Rainy day projects

Not that serious

Hands-free beard-activated dictaphone

Instead of fumbling with small buttons, it would be better if there was a dictaphone that simply started recording whenever you began stroking your beard (imaginary or real) in a suitably thoughtful manner.

3D box art gallery

A modern art gallery for poorly rendered 3D boxes for software that isn't actually available in box form. For some reason these images hold a morbid fascination for me. Most coveted are those that feature fake barcodes. I've started book-marking a few sites, so let me know if you find any that I can include.

Foreign job stand-in

In today's competitive job market, it seems silly to restrict yourself to poorly compensated jobs with small-town companies where you have limited potential for promotion. However, moving overseas has its own logistical and personal issues. There should be a service where you can take jobs in other countries by hiring some guy to sit in the office and arrange a reverse remote access thing so that you can remotely do the work. The guy can even attend meetings for you, like on that episode of Arrested Development when the stand-in for George Sr. had a camera attached to his head.

Ethernet patch cable for messy server rooms

Invent a Ethernet cable that has unshielded optical cables embedded in the insulation. The RJ45 jacks will include a button that powers up LEDs (using power over Ethernet). To trace a cable, dim the lights, press the button, and the entire cable will light up!

A bit more serious

Radio telemetry

I'd like to build an automated radio tracking system that operates on a small scale with accuracies of less than three metres. This will allow automated collection of home range and dispersal data in ecological systems at very high resolutions and allow interesting questions about fragmentation, habitat use and behaviour to be investigated.

I envisage a series of self-contained base stations containing solar panels, radio scanner, GPS module, an array of directional antennas, solid-state antenna switch, and self-organising (eg Zigbee) mesh networking capability. This would allow any number of base stations to be deployed in a target area. Triangulation would be improved by use of multiple overlapping directional antennae, while the lack of moving parts (eg, rotating antenna mount) will improve reliabilty for long-term studies. A central base station (or one nominated station) will collect fixes from transmitters and estimate exact locations. It would be interesting to determine accuracy by walking around the field site with a transmitter attached to a GPS. It may even be possible to 'train' the system by walking around the site before deployment to improve accuracy by using neural network techniques if standard geometric triangulation is not optimal in complex landscapes. Processed location information could then be relayed over a mobile data network to allow real-time analysis, or stored on site for periodic collection depending on the requirements.

I've read a little about a similar project being run in Central America at very great expense and with an accuracy of 70m, which is not really suitable for the areas I'm thinking about - though theirs covers a wide area and targets large animals.

CSIRO ICT has developed a Precision Location Technology system that does something remarkably similar to this and claim an accuracy to 20cm in ideal environments, though their transciever weighs 90 grams. I was hoping to use standard 'dumb' 144MHz transmitters, which are available down to 0.5 grams. The normal idea is for them to pulse transmit a tone at some frequency, which you pick up on a scanner. You can then lock the scanner to one frequency of interest to home in on a particular transmitter. It might be worthwhile to host multiple transmitters on the same frequency and analyse the frequency of the transmitted tones (each target having a unique frequency-tone combination). I don't see many problems with this as long as the pulse frequencies are similar (you'd get periodic transmitter collisions, but be able to cram more transmitters into an area and waste less time switching channels).

Another possibility I'm very interested in is harmonic radar, which reduces the complexity of the transponder to a single diode and antenna. The only tradeoff in the two orders of magnitude reduction in cost is the corresponding increase in base station cost! Another problem is that such simple transponders don't have any unique identification, which complicates large scale ecological studies when the fate of individuals is of interest. Perhaps it would be possible to attach a very small microcontroller to the transponder? I haven't found any information on anyone doing this.

I found some information about companies developing very long range (100m) RFID for asset tracking but not yet anything commercially available.

Transparent TCP compression system

I'm interested in the method that Riverbed uses to compress arbitrary network streams over a WAN. It sounds like they (very basically) use standard sliding dictionary compression techniques, but instead of throwing the dictionary out at the end of the file, you keep it around in a cache (and synchronise it at both ends of the WAN). This means that if you see similar data at a later time, even over an unrelated connection, you can just transmit the dictionary reference. While I'm sure it's not that simple (and they do lots of trickier application-specific stuff) I reckon it'd be fun to hack something together that implements this, possibly using LZMA or L77.

System notification RSS feed

An easy project - I get various boring emails from cron and such that I'd rather not have cluttering my inbox. Have them sent to another address and generate an RSS feed from its maildir, which I can then monitor from the comfort of Google Reader.

Rental accommodation review site

A review site for rental accommodation, so when you move out you can rate access to shops, neighbours, structural flaws and so on. The business model is that agents and owners can pay you to remove unfavourable reviews.

VHDL

A very long time ago I did some work in VHDL. I'd like to buy a cheap FPGA starter kit and get back into it for no practical reason that I can think of right now. I had once considered designing a FPGA ethernet router that could achieve 'wire speed' routing and filtering, but this no longer seems very exciting.

SVG

People are doing cool things with SVG these days. The first time I was truly impressed by it was by a real-time network traffic grapher that used JavaScript to call a CGI script, which reported current byte counts and updated the graph. It can also be used to do nifty graphical effects within Web pages like rotated fonts. Note to self - learn SVG.

Electronic field guide

A walk outside might involve taking a bird book, Wilson and Swan's A Complete Guide to Reptiles of Australia, It's Blue With Five Petals, and the entire Flora of South Australia. I'd love to digitise all of these and carry them on something convenient like an iPod Touch. I envision being able to point to where I am on a map (or even better, use a GPS add-on) and see a complete species list and narrow things down using a dichotomous key.. though not a traditional hierarchical one, but a key that shows 'common' identifiers first that may knock things down to lower levels more rapdily. So instead of deciding if trying to decide whether the thing you were looking at is, say, a monocot or a non-passerine, you could say "four petals" and further searches would be limited that way. This avoids one of the problems I have with keys - because I'm not great at using them, making the wrong choice in the first few questions immediately sends you in the wrong direction. By making 'obvious' choices first (which are rarely the first questions in a key, at least for me), this should be much better.

Also, it'd be good to have decent colour photos of every species, recordings of calls, movies showing behaviour, a button that records seeing it, the ability to take photos of the specimen. Should be a boon to forgetful naturalists everywhere.

iPhone Wikitravel interface

Rather than lugging around n kilograms of already outdated guidebooks when travelling, it'd be nice to build an offline Wikitravel reader unless someone else gets to it first. There's already a Wikipedia reader that can probably be extended to do both. Complication - Wikitravel doesn't currently release database dumps!

Assembly language

I've always been interested in assembly but haven't done much of it other than for the Z80 and 68HC11 in embedded projects. It would be a total waste of time but fun to pick it up properly. Because I have a nice Core 2 Duo, I'm quite interested in the idea of multi-core programming in assembly. Maybe it would be fun to port some of the Linux Assembly tools that have parallelisable algorithms to work on SMP (if this hasn't already been done). A more accessible target might be the Parallax Propeller, which is an 8-core microcontroller running at up to 80 MHz that comes in a sensible package. I can't yet think what I'd do with one.

Genuine work things

Upgrade apps

I maintain a few Rails applications written using relatively ancient versions of the framework. I really need to upgrade them all and clean them up to 'modern' standards.

ext-js

Play around with the ext-js library. It looks rather cool, though licensing fees for commercial use puts it out of my reach for now.