In the last couple of months I’ve been reading about Pokemon Go which requires players to capture Pokemon creatures imposed on the view of the real world as seen through your phone camera; and just now I’ve read a Linked-In headline reading “Is augmented reality the next big marketing channel?” with an explanation that augmented reality involves superimposing a digital element on another environment. The thought suddenly occurred to me that this might be a way to display all these memento’s that I’ve been digitising. Could you designate a room in the house as a display room in which mementos could be imposed digitally on the walls and in the space, and which could be seen through the phone camera or virtual reality headset?

It was only a few days after I’d watched a TV biopic on the last days of Winston Churchill that I discovered that the central nurse character was a fictional invention. Some days after that, I read a Guardian article (02Mar2016, page 8) quoting Tim Bliss, who had just won a share of an award from the Lundbeck Brain Research Foundation for his research on memory. Bliss said that we now have a pretty good handle on what happens with memory and asked, if that’s the case could we instil memories that we didn’t actually have? He went on to say that there’s very good evidence that we can start to erase memories using drugs and that this may  be useful eventually for the treatment of PTSD. This got me thinking that the truth is in danger, as we produce and consume more information, as we exploit virtuality, and as we get more technologically sophisticated. By ’in danger’, I mean we are becoming less able to distinguish fact from fiction with a commensurate reduction in trust and increase in suspicion, disagreement and hostility. Perhaps we need to start being more rigorous about declaring fictions; and maybe we should start exploring how we can adjust our laws to cope with an increasingly malleable future.

Perhaps it would be interesting to place pictures of all the houses you have lived in on a poster with associated pictures or information around them. If you are missing a picture of one of the houses it should be possible to find one in the satellite view in Google maps or in Streetview. Maybe, it would be even more interesting to extend it to houses your parents, grandparents and their ancestors lived in. Once the photos and information have been assembled it’s easy enough to create the poster in a service like Snapfish or Photobox.

Now that we have to pay for plastic bags in the UK, I try to keep a spare in my coat pocket – but sometimes I forget to replace it. That made me think it would be good to have a jacket or pair of trousers that had a bag designed into the fabric. I’m sure someone must have invented this already – but I don’t recall ever seeing anything like it in the shops.

In today’s digital age it is, perhaps, preferable to store paper documents by digitising them (as either scans or photos). However, sometimes one wants to retain the originals, and, in that case, the two forms have to be stored in separate places. It would be useful to be able to store them  both in a single container (an ebox perhaps) which is able to both store physical pages AND display electronic pages.

I’ve seen very, very small jigsaws – but no very, very big jigsaws. Wouldn’t they be a good accompaniment to giant chess and giant connect-4 in a garden or park?

These two statements in William Keegan’s article in today’s Observer have prompted me to flesh out this idea: “it should never be forgotten that the coalition inherited a burgeoning economic recovery in the summer of 2010 and proceeded to bring it to a halt with its misguided programme of austerity” and “ I think I heard the prime minister come out yet again on the wireless the other day with that pre-Keynesian howler – much in vogue with the German economic establishment – that when the private sector cuts back, it makes sense for the public sector to cut back too. On the contrary, it does not make sense, and was the reverse of what was needed after the depression which followed the financial crash of 2008-09”. I’m fed up with politicians, clerics, lobbyists and other people with an axe to grind, brainwashing us with stuff that I suspect they do not fully understand, or that they are twisting to their own ends, or, worse still, that they are simply lying about. I’d like to see these points tested in the media by sending them to the Telegraph, Times/Sunday Times, Financial Times, Guardian/Observer, and The Independent, and asking them to research the following aspects: a) was the quote an accurate record of the statement? b) was any additional meaning imparted by the context in which the statement was made? c) what evidence did the person making the statement base it on? d) what are the findings of the research that has been done on the subject e) what experiments/empirical tests have been performed to validate each main set of findings? e) what is the broad consensus of the professionals in the field concerned regarding each of the main sets of findings?

It’s good to have a contents template when creating documents of a particular type – an audit report, an IT Architecture document, a Project Plan, or a Preservation Plan, for example – there must be hundreds of different types in use today. It would be very useful to have an iPad app which provides all the standard contents for different types of documents. In some instances, a few of the main headings may not be relevant, or you don’t want to go down to such great levels of detail. So the app could help you choose which subset of all the possibilities would be most useful for a particular set of circumstances. Content components could be suggested by users and moderated by the owner of the app.

As computer technology powers ahead, people look back with nostalgia on the earlier models that they used, so the time is ripe for the production of small scale replicas for collection and display. Of course, being computers, they might do a little more than just look good. Building in a chip holding information about the model, and a wifi capability, would enable it to display its details on a local screen; and, depending on the particular selection of models that you have collected together, particular functions and processes could be programmed to occur. For example, the display of footage of an early computer guru speaking, the ability to pay an early game, or the ability to undertake the next stage of a complex puzzle.

When I swim I enjoy going underwater and sometimes picking things up from the bottom. The other day it occurred to me that, by integrating some electronics and chips into the tiles on the bottom of a pool, it might  be possible to make them light up and to switch them off with a touch. This ability would enable a challenging underwater treasure hunt to be constructed. Tiles could be lit singly such that a new one is lit when the current one is touched. Alternatively, the lights could show numbers such that you have to switch them off in the correct order. Software would enable courses of differing tile placement but with the same length routes, to be constructed such that individuals could compete to get the fastest time.