I hate sand / sleep in my eyes when I wake up. For some reason I only get it on a saturday or sunday morning. Nanobots which live in your pillow could come out and eat the sleep as it is exuded. They could then return to the pillow and deposit the sleep in a holding / evaporation tank slung under the bed. Once a year a pound of solid sleep could be easily disposed of in a single block. Could potentially open up possible uses for bulk sleep - as a foodstuff for fish, or in the pharmaceutical industry. Who knows, the cure to insomnia may lie in this stuff.

An auto folding towel rack - throw your towel at the wall, and it catches it, shakes it, folds it and hangs it on the rail. A simple rubberised roller could be motion sensor activated to start running the towel back and forth (like a canon photo printer does to the paper) until it is straight, then deposit it on one of the free metallic rails below. This would save me from one life’s most pointless chores, and most common reasons for argument in my house. Why DO women hold towel arrangement in such high regard For any girls reading this thinking ‘who wants a stupid big roller in the bathroom’ I just checked, you could make this using PINK rubber. Happy now?

This is a simple concept, with no doubt incredibly complex technical requirements. A cycling doping cure - fit all cyclists with a pacemaker type internal device which would sense dodgy substances and text the press. A mini testing lab looking for indicators of doping, and either log or send out a positive result. This would then be investigated by governing bodies. Big brother A twitter like continual stream of bio data on each rider could be published. This would allow race fans to keep an eye on their favourites. It they also twittered 'training at altitude' style information alongside the 'telemedary' it could be quite addictive to monitor. Imagine the stats you could do during the tour. 'he got up that hill quicker than anyone else, but he did less altitude training than all but one rider'. I love le tour de France. I hate it when people get kicked for cheating. This years event was potentially beautiful, but an turned out to be an almighty anti climax. If all the riders had been fitted with this thing a year ago they couldn’t have cheated, so we’d have had a better race. There are other potential uses. This technique could also be used to warn the coach of cake attacks - so it’s not just a big brother thing. The cake attack version may be easier to implement initially, as it could operate purely on blood sugar readings. Weight loss Away from sports, it could be wired up to a big battery to give fatties a shock when they sugar rush so they drop their donuts! A milder version could just be wired to a speaker which said nice things like "you don't want to eat that - have an apple" or "put the burger down and go for a walk dude, this is your heart talking". The domain name velodope.com is available as I type. As is autodopefinder.com. Some scary medical giant must be working on this already.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in the UK a mishmash of churches and local councils tend to be responsible for the upkeep of cemeteries. A few of the ones I know are in serious need of some TLC, simple things like mowing the grass more than once a year seem to be beyond the available resources.Things are made worse by the dispersing of families. If you only visit once a year because you live 600 miles away, you can’t expect to maintain a plot yourself. A subscription to a tending service would seem to be good value. Or does this exist already? Simply pay someone to keep a patch looking good once a month. Some community aspects would allow the service to be more effective, allowing the tender to do a few together. It also lets you know your dead neighbour - a sort of facebook for the deceased. The domain name cemeterytender.com / .co.uk etc... are all available as I type.

The clip on top of most pens assume you will be clipping your pen to your pocket, or the front of a notebook. This pen should have a sideways clip - assuming it will be running along the spine of a moleskine type notebook. This would keep my bike bag slightly neater, even if no one else needs it. [sketch of side clip]

My distributed webcam weather forecast post got me thinking about how information can be extracted from images. Wouldn't it be cool if you could calculate the average colour of an image search? Using a combination of open source tools listed below I've come up with the 'word color' tool. Basically you type a word or phrase, and it returns the average color of a search on Flickr for that word. Simple! If anyone wants to run with this and take it further, I've linked to the bits and pieces used to achieve this below. Some related tools, techniques and posts:

• Image Magick - open source image manipulation and calculation
• Wisegeek - another image / color / flickr mashup giving a hex value from a Flickr image ID
• PHP Imagecolorat() - starting pointin the PHP manual for color experiments
• Theo - nice flash single image color averaging
• drunkmenworkhere - interesting 'color of the web' project
• fractulus - search for images by color
• AntoAPI - nice ajaxy implementation of color calculating