2025-07-14

project ideas

computer related

  • a fast, simple, drop-in replacement xdg thumbnailer. tumbler delays too much for generating thumbnails in various sizes
  • make wikipedia available as a small plaintext download - only current pages, no history, no talk pages, etc
  • basic dicussion web application with indented message threading like on reddit and maybe email support. could replace or complement mailing lists and web forums
  • a program that extracts c routine, macro, struct, enum and type signatures as parseable text. to be used as a basic but useful interface documentation
  • an actually practical peer-to-peer website system. plain text websites are only kilobytes
  • automatically create an installable package from modified system configuration files. so that one can install the base and configuration packages to have the same system. paconf
  • a plain simple c honeypot that just keeps random internet opportunists busy. existing tools either focus on logging or have too much code
  • self-learning fan control that measures cooling effectiveness and considers a loudness gradient
  • graphics card exclusively built for real-time voxel ray tracing
  • generic ast-based code transformer. this allows chatbot systems, that struggle with the exact diff format, to generate changesets that can be automatically applied
  • remove the obstacles that prevent a binding to gsl using guiles foreign function interface
  • more free and open metadata databases (movies, music, games, products, thesaurus) with api and fair payment if one needs many requests or the full dataset
  • command-line application that lists active network connections and works like a stream like "tail -f" for new connections and shows only source, destination, ports, inbound/outbound and protocol. to debug firewalls
  • an complete redesign of the historic e-mail protocols
  • distributed file system library. with peer discovery from seed nodes similar to kademlia
  • automatically create graphical user interfaces from command-line interface specifications like the ones sph-cli creates
  • research applying a minimum principle to ai: bootstrap intelligence from a stream of non-random data with fewest algorithms and few inbuilt goals
  • configure process priorities in /etc before programs start
  • list expected and unexpected active os processes using a process whitelist
  • standalone s-expression parser
  • file integrity layer - userspace file system, or other tools, that ensure that files do not get corrupted over time
  • email client that stores mail using sqlite or as one file per email. currently it can be difficult to extract and backup e-mail
  • bookmark-sharing website with open licenses and tags
  • terminal csv editor
  • application to add filename extensions if they are missing
  • a service/library for automated microtransactions. for all kinds of small payments, unlocking something, one-time buys or subscriptions
  • an online funding platform with an emphasis on commission-like payment where the price for a product lowers after a certain income has been reached. with digital products it sometimes occurs that something becomes popular and continues to be sold for premium prices for an indefinite time, possibly even after the death of the creator and by new copyright holders. this could be seen as rent-seeking that should be countered
  • federalization in free dating site software
  • have users curate lists of what they like and dislike in various topics (music, movies, books, products, etc) in order of favorability. find new things the user might like from other users that like and dislike the same things
  • distributed virtual memory library. automatically prefer fastest-to-reach nodes
  • analyze phonotactics to generate likely and unlikely character sequences (words) for different languages
  • store file format information exclusively in extended file attributes
  • program for emacs keybinding visualization. maybe only using ascii characters
  • latin character encoding without unused control characters of ascii

  • scheme

    • equivalents of mathematical notation as procedures in scheme (similar to math-as-code)

    • more purely functional scheme

    • a syntactic module system for scheme similar to what is explained here or what is used in chez scheme

    • guile binding to lmdb

    • scheme command-line code refactoring and analysis. find uses, declarations, rename modules/other-identifiers, list dependency trees

    • a simple command-line guile-wisp calculator, like the node.js repl but using prefix notation

    • a small scheme transpiler that allows for some coffeescript syntax: space, newline, and indent for application and commas for continued argument lists

    • implement natural cubic splines in scheme

moreso for entertainment

  • application that generates text descriptions of unlimited random worlds similar to minecraft. for example creating a textual journey through a world, maybe even interactive
  • metaphorizer: replace patterns in text with ridiculous metaphors, idioms and figurative speech
  • online service where users can create timelines of things
  • computer-assisted categorization of music. loudness, calmness, instrumentation
  • wavelength to rgb approximation converter
  • planck units calculator and visualization
  • collect image memes as machine readable text and publicize for free use

other

  • garbage collection process for rules and regulations
  • an object/action dictionary that lists any kind of object in the world and how it is useful, and the reverse
  • mathematical formula collection that uses ascii and maybe prefix notation instead of traditional mathematical notation
  • dependency graph of mathematics concepts - "if i want to understand x, what exactly do i have to know?", to make it easier for non-mathematicians to work themselves into higher-level math topics
  • list public trust breakage of, for example, politicians and companies in a simple way with sources to verify. care must be taken that it is not misused like for example fact checking
  • a news website for tracking events, and displaying events by date and not so much by click popularity
  • a linear hangul character set optimized for lojban
  • a list or wiki of dangerous things
  • choose a date and see information about how life was like at the time
  • list of percentages of all kinds of things, statistics about the world in percentages