Things They Should Invent: Set it and forget it emergency kits

Years ago, I bought one of those solar crank emergency radios. The instructions said that the battery will charge in sunlight, and if it isn't charged you can charge it by cranking it. So I sat it in an area that gets sunlight and forgot about it.

Years passed before I had a power outage, and when I did, the radio didn't work. Sunlight didn't power it. Cranking it didn't power it. It seems that, in the years that elapsed, the battery lost its ability to hold a charge.

 

 

When I first heard of 72-hour kits, I bought a bunch of bottled water and canned food. I put it all in the cupboard and forgot about it.

 

When I next moved, I dug out my supply of bottled water, and discovered that the water bottles were all kind of soft and collapsed. It turns out the plastic in the bottles wears out even if it's just sitting around doing nothing!

 

Googling around the idea, I also learned that canned food can go bad. People on the internet speaking positively of the longevity of canned food are like "Oh, it lasts forever! Like, maybe even as long as 5 years!" 

Okay, but my life expectancy is far longer than that! Am I supposed to keep throwing out and replacing my emergency kit???

 

 

Googling around the idea, I discovered that the idea is that you use up the canned food and bottled water for your naturally-occurring everyday use before it goes bad, and replenish it. But the thing is, I don't really use canned food and bottled water in my regular life - I'd have to go out of my way to eat and drink it when I don't even want to!

 

Similarly, you're supposed to test your emergency radio regularly and replace it (or replace the battery if, unlike me, you've stumbled upon the convergence of a radio where you can get at the battery and a battery where you can find an actual replacement, not just something that claims on Amazon to be a replacement but is the wrong size)

 

 

Someone really should come up with an emergency kit with actual longevity, where you can set it and forget it without adding "constantly monitor your emergency kit" to your ever-growing to-do list!

 

 

One thing I have tried is storing water in glass bottles. I used screw-top wine bottles that I washed in the dishwasher in a sanitation cycle, and specifically chose bottles that had contained red wine in the hopes that it they didn't get perfectly clean, it would be visible. 

 

I drank some of the water after a few months and it seemed fine, no ill effects or weird tastes, but obviously I have to wait multiple years to see if it lasts multiple years.

 

Another thing I realized during my last power outage is, canned food aside, I normally have 72 hours of food in my home anyway. 

 

I usually have one or two perishable meals of leftovers in the fridge, which could be eaten cold right away before they go bad. I keep a couple of loaves of bread in the freezer that could be taken out and thaw, I usually have a variety of fruits and vegetables that are kept at room temperature in the supermarket (even though I keep them in my fridge for space and health reasons), I have a few bottles of meal replacement shake for if I get a reflux flare-up - basically, with no particular effort, I have 72 hours worth of food that's within the scope of what I'd eat anyway.

 

Last power outage when I realized my emergency radio had died, I looked around for if I had another radio around, and realized I still have my high-school walkman in a drawer. It takes AA batteries (which I keep on hand anyway, and could easily take out of a remote control during a power outage), and gets a better signal than my emergency radio or my bedside clock radio. So I'm not replacing my emergency radio, and instead just using my walkman for as long as it survives.

 

 

Thinking about what I already have around the house that would serve me well in an emergency gets far better results than making an artificial emergency kit, not keeping up on the additional chore of maintaining it, and then finding myself without an emergency kit in an emergency. Maybe advice surrounding 72-hour kits should focus on this?

 

But it would also be useful if there was a way to make universally set it and forget it 72-hour kits, so anyone, regardless of their needs, can just buy or assemble the kit and never have to think of it again.

Things They Should Invent: library book sale queue

Sometimes, people are willing to pay a small amount of money for a book, but not retail price.

 

A place you can buy a book for a small amount of money (usually smaller than second-hand book stores) is the library book sale. 

 

What if you could sign up to be automatically notified when a book you're interested in is added to the library book sale, so you can get the books you're interested in owning at an extremely affordable price? 

 

Depending on how their computer system works, you could either get a notification when a book is added to book sale inventory, or when it is removed from the catalogue because it's being weeded from the collection. 

 

Also depending on how the system works, maybe they could put books aside for people who signed up for notifications rather than putting them directly into the general book sale. (I feel like putting a book aside for the person who requested it is already within the library's skill set).

 

The book sale could charge more for this priority - maybe $2 or $3 or a book that would normally be $1 - thereby raising more money for the library while still being a fantastic deal on a used book. Win-win!

Steal This Idea: stealth crossover mystery

Two or more TV shows (or other works of fiction) are set in the same location at the same time, with different, unaffiliated characters solving mysteries.

 

Except, unbeknownst to any of them, they're solving the same mystery!

 

Each show has the characters find a different set of clues that lead them to the same person having committed the same set of crimes, although perhaps each show emphasizes a different crime. (For example, one show is solving "Who stole the MacGuffin?" and the other is solving "Who was the hit and run driver?", when it turns out the driver committed the hit and run during their getaway from the MacGuffin theft.) If it's the kind of mystery that has to end with the police arresting the bad guy, it's shown in screen in a way that's vague and non-specific enough to avoid any awkward questions (e.g. montage with uniformed officers and dramatic music while the main characters have an emotional discussion that resolves their respective B plot.

 

Just once or twice in the season, we see actors from one series as background characters in a scene in the other series. For bonus points, we see them both in the same scene in the different series - e.g. one cast walks by the window as the second cast eats in the restaurant. 

 

For added authenticity, both series could share background actors, so they both have the same older lady in a statement hat and enormous man walking a tiny dog walk by in the background.

 

 

The most important part: they must not promote this crossover in advance! Wait for the internet to notice, and be careful with your IMDB curation until the internet does notice! This should be posted by some small Tumblr (yes, I said what I said in this the year 2025), then reblogged by some big-name fanfic writer, which leads to it being screenshotted on Reddit and then someone makes a TikTok post about it that doesn't get traction until some influencer duets it. By the time the information becomes general knowledge, the season is already over, and the ensuing buzz saves at least one of the serieses from cancellation.

 

I theorize that there's a 63% chance someone's already done this and no one has noticed. 

Bring back the Canada Post Comparison Shopper to help Canadians buy Canadian

In 2010, Canada Post introduced a tool called the Canada Post Comparison Shopper, which let you compare prices and shipping costs from a huge range of different online retailers.

 

Here is a news release from when the Canada Post Comparison Shopper was first launched, and here is my blog post from when I discovered it.

 

This tool helped me discover all kinds of new stores I never would have come across on my own and get amazing deals that I never thought possible. I mourned the day it was discontinued - I've never found a replacement that's anywhere near comparable!

 

As Canadians work together to disentangle ourselves from the United States of America, the time has come to bring back the Canada Post Comparison Shopper.

 

It could be a quick, easy way to search Canadian retailers for the specific product you're only been able to find on Amazon, or for a Canadian alternative or non-US alternative to the American product you've been using for ages. 

They could provide options to filter for Canadian-made products, or filter out US-made products, or filter out foreign-owned retailers.

 

Currently, the comparison shopping tools available to us are controlled by American oligarchs and run on algorithms designed to enrich them.

 

The Canada Post Comparison Shopper was a public good designed to benefit Canadians and Canada. In this, our moment of need, it's time to resurrect it.

Things They Should Invent: Canadian (or non-US) equivalent of Consumer Reports

I value buying and using quality products, so when I'm shopping for a new product category, I regularly search sources that provide objective, scientific, comparative product reviews like Consumer Reports does, or like Beautypedia used to.

 

As the need to economically disentangle ourselves from the United States becomes more and more apparent, I've been looking at the origin of various household goods, and I've noticed a pattern: most of the products I use regularly that were made in the US are products that I started using because they were well-reviewed in Consumer Reports or Beautypedia.

 

And I realized: this is because Consumer Reports and Beautypedia are American - they review products commercially available in the US, which likely strongly correlates with products made in the US! If a product is made elsewhere and is not sold in the US, they aren't even going to know about it to review it, so high-quality Canadian products are significantly less likely to have received a good review, because they're significantly less likely to have been reviewed at all.

 

With more and more Canadians trying to buy Canadian and more and more people around the world trying to avoid US products, now is the perfect time to fix this.

 

We need something along the lines of Consumer Reports or Beautypedia that rigorously and objectively reviews Canadian-made products or non-US products to determine which is the best quality. What is the most absorbent Canadian paper towel? What is the most effective Canadian dish detergent?

This would take the guesswork out of switching to buying Canadian and help promote Canadian products in general by highlighting Canadian excellence.

Things They Should Invent: handyman service as a condo amenity

One benefit of living in a well-run rental apartment building is the on-site superintendent handles home repairs for you. However, in a condo, you're responsible for your own repairs, which means you have to hire someone if the repair is out of your skill set.

But there are hundreds of units in a condo building, all of which started out with the same appliances and plumbing fixtures and door frames. 

What if they all pooled their resources and hired an on-site handyman-type maintenance person who would do in the in-suite repairs and odd jobs that are normally the resident's jurisdiction?

Some quick back-of-envelope math: if a maintenance makes $100,000 a year (nice round number) and there are 500 residents in the building (like there are in my building), it would cost everyone $200 a year - or $16 a month - to have on-site on-demand maintenance service for all the things that would normally be the resident's jurisdiction. Not bad, considering there's usually a minimum charge of about $100 for a tradesperson to even come out to see you, not to mention the peace of mind of knowing who to call (and not having to figure out who's a competent tradesperson and who's a scam, and not having to figure out what kind of tradesperson to call for your specific problem when it's not glaringly obvious - I mean, whose job is "my blind won't open" or "my soft close hinges no longer close softly" or "the handle fell off my window"???)

One benefit of living in a condo rather than a rental building is that there isn't a profit motive - they can spend condo fees on things that are convenient for residents, solely on the grounds that they're convenient for residents. For example, my condo hires professional window washers to wash the balcony windows, which is a marginal cost for each household but makes everyone's life significantly easier by taking away an irritating chore.

This would also make everyone's quality of life easier, by taking away all kind of irritating chore.

Things They Should Invent: web interface for Too Good To Go

I recently learned about an app called "Too Good To Go", which lets you buy food that's close to expiry at a discount, to help reduce food waste.

Problem: it's only an app. There's no web interface whatsoever.

This means you have to download the app not just to place an order, but also to see what restaurants are on it and what they charge for the discounted food - basically to find out whether it even has the possibility to be useful to you!

This is an accessibility issue for some people (browsers can be more easily customized with accessibility tools), a pain point for me personally (whenever I'm ordering food I'm already at a computer, so having to dig out a smaller, less user-friendly device is an additional layer of inconvenience), and also makes me suspicious.

Generally, when companies try to push you towards an app for something that can easily be done with a website, it's because they're trying to collect user data or prevent users from blocking ads or tracking. 

Given that everywhere I order food from has a web interface, I can't imagine any technical reason why this would need to be app only. Which makes me wonder if there's an ulterior motive.

Even if there is some technical reason why Too Good To Go wouldn't be able to make a web interface, they should at least let participating restaurants include Too Good To Go bags on their own online ordering web interfaces, so existing customers don't have to switch devices to take advantage of this very useful initiative!

Things They Should Invent: "What should I grow in my garden?" calculator

The question of what to grow in your garden is complex. 

What foods do you like? What quantities of them are you feasibly going to use? What kind of land and/or planters are available to you? What can grow in your local climate? What's your skill level? How much time can you realistically invest? There might also be questions of cost-effectiveness, if that's a decision factor for you.

Someone should invent an online calculator that works this out. You input all the variables, and it tells you the optimal balance of different plants to grow. Maybe you can even adjust it for results year to year, i.e. "Last year you told me to plant 3 tomato plants and I had way too many tomatoes"

Firefox's translation feature needs to be suppressed on pages that already have an official target language version

Recent versions of Firefox have a "translate this page" function that pops up if it detects that the webpage is in a language other than the preferred language indicated in your settings.

They need to figure out a way to stop this from automatically popping up when an official version of the page exists in your preferred language.

 

For example, if I, with my default English settings, end up on the French version of the federal government's COVID wastewater monitoring dashboard, a conspicuous "Translate this page" bubble pops up front and centre. 

This is a problem, because an official English version of the page exists. You can access it by clicking the English link on the top right. And the automatically translated version is never going to be as good or as authoritative as the official English version.

Screenshot of linked page, with the English link at the top right highlighted

 

People outside of translation/language intersection spaces don't always know that pages with multiple language versions exist, but they are common, especially in institutional (government, education, etc.) spaces that provide official information.

 

Firefox's translation feature needs to avoid distracting these uninformed users from the existence of the official multilingual versions that they may not even know to look for.

So how do you do that from a programming perspective?

Preliminary idea to build on: what if the translation feature could detect the name of the target language in the target language? If the user has English set as their default language, it detects the word "English" on the page. Perhaps it could highlight it? Perhaps the translation feature could say "An official version may exist"?

This wouldn't catch every instance. Some websites use abbreviations (en, fr, de, es, pl) and some websites use flags. However, there may be a finite number of ways that these are coded, or commonalities to the scripts used to switch the language, or indicators in the metadata.

Another possibility would be to have the pop-up appear elsewhere on the page (maybe towards the bottom left of the visible portion?) so it's less likely to cover the link to the official version. 

In any case, however well-intentioned this automatic translation feature is, it needs to avoid making it difficult to find the official version of the page in the target language.