Author: coutinho

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Universal Belay Device

By Kurt Sturm, University of Utah Technology Commercialization Office, iBridge Network Innovations – March 06, 2013 at 12:13AM

Invention
Summary

 

This is
the FIRST belay device that can be easily switched between a frictional mode and
auto-locking mode.  Switching
between the two modes can be done anytime without removing the ropes or
unclipping the device from the belayer’s harness. This means switching can occur
at any time without sacrificing safety. The universal belay device can also
handle single or double ropes of all commercially available diameters.  In frictional mode only a small force of
15-30 lbs is required to stop or “catch” a climber’s fall, while auto-locking
mode allows the device to be operated “hands-free” and immediately arrests a
climbers fall.  This technology is
available to license.

 

Features &
Benefits

 

·        
Switches between auto
locking and frictional modes without removing the rope or detaching from the
harness.

·        
Accommodates one or two
ropes.

·        
Use with
all rope diameters.

·        
The switch
can occur at any time.

·        
The device is safe for climbers making
the switch.

 

Market
Opportunity

 

Current
devices operate either in frictional mode or auto-locking mode. No device has
the capability to switch between the two options. This device can operate using
one or two ropes giving the climber options to choose
from.

 

The
Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) reports that over 9 million Americans
participated in recreational climbing last year. Military and search and rescue
teams are steady users and buyers of climbing and rappelling
equipment.

 

Intellectual Property

 

Two US
patents (No. 7,757,812, 8,316,989) has been issued from the US Patent and
Trademark Office.

 

Inventors

 

Dr. Eberhard Bamberg,
Ph.D., Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, University of Utah

 

Nathanial Young,
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Utah

 

This new technology
is available on an exclusive or nonexclusive basis.

 

 

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Supercharge Your Pocket Experience With These IFTTT Recipes

By Nancy Messieh, MakeUseOf – March 05, 2013 at 10:31PM

ifttt recipesBetween the two of them, Pocket and IFTTT are excellent services that do their part in making their users more productive. Pocket gives users a one-stop shop to access all of the content – articles, videos and more – that they want to save for later viewing.

Combine that with IFTTT, the ultimate automating service, and you have the ultimate way to automatically save content to your Pocket account, easy ways to share that content with others, and no limits to the kinds of content you can save to Pocket. IFTTT can also be used to keep up with new freebies, to automate your online interactions, and much more. With both of them extremely versatile tools, you can come up with a variety of interesting recipes that put Pocket to proper use. We’ve listed a few of our favourite recipes that we think will supercharge your Pocket use.

If you’re still getting the hang of IFTTT, be sure to check out our guide here.

Automatically Tweet Your Pocket Favourites

As your working your way through your Pocket reading list, if you want to get a certain flow going as you work, there’s one way you can tweet out interesting articles as you finish them without interrupting that workflow. Rather than manually tweet out the articles that you want to share with your Twitter followers, with this ifttt recipe, you can automatically tweet any articles you mark as your favourites in Pocket.

ifttt recipes

While Pocket does provide an easy tweet button to access, this method is far more fluid and will probably let you get through more articles in a shorter amount of time.

Save Pocket Favourites To Your Tumblr Blog

Let’s say you want to recommend your Pocket favourites to more than just your Twitter followers? If you want a page that’s all your own – filled only with recommended links for people to read – you could always send your Pocket favourites to a Tumblr blog using this recipe.

ifttt recipe ideas

When adding a story to your favourites, Tumblr is one of the best automated options since you can choose to create a link post. Your Tumblr blog could then become a unique recommended reads site accessible to anyone who has the link.

The recipe, as is, shares the title and link, but you could also choose to add an excerpt if you want.

Send links From Your Twitter Favourites To Pocket

While Twitter pulled the plug on its IFTTT integration, there are still some workarounds that people have come up with that allow you to still take advantage of that connection. This recipe sends links in your Twitter favourites to your Pocket account.

To use this recipe, all you have to do is paste the following in the RSS field, replacing ‘username’ with your Twitter username:

“https://api.twitter.com/1/favorites/username.rss”

ifttt recipe ideas

Save New Posts From A Site To Pocket

If there’s a specific site you know you don’t want to miss out on any of their posts, you can create a site-specific recipe that will be triggered each time its RSS feed is updated. We’ve created a recipe that does just that for the MakeUseOf site – so that all articles from the blog will end up in your reading queue.

You can replace the MakeUseOf RSS feed with any site of your choice, but we’d certainly encourage you to include MakeUseOf in your Pocket reads!

ifttt recipe ideas

Save Videos To Watch On Pocket

While Pocket is all about saving articles to read for later, there’s no reason you can’t use it for a bit of light entertainment as well. With these two recipes – one for Vimeo and one for YouTube – you can save videos to watch later by sending them to Pocket. Both recipes use the same triggers – simply mark the videos on the video sharing site to watch later – and they’ll automatically end up in your Pocket queue.

ifttt recipes

The cool thing about using these kinds of recipes is that you can create a playlist of sorts for yourself from both YouTube and Vimeo, and watch them all in one place.

Send Pocket Items To Your Kindle

If you want to save Pocket articles to your Kindle, you can use this recipe which takes advantage of the Kindle-Instapaper connection. This recipe works by sending your archived (or marked read) Pocket items to your Instapaper account. In order for the article to make it all the way onto your Kindle, you have to have the Kindle-Instapaper connection set up. You can do this by going to the Kindle page in your Instapaper account.

What are your favourite Pocket-related IFTTT recipes? Share them with us in the comments.

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