It’s down to screen brightness. Compared to a typical indoor environment, the great outdoors on a cloudless afternoon can be hundreds of times brighter. An anti-reflective screen protector may help a bit if you’re getting a direct reflection of the sun from your screen, but the main problem is that the rest of the world is so bright that it’s making your pupils constrict down to pinholes. The only way to make a phone/tablet display readable under those circumstances is to increase the display’s light output to likewise make it hundreds of times brighter. For that to happen, batteries will need to get bigger, and either:
screens will need to get much more efficient, or
screens will need to be able to tolerate the massive amount of waste heat that comes with making enough light to outshine the sun.
You know how car seatbelts have these mechanisms on the end with a weak spring? I think somebody should invent one with a stronger spring that can actually retract the belt when you are getting out of the car.
I imagine the technology to do this has existed for a decade, but TPTB aren’t interested in implementing it:
A way to opt out of the local affiliate’s programming and watch the network’s feed. Like, my local CBS affiliate has a viewing area that’s probably 200 miles in diamter, if not bigger. That means that a town in Southwestern Illinois, 200 miles from me, could be experiencing severe weather. It’s clear skies where I am. So why should I have to watch the weather guy explain the tornado warnings in Bunghole County, Illinois, in exacting detail, when I’d rather watch Ghosts?
Similarly, local affiliates in the two TV markets where I live have pre-empted network programming for sponsored content, some show of local community interest or something (I really don’t get it), debates between local politicians, and (and I swear I’m not kidding) high school basketball.
Surely, the technology exists to let me kick to the network feed. The fact that I (and probably 70 percent of viewers) watch on streaming rather than cable/satellite, should simply this even further.
I had a better thought: make the seatbelt out of a loose-weave tube of kevlar cords (thus, no sharp edge to the belt) that you roll into a loop of coiled metal rod – the tube flattens out against your body and is held securely where it bends around the holding loop, yet has no buckle for you to futz around with and would probably work ok if it never fully retracted.
What I want, which is not really an invention so much as a redesign, is a practical refrigerator. It would have two sides opposite each other, each side having 3 compartments with multi-pane glass doors, so you can see what you are looking for before opening the door (compartments help confine cold air loss), plus drawers on the bottom. Between the sides, you pull the right half open like a door to reveal the compartmented inner freezer doors. All mounted on a turntable to make accessing the sides easier.
But why? How is this an improvement? Because, we just cleaned out the old fridge in the garage, and there was stuff way back deep in the shelves that had been there, forgotten, for ages. I need comparable capacity, with compartmental efficiency, but shelf space that is no deeper than my forearm, to improve accessibility and keep stuff visible.
I wish they’d invent a way to use solar distillation to remove pollution from river water. Some kind of system where a portion of the local drainage canal (this is in SWFLA, so no shortage of those) is diverted into channels running underneath clear plastic half-tubes. The water in the feeder channel evaporates in the solar-heated tubes, condenses on the inside of the tube and runs down the side into exit channels back into the canal a little bit downstream. the gradient needed to get the distilled water to flow could be created by having the exit channels higher up on the inside of the tubes. I don’t know how to economically remove the built-up pollution from the feeder channel, though.
One big problem is that simple evaporation isn’t going to separate volatiles from the waste water. The condensate would contain light fractions of petroleum, ammonia, and God knows what.
I’d like a way to tattoo electronic circuits directly onto/into human skin. (Special inks?) For instance, the circuitry inside my blood glucose reader would be tattooed into the skin of my forearm and would continuously transmit its readings to my phone, or better yet, to a display also tattooed/impressed into my skin.
I’m not explaining this very well, but hopefully you all get what I’m saying.
I believe I have invented/designed the snow ‘shovel’ of my dreams, I just need someone to make it for me!
Here’s my idea; I don’t really want to shovel snow. I’m an older, smallest woman, with a short walkway only to clear, and don’t feel shovelling is strictly necessary. I am looking to push snow NOT shovel it.
I have lived in snowy climes my whole life and feel I know a thing or two about plow design as a result. In cities, snow plows are straight, slanted to one side with a curve to lay down a berm on one curb as they proceed. In smaller communities, with single lane roads, a plow is used that is pointed in the middle, with curving blades spreading either side. The result is it clears the snow and creates two berms at once, on either side of the road.
What I want is basically a version of that which is 18” across. A pusher, NOT a shovel! (I realize after a truly heavy snowfall, this could prove ineffective, but that’s the exception not the norm.)
This would prove a very useful tool for me. Instead I push the snow with the current shovel, until it can’t be pushed any further, then…shovel, shovel, shovel. Yuck, hurts my back!
I haven’t been able to figure a way to MacGiver it myself, such that it won’t crumble with usage. But I’m always on the outlook, waiting for someone to make one.
They make newer designs each year, but really aren’t anything that new. I’m waiting and waiting…sigh.
I think you’d find that your manual plow idea would only work for very, very light snowfalls, and for those, an ordinary snow shovel would be easier. The problem being that pushing a plow takes a lot more effort than one might think, especially against the further resistance of accumulated snowbanks to the sides. That’s probably why they don’t make 'em.
What you probably really want is a sleigh shovel (also called a sled shovel). I found these very useful back in the day when I was still shoveling my driveway. The example I linked is just 22" wide, just a little wider than your walkway.
The beauty of the sleigh shovel is that you only have to push it to load it up with snow, and then drag it backwards like a sleigh until you get to where you can dump the snow. You never have to lift it. You can somewhat pile up snow with it by pushing it up a snowbank, but it’s even easier if you have a large flat area for dumping. I used to clear big snowfalls on a long driveway with one of those.
Nope, nope and nope. 22” wide, useless to me. This big red thing? Also useless to me. No place to dump it at all.
I will only be using it when light snow has fallen so it will be ideal for me. (It would be dead easy to use it two or three times if more snow falls, it’s just pushing after all!)
And No, a regular shovel doesn’t work, push, push, push…cannot push more, stuck…because the snow is ALL in front, none is being pushed to the sides. Now stop and shovel hard! I’m looking to avoid this.
I recognize that what I’ve described would not work for your purposes, but I stand by that it would be the exact thing I need. No drive to clear. Ive been shovelling at this house over 20 yrs, I’m pretty sure I know what doesn’t work, because I’ve tried them all.
I know this would make clearing a walkway for an old lady a snap! Made out of stiff plastic it would be lightweight and easy to use.
Never mind, I’m confident one day someone will make one and ‘get it’, not for everyone, perfect for some though!
Is this just something to clear a sidewalk-sized path? I could see it working for that. It might not be all that good for a driveway since you’d be left with rows of snow on the driveway, but if you’re just trying to push the snow to the sides of a walkway or sidewalk, it seems like it would work to have something you push that’s like a mini snowplow.
I think it would have to be a V-shaped plow rather than a straight slant. If it was a slant, it would be hard for you to keep pushing in a straight line. The pusher would want to move diagonally against the snow. You’d need something V-shaped so that the force of the snow is balanced across the plow so you can push it in a straight line. Perhaps something like this:
There’s also this one which has an auger to push the snow off the side of the shovel. I’m not sure how well this would work, though:
I’m not going to try to talk you into a sleigh shovel if you’re convinced it won’t work for you, but for me it was a lifesaver – perhaps even literally! I assumed that if you have a walkway you’d have a lawn space on which to dump the snow, or a space between the sidewalk and the street, no?
My skepticism about your human-powered plow idea is based on my experience with a small electric snowblower that someone once gave me, with the comment that I might (or might not) find it useful. In fact it was virtually useless, because it wasn’t self-propelled, and despite the powered blades that cleared the snow away in front of it, it took so much effort to push against the snow that it just wasn’t worth it.
Quite honestly that thing looks like it should be attached to a lawn tractor! I can’t imagine it being effective if there was anything more than about half an inch of light snow.
