Bed-ridden reading

When you're flat on your back after (e.g. shoulder) surgery and you'd like to do something more than watch the boob tube, it is frustrating to realize you can't hold a book in position. E-books might change that.

There are several possibilities. You can mount a flatscreen monitor on the ceiling, and use a tablet at your hand with some kind of bluetooth interface to the monitor pickup, which would then control the monitor. This would allow other things besides just books, of course. You could fumble through your email, browse the web, or setup your own boob tube feed. However, room lighting might make it less than ideal. Room lighting (and the greater expense!) make projection on a screen on the ceiling even less attractive.

It would be easier to mount swing-arm type of holder (with stiff springs!) to the headboard for your e-reader or tablet. If you can lift your arm, it should be fairly easy to control. If you can't, a tablet should be within easy bluetooth range of a corresponding device you could have at your side.

Available on Amazon, turns out.

Antenna charging

I've been at conferences in which the series of meetings lasted long enough to have participants scrambling for power outlets to keep their laptops running. Typically there aren't enough.

Suppose one were to attach an antenna that served as a charger, matched with a large broadcast antenna grid on the ceiling. The broadcast antenna measures backscatter and dynamically adjusts its broadcast distribution to focus as much power as possible on the receiving antennas. Starting with pulses, and dropping back to pulse mode from time to time, might make this easier.

In an auditorium a floppy charging antenna is likely to hang vertically, which isn't exactly ideal. So the antenna should be stiff like the old radio antennas, but even so I've been in crowded auditoriums where there such a thing would be parting the remaining hair of the fellow in the row in front, so this might not work very well.

There will be some wastage, which may not be acceptable in crowded rooms. If everybody is flopping antennas into the middle of a desk the level of wastage is probably safe.

The size and grid density of the broadcast antenna will determine the number of simultaneous beams (unless you want to cycle among them).

New cell phone state

Caller ID is great--I can often identify who is calling by the ring tone. In some cases I ignore the call and settle for voice mail later; especially when driving or in a meeting.

My phone is either receiving or not receiving a call. Maybe it is busy, or off, or I just haven't answered it yet, but no information can reach me until I pick up.

Suppose I specified that for some phone number, I was willing to accept additional data to be communicated during the ring. I could turn this feature on when driving. (I tried a bluetooth headset but the battery ran down quickly.)

1. This could be a simple flag that turned on a "whoop" to indicate that this is an emergency call (e.g. please pull over and take this call).
   
2. It could be a text message that text-to-voice turns into an additional spoken message during the ring (e.g. "You left your passport on the table!").
   
3. It could be a chunk of speech sent as data that gets appended to the ring tone.
   

This isn't something to turn on during a business meeting, and there are opportunities for mischief if somebody gets hold of your phone and resets permissions for you. And the police would probably want to be able to override preferences ("Please pull over now and wait in your car").

There are times it would be handy, and it doesn't seem as though it should be hard to implement.