Hasta La Ideas

Golf has never really looked like a green sport to us, even considering the often beautiful surroundings. At least not when one considers parking areas filled to the brim with large SUVs and lawn mower tractors working around the clock. If we also weigh in golf cars, fertilizers, irrigation and every other must-have to keep a golf course in peak shape… Well, you see our point. However, here’s a way for you to take charge of a piece of your own carbon footprint an make at least your own golfing a bit greener. It’s called the Gocy Active and it’s a combined golf-cart and bile trailer. With the mounting kit installed on your bike, it’s easy to hook up the trailer/cart and pedal off to your local links with a better eco conscience. On arrival you unhook the cart, extend the third wheel and swing away. After your last hole, the procedure is of course the opposite. You use your own golf bag, but the Gocy is delivered with it’s own special bag for grocery shopping, picnicking or whatever you need to schlep along.brbr

Jim Parsons on smartness. Cut from the Swedish edition of Elle magazine #10, October 2008. Thanks’ Jim…brbr

The Solvatten water purification device won first prize in this year’s Swedish Skapa awards and boosted inventor Petra Wadström’s bank account with a cool SEK 400,000 (about USD 50,000). The invention is a water purifier where the sun’s heat and UV radiation does most of the cleaning work. A filter on the tap does the rest. After sitting out in the sun for three to four hours, the device can deliver ten liters of clean, drinkable (and hot) water. Anything that can help fix the lack of drinkable water in the world gets our support. However, as good as it may be, the Solvatten is not the first of it’s kind. We have covered three similar ideas before, the latest one only last August. Then, designers Alberto Meda and Francisco Gomez Paz won first prize in the Home category in the Index:2007 design competition with their very similar (but better looking) concept, the Solar Bottle. In March of 2006 we also presented two other, and much simpler and cheaper, solutions using the same principle. Petra Wadström’s Solvatten, however, seems to be much nearer actual production than the Solar Bottle. The two other ideas are already in use, we think.brbr

We spent a great deal of yesterday visiting this year’s Tekniska Mässan (the Scandinavian Technical Fair). We knew that the Swedish Inventor’s Association and the Skapa Foundation (Swedish only) were to present a lot of new inventions this year and that many of the inventors themselves were going to be on hand for chats. Over the next few days, we’ll present some of the inventions we found at the fair. We’ll start out with C Me. C Me is an aerosol spray that can make virtually every garment in your closet reflecting in the dark. It is said to work best on denim, fleece or linen but other fabrics won’t cause much of a problem either. The spray is totally invisible in daylight, does not leave stains or affect the feel or function of the garment sprayed. The persons in the picture above have each had one trouser-leg treated with the spray. It strikes us as a way to make teenagers wear reflexes, since they would be reluctant to wear ordinary reflecting tape or fobs. The C Me spray is also available in a version for pets, i.e. dogs and cats. It would probably work well on cats that like to run outside and can’t be persuaded to wear a collar.brbr

Maybe you can’t get very much into the little compartment, but if you have something really, really secret this hollowed out 5/8 bolt looks like a great stash indeed. What if we would keep it in our tool box with some other bolts just like it, or actually screwed on to something innocent like one’s car or porch swing. No-one would have a clue. According to the Spy Coins site, who sells different spy tool replicas, among them hollowed out coins, these things were actually used by spies during the Cold War as means to hide and transport secret documents on microfilm. Apparently U2 pilot Gary Powers was carrying a hollowed out silver dollar when he was captured by the Soviets in 1960. The coin contained a suicide-device, but Powers either failed to, or chose not, use it. The coins are mostly US, so we chose to write about this bolt instead, since it would work all over the world. The bolt is USD 40:- and current American nickels and quarters are about USD 20:-.brbr