Aardvark Daily

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Things I wish they'd make

Have you ever found yourself with a burning need for some kind of gadget or piece of technology and wondered "why can't you buy that?"

I know I have.

Perhaps the best example of this is when you lose your keys or some other essential item. You know that the item you seek is somewhere in the house but, no matter how hard you look, you just can't find it.

How cool would it be if you could just press a button and instantly, the exact location of that missing item would be revealed.

You know you're not alone in playing "hunt the keys/remote/phone or whatever" because many of today's devices have a built-in homing signal capability -- something that must have been included by popular demand.

I've lost track of the number of times I've used the "find" button on our cordless house-phone.

Sometimes the old-sheila puts it down somewhere and sometimes it's me who forgets where I put the damned thing.

Pressing the "find" button on the base station results in the cordless handset emitting a piercing noise that's pretty easy to track down.

A good number of the calls to my mobile these days are simply requests for the phone to announce its location by ringing. Without that utility, I'd probably go through several phones a year.

What about car keys though... how do you find them?

Well there were some early attempts at creating fobs that would scream a locating tone in response to your attempts to whistle. They were useless but can still be found for sale on the internet.

Even the jangling of the keys themselves would often be enough to set off that awful screeching noise so most people simply took the locater off and threw it in a drawer.

But hey, that was 20 years ago and now we're living in the 21st century, complete with RFID, GPS and a host of other technologies that ought to be able to help.

Indeed, you can now buy clever little devices that, once fitted to your car, will tell you where it is 24/7, anywhere on the face of he planet. Just like those spy and sci-fi movies of years ago, you really can see your vehicle moving in real-time as a little dot on a map -- thanks to GPS, the cellular network and Google maps/earth.

But that won't help you find your keys, will it?

I'm thinking that there are thousands of Kiwis who, at 7:30 on a Monday morning, would pay a king's ransom to know exactly where their car keys were, instead of frantically rushing around the house, tossing sofa cushions and dirty laundry around the place as they realise they're now late for work.

Of course there are now much better key-finders available on the internet and some of them seem pretty good, using RF to trigger an audio alarm and flashing LED on the missing item over distances of up to 100m.

I wonder however, how many people have then gone and lost the device that triggers the remote key finder? I'm thinking that you'd have to nail such an important piece of gear to the wall or at least padlock it to the fridge so you always know where *it* is.

So it appears that one of my "why don't they make.." inventions *is* available but what about the other devices that you've often wished for but can't seem to find?

One of the key elements of a "million dollar idea" is finding a problem to solve.

Once you've found your keys this morning, I wonder if you'd like to suggest any "why don't they make..." gadgets or bits of technology. Who knows, there may be some bright-sparks within the readership of Aardvark Daily who can point you in the right direction or even come up with a solution of their own.

Or, has the power of the internet meant that you really can just about get anything your heart desires (so long as it's scientifically viable)?

Remember, this need not be hardware, it might be a useful piece of software you've wondered about. Why don't they write a program to...?

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