Autosmoker

I am not a smoker, but many of my coworkers are. Smoke breaks are super super common, and e-cigarettes are popular too, as they allow smokers to smoke at their desks. (Traditional cigarettes would set off the smoke detectors, as well as making the entire office smell like an old cigarette.) One of my coworkers I remember complaining that he had two e-cigarettes, and this used up his hands, making it somewhat difficult to smoke and work at the same time. (If I'm remembering right, this same guy goes through a pack and a half of cigarettes per day, and this goes up to two packs per day on stressful days.) He idly pondered if there was some mechanical way to help, and although I said nothing, the wheels of my mind were already at work.
I'm imagining a collar-like machine with two robotic arms attached, and the arms hold the e-cigarette. Or two of them. Upon a pre-conceived signal, which could be two blinks, or a shrug, or any other gesture that can be made while typing, the machine pops the e-cigarette into the user's mouth for a quick inhale. It then extracts the cigarette and moves it to the side so he can get back to work.
Such a machine would increase the productivity of my smoking coworkers, who can now get their nicotine fix while at work, and would probably improve their smell a bit. (I can tell when they've had a cigarette, because they come back from outside smelling like an old ashtray.) Unfortunately, I think it would deepen their nicotine addiction. To the point that they'd never really stop smoking. And nicotine is made by tobacco plants specifically to make insects that eat them die of heart failure. Then again, so is caffeine, and I've developed quite the coffee habit, I'm afraid.
I'll be sitting in a major certification exam today. A little nervous.

Freeway Redundancy

I used to live in Los Angeles. The Westernmost cities of the United States tend to have a grid shape where the terrain permits. There are a lot of advantages to a grid shape, one being that it's much much harder to get lost. Another is that one blockage can always be routed around. The Internet was built on this idea, though in practice it has a lot of choke points.
Then I ended up moving east. The easternmost cities of the United States tend to have roads based on cattle trails, so everything bends and curves around for no apparent reason. And one immediate thing I notice: There are ways around clogs, but they're not always direct. In fact, they often make little to no sense. Except New York. New York is a grid.
Most communication, including transportation, benefits from redundancy. When there's more than one way to do something, no blockage is genuinely possible. You can always go around. This is helped by GPS devices that know where you are, and where the roads are, and how your road can lead to your destination. This is helped more by ones that have live traffic reports, quickly showing to you to the fastest possible route.
Another theory says that traffic grows to fit road capacity.

Fiber upgrade

Most telecom in the united states was built in the 19th century for telegraphs, and later telephones. A massive network of copper wire enables Americans to call anywhere in the country, and getting a new telephone line is trivial even in rather rural regions. (It may be difficult far out in Alaska due to the remoteness...it's hard to get anything there, really.) This is the backbone of our internet access too now.
However, in much of the rest of the world, the telecom infrastructure was completely destroyed by wars. World War 2 basically burned the vast majority of Europe, and coastal Asia, completely to the ground, and everything was rebuilt from scratch. With much of these regions managing to maintain a high population density, it was profitable to rebuild this infrastructure with what was then the best technology available. And a difference shows.
In America, a $40/mo broadband connection willl give you maybe 1mb (megabit) per second, but a compare this to, say, a Swedish connection gives you 4mb per second for 25 euros ($32 USD?), and people are outraged because they think they should have 6mb/s. And that they should only have to pay 20 euros instead.
Part of the difference is population density. The denser people live, the more people can be connected with less wire, and the more profitable it is to serve them. Sweden's people mostly live in the southern portion of their country, where it's cheap to keep them connected, while America's population is deeply scattered across the entire continent, and the four largest cities are practically at opposite extremes of the country. (New York, America's most populous city, is practically in the northeast corner of the continental United States, and Los Angeles, the second most populous, is practically in the southwestern corner.) South Korea has a great telecom system....because it has a huge population in a smallish area. Koreans get on the Internet for super cheap because it's not too expensive for companies to provide this for them.
I think that the cost might go down quite a lot if we replaced a lot of our old copper installations with fiber optic. Fiber optic cables are mirrored glass strands that can transmit information by shining colored light down its length, and the light bounces down the strand to the destination. By using many colors, outrageous bandwidth can be achieved. Fiber optic is also very cheap once installed, as it requires very little maintenance. Glass, unlike copper, doesn't corrode.
I think this upgrade to our infrastructure would make Internet access cheaper and faster, but I don't see it happening on the grounds that people tend not to like to fix things that aren't broken.

Wintermobile

I have what I think is an interesting idea for a cold weather car. Cars generally drive through environments colder than their engine, even in the desert, though this will gain the most usefulness in the more freezinger parts of the world. The car would have pipes going all throughout its outer chassis. The pipes would be full of an antifreeze and water mixture, and would end on either side in a bypass valve.
In cold weather, the driver can flip a switch, to open the valve, and now circulate the coolant in the car around the entire body of the car. Much heat leeches out the top, into the driving compartment, and out the back. In cold weather, it'd feel nice.
The engine would also benefit. Gasoline engines work by heat exchange -- the more heat it can pump out, the more efficiently the engine works. Coolant would come in cold as can be, and the solid parts of the car would have fewer heat differences over time. With fewer heat differences, there's less thermal stress.
I think taking this car to a hot region, though, like a jungle or a desert, would be worse than a conventional car.

Defeating CAPTCHAs

Another coworker of mine mentioned to me that a hobby of his was defeating CAPTCHAs, and that instant, I realized that there were two completely different routes to do that. One social, and one technological. CAPTCHAs are, of course, a Completely Automated Public Touring test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Those squiggly letters you're forced to enter to post on a forum, register new accounts, or whatever. They make them to prevent mechanical submissions, which get really annoying, really quickly.
The technological approach is to basically reinvent OCR, Optical character Recognition. OCR has gotten a lot of funding as a way of automating the conversion of paper documents into computerized ones, to gain the advantages of computerized documents -- easy transmission, copying, editing, and so on. An OCR approach analyzes the graphical elements to determine which letter they were originally, and enters that. Supposedly, really good ones can work with just a 3-pixel row.
The social approach is to decide that only humans are capable of reading the bent and distorted letters of a CAPTCHA and convinces them to do so. One common approach is to offer something in exchange, like file downloads, or pornography. There are plenty of people who will willingly do just about anything to get more of those things, including decipher letter puzzles. It's not as fast, but it is plenty reliable. After all, the goal of the CAPTCHA maker is not technically circumvented, a human being is solving each and every one of their little puzzles. Just...not in the way they had hoped. Social attack CAPTCHA are promptly cached and used to hammer the server with mechanical submissions.
My coworker, however, said he took the technological approach. He took pride in the quality of his OCR craftsmanship, boasting on his only requiring of the right three rows to totally guess the correct answer.

Auto Gaming

I think I heard this story a while ago, but now is the first time I actually remembered the address. An electronics engineer made a small device that automatically plays the game Guitar Hero, scoring better than any human ever possibly could, because it never makes mistakes.
Guitar hero is a "rhythym game," in which players use a plastic replica of an electric guitar to press buttons as they appear on a scrolling musical scale, in tribute to Bach's famous quote about musicianship: “I just press the right keys (buttons) at the right time and the organ does the rest. ” The guitar vaugely resembles the actual action of playing a guitar, in which a guitarist holds down some of the strings to change the effective length, and thus the pitch, of the vibrating string. Players of Guitar hero have about two seconds head-warning before they need to press the respective button.
Anyway, the machine receives a video signal, analyzes this signal, and uses it to determine when to send the button-push signal back to the game console. Two seconds is enough time for the computer to have completed its analysis, so the machine literally can't fail.
Why do this project? For one, it's an interesting look at video-analysis. Visual recognition is currently one of the weaker areas in computers. Show a computer a picture and it will interpret it only as a matrix of colors. Attempts to recognize pictures of people, useful for "We have a picture of a person walking into an airport. Is this person one of these people who are wanted criminals?" have been foiled by wearing different glasses, growing or shaving facial hair, or other things that wouldn't fool a human for even a second. There is big money, then, in getting computers to actually understand what it is that they are looking at.
For another, it's the "because I can" effect. Getting a computer to exactly copy a human action is an impressive boast.

Merry Christmas

With peace on earth and good will to humankind.
Also, a psychotic machine made of drills and hacksaws in every driveway.