I want a two-button, three-stop mute for my TV. The left button toggles between your “mute” preset (which you might set to a tick or two above totally silent) and the normal volume; the right button toggles between the normal volume preset (which, for a movie, might be good for shouting and explosions) and a higher volume preset for dialog; if the volume is at one end or some other adjustment, the buttons take it down or up to their respective ends.
Rob Cockerham (Cockeyed.com) purchased some peel and stick labels and printed out the UPC code from his grocery store’s loyalty card. On request, he’d send you one. You then put his upc on your loyalty card. Funny prank, I wonder what the grocery chain thought was happening.
(This was many years ago)
My absolutely brilliant idea was to have contact lenses in a tube. When I was young, I squeezed a tube of KY jelly and marveled at the clear gel that oozed out. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if you could squeeze a pea sized drop of gel from a tube and place it on your eyeball and it turned into a contact lens that was made to your prescription and you didn’t need to bother with saline solution and could pitch it in the trash at night and just repeat the process until the tube ran out? I didn’t bother with the details but I thought that was a great idea.
direct link (last updated December '02)
Most of the stores with loyalty cards let you enter your phone number instead. If you want the discount but don’t want the card, use the phone number 8675309 (along with your area code) instead. In most areas of the country that number has been registered with most of the store loyalty programs.
The TV in our RV does part of this. One press of the mute button halves the volume, second press zeroes it. I have no idea what brand it is or whether this is common. None of the house TVs do this.
That long ago, huh?! I’m surprised I got the details right.
I sort of feel sorry for the programmer/s that had to troubleshoot this ‘problem’.
Not the businesses I frequent. The only one I know of is Walgreens, as I mentioned in a previous post.
I did this, actually, with the soundtrack for The Greatest Showman, but it wasn’t a physical CD. As we were leaving the theater, I bought the soundtrack on Amazon and downloaded it. Physical media, who needs it, right?
On the grocery store cards: there are apps out there that will let you just scan all your “loyalty cards” and store them in your phone. Then, you can call up whichever one you want and have the person just scan the screen. The one I use is Key Ring. Also stores my gym membership card, restaurant loyalty cards, Sam’s and Costco cards, and CVS card. Much more convenient.
A supply of sand that would be stored in the trunk/SUV back or somewhere that could be spread in *front *of the wheels of a car when driving on ice.
There would be 2 or 4 tubes connected to the sand supply that would be dropped or spread in front of the tires for better traction. Just enough sand to get you out of being stranded.
Powered by what? Dunno, maybe a separate battery system or gravity or whatever.
Maybe this isn’t a good idea because no one has invented it? Or have they?
IANAE, so I have no idea if this is feasible.
For people who can’t or don’t want to buy a smart TV: a USB-type thingie that plugs into a TV’s coaxial cable outlet that connects the screen by wifi to a computer so you can stream programming onto the TV screen instead of watching it on a small monitor.
A small-cell foam wrap for a toilet so it is no longer a resonance chamber and all use of it is quiet.
I have seen it on school buses.
What I really want is a little metal chamber that sits on top of my catalytic convertor. It would have two tubes (feed and vent) going into a water tank and an outlet pipe next to my exhaust pipe. If I decide that guy back there is uncomfortably close, I open the feed tube to serve him with a cloud of steam to get him to back off.
Done that with a dumb tv hooked up to a DVD player that had wifi. Worked great.
At my business, I have a radio in the bathroom. People play the radio, sometimes very loudly. Same end result.
There are a number of products that do exactly this: Roku, ChromeCast, Fire Stick, etc. Athough they connect to HDMI not coax. Given the small and diminishing number of TVs that don’t have HDMI, and the dismal picture quality achievable with coax, I doubt anyone is going to make a coax version.
I’ve been carrying this one around with me for decades. Probably posted it here at some point, in fact.
All vehicles should come with two horns: a happy-sounding toot (“thanks for letting me pull in!”) and an angry horn (“thanks for cutting me off, asshole!”).
mmm
Red, white, and blue beer that separates after being poured.
A coffee mug that has a heating element imbedded in the ceramic at the base. In between sips, place it on an electric coaster, using magnetic induction. Keeps your coffee hot, indefinitely.
They already have coasters that keep your coffee mug warm.
This is already sort of a thing.
Smart bulbs can be programmed to do this, and there are new switches that actually just send a wireless signal. You no longer have to connect the bulbs to a switch, you can wire them directly to power.
The problem is reliability. The bulb can fail and need to be unscrewed and screwed back in, the wireless switch can fail, the battery in the wireless switch can fail, the power supply can fail, some of these systems rely on remote servers that can fail if the internet is down, the wifi can fail, and so on and so forth.
But it can work most of the time.