User:RalphHansen/CrazyIdeas

From STNY LUG Wiki

These are not all related to linux and opensource software, but enough are to be worth a personal subpage

• 2XnKCD-LIFE – An online community bringing XKCD fans together into a 2nd-life-like 2D virtual world that will have it's own geek economy, rules and ecology/functionality. Motto – bringing the command-line, and anonymous online interaction back to the web experience since 2008.
• Stinky feet Dash-top Accessories, Inc. - to manufacture realistic rubber feet that act as car dashboard holders of a variety of common car items (packs of gum, cell phone charger cords, cigarettes, extra keys, combs, lose change, etc.). Each stinky foot is made to mash nicely and stay put when place between the passenger side car dash board and the window shield (for when your better half is not riding with you and you miss having her stick her feet up on the dash). Feet come in multiple sizes, manicured, with warts and without.
• PPGGN (Pretty portable grid game notation) – an open standard for setting up recording and maintaining the status of games and puzzles based on grids. Brings into one family chess, checkers, sudoku, nurikabe, hanji, masyu, hashi etc, 1-person,2-person etc, multiple turn taking games, allows the automated generation of possible game states, solutions, handles grids filled with multiple piece-types, and multiple piles off the game grid.
• C-board – a cross between a trikke and a snow/skate board. Three wheels, steerable front wheel, rider stands on the single board platform sideways (like a snow/skate board). The steering handle is shaped as a forward protruding (backward C) curve. The C-board is propelled forward by rocking back and forth simliar to the trikke. At time the rear wheels (one at a time) leave the ground so that greater rocking can occur. Higher speeds than are possible with a trikke should be possible due to greater leaning and shifting of the rider's weight. It's harder to learn to ride (and balance) but should be a cooler ride.
• tvmakesyoustupid.org – an organization (promoted via firefox addon among other services), social network dedicated to finding, categorizing, and improving the availability and market for educationally beneficial video and audio clips online. As an aside the group will tout non-educational, poor-suitability aspects of old one-way mass media. The add-on is simple, to bookmark a clip or clip portion, users are forced to write something to answer “What did you learn by watching this video?”. There will be the option of 'Nothing' (a catch-all category for most of what's on youtube). The organization will make no attempts to host (store or serve/stream) any video or audio content (perhaps some minimal screencaps or relevant photos). The main emphasis will be to match source video/audio links with relevant reading material online (books? paper publications?), full text searchable transcripts, use hierarchical tagging. Google has started autocaptioning hasn't it? Yes, http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=100079
• Killaroachwithastaplegun.com – a simple yet challenging online target game/website (with prizes, somewhat questionable ethics as live cockroaches may be injured). participants visiting the site see web cam viewpoint of a pendulum swinging over a room full of cockroaches. The pendulum is armed with 4-8 nail gun-like staple guns. By clicking your mouse when your gun is aimed at the desired target a real-life staple is fired. In the free multiplayer rooms aiming is more difficult and less predictable than in the pay-for-private rooms since you never know when someone else will fire, which will jolt the pendulum unpredictably and the roaches will scatter due to the noise. Roaches and staple/nails are removed nightly. A companion site : Injureverminwithanailgun.com await animal-rights/ town-zoning approval.
• todosometime_next_week, this_month, next_month, tomorrow, soon (programming utility), combined with the Highlander project (There can be only one ... stream of todos UPDATE Looks like Google Wave will fill the niche I had in mind. I'll have to make GW plugin for my purposes), quick email/chat to todo forwarding. Could be called the "Time of Day Triage" or Dodo Do Master.
• half-knots – Singleness in the church organization (web design, content gathering project)
• DigitalHillary.com – discussing privacy and online rendering of 3D models of famous figures for the purpose of fabricating photos realistically
• Drag-pop-n-drop - As touch screens become the norm, and processor speed continues to improve, there's probably room for innovation in the commonly used UI building blocks (buttons and pull-down menus). For instance, dragging objects onto palettes that pop out could provide a flexible way of enabling more features while still conserving screen real estate. Dragging becomes a more acceptable user action because the direct touching on a tablet is more finely tuned than mouse selection on a vertical screen. Popout or popup context sensitive "menus/palettes/galleries" are easier when the processor and graphics can handle quick response to user actions. Multi-touch (two or three finger) gestures for selection or actions on screen objects is another area for innovation. Collabubuntu (collaboration distro) - featuring multimediaroom server setup that recognizes multiple laser pointers on screen used to control a common work area
• Vlogger Studio - a computer learning (edutainment) center for all ages. The center should have multiple rooms for video blogging, large (magic wall) touch sensitive screens and data projection and video conferencing facilities. The main idea is like FutureKids, but with an upgraded empasis on new technologies still too expensive for home use. The magic wall will allow small classes (groups of 3-5 kids) to play collaborative learning games. Some stations in the center will emphasize fitness by having a treadmill in front of a large screen (think - pac man where the faster you run on the treadmill, the more easily you'll avoid the ghosts). First person shooters and grand theft auto games will be avoided (except for age controlled fixed late-nite hours). Guitar hero could be adapted to teach real music skills. Magicwall collaborative gaming.
• Paint by Logic - a variant of the Nikoli Filomino puzzle that adds color. Solving the puzzle then coloring what's filled in becomes a beautiful piece of pixelated art.
• Naked Gravatar - it's a gravatar with skin (only). A gravatar takes your small profile pic/ online identity and takes it to multiple sites. The Naked Gravatar adds to this specification by adding a site specific layer of skin. Individual blogs/forums add suits, or badges of honor, or seniority to your gravatar image.
• Put a Tree on my Grave - What better way to give back to the environment and take a small step toward reducing your carbon footprint? One can still have a small stone; couples and families can still be buried together; but all I'll need is a small pine box. Let the tree's roots hasten the decay. As people come to visit they'll see a reminder of the passage of time. I don't seek eternity in a memorial, just a sense of continued growth. #ifIwereatree (I'd wanna be a lilac tree.)- twitter topic to periodically promote the movement. Magnificent trees and the rodents who live in them.
• Maybe not so crazy programming projects - Time-of-day-triage, Google Wave app (and gadgets) that allows playing Nurikabe, improving command-line/ text-only twitter apps, creating a minimalist Gnome applet twitter client (one that shows just profile picks and activity), color template builder that allow wireframing simple page layout (to wysiwyg a web site quickly), tweepml web site design for bi-lingual tweeppl, using clojure and incanter to simplify creating (themable) barcharts and other graphs for the web. Improving Tiddlywiki and Conkeror integration (to compete with emacs org-mode, planner.el etc)