While you are waiting for a support call you are forced to listen to some easy listening music.

I suggest making it user settable.

“Thank you for calling Company X.
Your call is important to us.
You will now wait for an unknown number of minutes
and we will play some sounds for you so you know
you are still connected.
Press 1 now directly to not have to go through all the settings.
You will then be rewarded with bird sounds.
Press 2 to listen to birds; annotated with which bird it is.
Press 3 to listen to rain and wind in the forest.
Press 4 to listen to occasional static. Also, besides the birds, the least annoying sound.”
Press 5 to listen to US teenage over produced pop.
Press 6 to listen to softened down and mishandled jazz.
Press 7 to listen to what we believe is classical music.
Press 8 to listen to what we believe is rock.
Press 9 to listen to etno but it will be pan flutes and everything is played on synthesizers. The “etno” in etno will also be from North and Central America only.
If you choose to not choose you will get bird songs.

Addendum

Just changing from music to bird sounds would be a giant step forward.

Say you feed your powered mitre saw with wood from the left.

I suggest having a laser measurer mounted to the right. It is angled towards the blade, close to the fence.

When the blad is down 0 distance is measured. As soon as you put wood through it can measure the distance to the end of the wood and hence the resulting length.

A draw back is that it has to be in line with the wood and, possibly, in the way.

If it is set further out, it might be so long away, and with the wrong angle on the display, that it is impossible to see.

So I suggest that it does not have a display but sends its data to a phone close to the saw.

I you have a wood working shop with a bolted down mitre saw, you could mount the laser measurer at a wall once and for all.

It can also be set with a offset.

At Kickstarter, Reekon tools has made a solution that doesn’t have the length limitation my idea has.

Problem

As a developer I often have a settings table which is only editable by database tools (e.g. sql or text editor) and often only on the backend server. It would be nice to have a solution to allow easy editing while not being on the backend.

Solution

A small xcopy:able web site or application.
For database data it could have a connection string to the server and for text files it could have a path.

It should be able to figure out some meta data by itself but then, with local settings, override them to a more user friendly format.
For instance, if settings is a CSV table, the local settings could have definitions for separator characters, column headers and column data types.

This suggested solution is not for production but would solve the problem during development and even for production time backend manipulation in the right, careful hands. The same hands that otherwise would write sql queries to do the same task.

All slalom ski boots or snow board bindings only stretch so far up.
We do want a fix position, so we might want to make the slalom boot higher or snow board binding higher; maybe to almost below the knee.

When riding snowboard the bindings should not rotate but be in a fix x degrees angle.
When kicking the snowboard with the rear foot loose and the front foot fastened the angle should be straight forward (or at another angle).

Why not have a simple manually operated lock/lever that lets the rider loosen the binding to rotate.

Then, when about to ride again, use the same lock/lever to lock the binding in position?

When making hasselbackspotatis one cuts the potato almost through.

Instead of cutting carefully or holding the knife at a certain angle why not surround the potato with wooden blocks of the same certain height.

Change the potato to a carrot and a block on each side to achieve the same result.

Exchange the potato or carrot to anything.

This site contains ideas and solutions for the world to use and not own.

A problem that was solved ages ago, how to mount and remove a roof rack with a click or the turn of a knob, has become unsolved.

Today’s solution is to have special nuts (threaded holes) in the car’s roof and screws to match.
This means every car model has its own setup and it is quite a lot of job, possibly with a special tool, to mount the roof rack.

I suggest, in lieu of the classic drop list, to keep the threaded holes but to have an adapter to mount.
Normally the adapter should be taken off as soon as possible but if it is not, it is stream lined and creates as little drag as possible.

On this adapter the roof rack can be mounted with ease, and not screws.

This way the car can be as stream lined as possible. Then, when need arises and with a little work it can be prepared for roof racks. Finally the roof racks can be mounted and removed quickly and with ease.

I do not always rise at the same time as my spouse who is sleeping next to me.

I have the idea of an alarm clock that makes you wake but not your spouse.

When using a centre punch in a wood like fir it is very common it slides of the brown line into the lighter brown part. The brown line is winter? wood and harder.

I want a centre punch that doesn’t do this but instead makes the hole exactly where I put it; want it.

One solution can be to have a tube, think drinking straw, but in metal, but sharpened in the business end. Pressing it against wood would make a round mark. Since it is a couple of millimeters in diameter there is a good chance it gets a grip so it doesn’t skid off any brown line. Marking with a centre punch is often done for drilling so marking a 4mm ring does not create any damage if one intends to drill with a +4mm drill; or an even wider mark if a screw head will cover.

Inside this tube is a sharpened rod. So when the tube has a good grip, just press the rod down, and now you have a centred mark.

If it is hard to centre the tube one could start with letting the rod protrude and put where wanted; but without the pressure that will make it skid; and then lower the tube so it grips, and finally press the rod.
Or one could have a template or jig, say a see-through piece of plastic with a hole exactly fitting the tube. Adjust the jig/template by eye, it should be easy with these small distances, insert the tube and press down the rod.
If the precision is not enough, have a see through inset with a cross hair. Adjust the jig/template with the exact crosshaired inset in place. Remove the inset. Place the tube. Press the rod.

I have seen semi automatic spring loaded centre punches but they all lack the sharpened tube.

Another solution, that won’t mark around the single mark we want is to have a see through plastic template with a, say 10mm hole in it. In this hole is placed an inset with a crosshair to align exactly. Then the inset is removed and the punch is inserted and pressed. This solution is very similar to the one above but relies on the template staying in place instead of the sharpened tube doing it.