temp profile between a ‘heat‘ and a ‘fill‘. This should be easy to achieve by plotting the temperature over time.
Two simple buttons, ‘too long‘ and ‘not long enough‘ allow for further life long training of the device. There may be an issue here where different coffees enjoy slightly different brewing times, this could be overcome with a squooshy override button - push it to the left for less time, to the right for more time. At the end of each brew it resets. Squooshy buttons also make the device look cool. Trust me, squooshy buttons are the future.
On the retail side, the two main options are to have an add on or a full cafetiere. I’d assume the full cafetiere would be the way to go. Add ons would have to accommodate different sizes, manufacturers etc… Economies of scale would likely make the all in one unit cheaper. It would also be easier to fine tune the magnetic force requirement.
Health benefits
The amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee is dependent on a number of factors. Among them the temperature of the brewing water / steam and the length of time the grounds are in contact with it. A long plunge is therefore bad for my health. This device could save my life. And it would add some technogeekery to the humble cafetiere, long lagging behind the espresso machine in this respect.
Someone make one. Please.
international standard tshirt number
I love tshirts. I love geek tshirts. Never am I happier than when explaining that “no, in the context of the Tshirt 10 means 2, not 10″ or “the wee arrow means greater than“. Or “no, it’s not just an arbritrary orange, it’s a software company logo“. One of the problems with these Tees is that they wear out, get solder burned, or get toasted to a half sized crisp in the dryer.
Ordering a fresh one should be easy. But it isn’t. You look inside the average Tshirt and this is what you get:
Useful. Threadless get closer with this:
Books have the ISBN. Tshirts should have a ISTN. A standardised system for organising tshirt designs. It would make tshirt searching so much easier. I propose a 4 part system limited to 16 characters.
TGEK-BINP-MBAA-XL
producer - design - item - size
thinkgeek - binary people - mens black - extra large
The first and last sections are standardised. So you always know where it was bought and what size it was. The central two parts are self managed by the producer. They get to name the design, and use whatever code suits them for the item.
One spin off I can foresee is a subtle sleeve or back of neck print of the producer code on the shirt. So that when I see a shirt on the street I can just glance at the sleeve and note “right, he got that shirt from GYOI! - must check them out”. Benefits the shop, benefits me in finding a new shirt, clutters up my sleeve a little.
Some central area, nothing more complicated than a wiki, could allow producers to claim a producer code and then optionally maintain a list of design codes on that site. This would have promotional advantages, and would help them to show they were first with a design when they get ripped off on cafepress forty times.
Adding structure to the chaotic world of t-shirts. Hardly an earth shattering global innovation, but would be cool. Comment if you want to reserve a cool 4 letter acronym!
The sketch
(May I apologise for the quality of photography. I seriously need a new flash!)
fancy rain guage idea
I really need to fix my guttering. Theres a spot above the front door that leaks. It only leaks if there is a reasonable amount of rain tipping down though, more than just a shower. This got me thinking…
What if I could tune this problematic guttering to spray that overflow water into fancy patterns, swirling fountains, or clean jets aimed at a pond in the garden?
What if I could have four pools, graded to the weather, and four separate spouts fed them? What if I could use this to state how heavy the rain was? “Look dear, it’s dinging down a 3er out there”.
An end piece for a standard gutter should be formable from copper to direct overflow in this way. The pools could look great - every garden benefits from a pool or two. We’re not talking mammoth lakes here, just little foot or two across garden ponds. I guess any newts that took residence in the big pool might get a shock during a ‘grade four downpour’ when the jet turns on - bet hey - they can swim.
I’d pay for that. Some artisan gutterer turns up at my house with his copper bending kit, his intuition, and an apprentice to dig a few ponds in ‘just the right place’. Think how cool your neighbours would think you were. “look John, next doors house looks so PRETTY when it rains!”
This would really fit with my liking for arbitrary measurement. When making coffee we talk about a ‘3 spooner’ or a ‘4 spooner’. When we recently got all new cutlery the meaning of ’spoon’ changed. Our terminology didn’t. It just feels more organic. I like the thought that a ‘pool 2 day’ at my house is a ‘pool 4′ half a mile away. Personal units of measurement are so much more touchy feely than metric units.
coffee intake automonitor
Sometimes I drink too much coffee. Not as often as I used to, but it still happens. I always kick off my day with a cup. Cafetiere (french press) coffee, freshly made. If I start my day too early, and say ‘yeah why not’ a couple of extra times during the morning I can easily hit 5 or 6 cups by noon. Bad news.
I need help to cut down. The basic idea is as follows:
Attach an RFID to your Cafetiere. Install a proximity reader in the kitchen. Every time the cafetiere comes into range PING! that’s another cup of coffee. The proximity reader sends a message to the ‘watchyourcaffiene.com‘ website - ran by the people who sold you the rfid kit.
Obviously the rfid reader would have to look cool, or be small enough to hide behind the kettle. A glowing coffee bean would be nice. With a tiny led growing deep inside its resiny shell. Or coffee makers could partner with watchyourcaffiene.com to sell units with built in monitors.
You can see your profile online, you can let other people see your profile online (sig. other for example). You can set alerts to hit your Phone / Twitter / Jaiku when you exceed your limit - or when the cafetiere enters the kitchen just as you are ABOUT to hit your limit. You are reaching for the kettle and suddenly “I’m sorry dave, you can’t have another cup”.
Taking this a step further, an RFID in your cup would track your personal consumption if you shared a cafetiere. If you had two cups you could have a Coffee and a Green Tea cup. Try to keep them in balance! “turn it into a game” as Seymour would say. You are reaching for the kettle and suddenly “I’m sorry dave, green tea this time”.
The company could milk the cash by offering smaller cups - which count less. If you were allowed 2 mugs a day, that could be 4 cups, or 6 minicups. They could sell you a mug, then when you drink more than 2 a day along with the “I’m sorry Dave…” message could suggest you buy a smaller cup.
Another revenue earner could be a SMS reply to the “Sorry Dave…” message saying “I’m having a decaff” or “I spilled it - honest” to lower your daily count. (btw did you know the caff from decaff goes into soft drinks - I never thought about where soft drink caffeine came from)
I like my current coffee cup though, so they would have to sell an add on monitor. This would actually look quite cool as a big tag for the handle - like when things in supermarkets are tagged with huge lumps of plastic to set off the alarms. A public symbol of your dependency. And they’d have to be dishwasher safe. A sophisticated mini sticker for underneath the cup would also work - more subtle.
And of course the league table of coffee drinkers could allow caffeine heads to show off their intake. “Dude I had like 3 mugs and 7 espresso cups this morning“. Blog chicklets to let you post your current daily and weekly count would promote the site.
moleskine indexing hack tool
I love my moleskine notebook, it just feels nice. I need a way to structure my books, and get to sections quickly but I hate those sticky tabs GTD addicts use to organise them. They just get bent, or pushed out of place, or lose their stick. I carry my notebook in my bag, my pocket, in my cycling backpouch. Anywhere. Stuff just gets bashed.
I would much prefer a simple cut out ‘inverted tab’ like you get in old diaries to mark the months. A tool to achieve these would be amazingly useful, like a mutant stapler or nail clipper. To test the idea I got out the trusty Stanley knife:
The squared notebook gives a nice line to follow for the cuts. Any tool should aim to exactly fit these lines, just to enhance the feel of the finished tab.
The very square edge is a little open to becoming frayed and bashed, so the tool should be a curved die giving a nicely rounded corner to the tabs. Either the square shallow tab as shown here, or a deeper semi circular version would be nice. I clipped only 5 pages at the start of a section.
The side view shows the general effect. These inverted tabs are very easy for your thumb to locate. I’ve used them to split one notebook into 6 separate sections, for separate projects, all along the vertical side. For a more sophisticated setup a mix of tabs on the top, bottom and edge could separate 3 different types of sections, with individual sub sections along the length of the edge.
The 10 minutes playing with the Stanley knife was quite fun, but could grow boring pretty quickly. A tool would be very convenient, the standardised size and shape would be pleasing, and I bet the chances of slicing your finger would be much less than using a knife. I bet every moleskine addict would buy (and receive) several for gifts. Especially if they were a sexy leather bound minitool you could carry in your bag.
My googling hasn’t turned up any suitable tools, there are several die cut tools featured on crafting sites, but none are really small enough, or simple enough to use. If you know of anything suitable please let me know below or at steve@inventoids.com.
As ever, this was initially sketched on the train - before mocking up the output. Here is the sketch:
no more big floods
England has been hard hit by floods this year, including a relatively close call for some of my in-laws. Turriff Show was even cancelled a couple of weeks back because of the downpours overnight. My garden even had a couple of huge puddles, and we practically live on a 1 in 10 slope.
I have a nice simple solution. Take a huge can of no-more-big-gaps, and squirt a 3 foot high barrier of solid expanding foam all round your house. Higher if need be.
For comedy marketing purposes I’d call it nomorebigfloods or ‘no more big sewagey carpets’.
It might make a mess of the rosebeds, but they can be replanted more quickly than you can renovate your entire lower floor. If the foam could be made 100% starch based, I bet it could even be compostable - and eventually GOOD for the roses.
The ever present environmental problems raise their heads again. Spraying all that evil foam into the world can’t be a great idea. However, throwing out your home contents and buying afresh is pretty evil too. Lesser of two evils?
Excellent diagram of a house there, I’m sure you’ll agree.
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About Steve
Steve invents things while travelling to work on the train. He sketches them in his moleskine notebooks. Instead of actually making them (and becoming a billionaire overnight) he posts them here for the good of mankind.
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