Chapter a Day?
I had an idea for a service that lets you read a book via email. Like, it sends you a chapter a day. But, maybe you're busy one day and you don't have time to read the whole thing, only reading 1/2. Well each paragraph would have a "stop here" link. And tomorrow's email would pick up there.
Truth is, I don't know if I'd use a service like this. I find it hard to imagine that I would read something, but maybe having it delivered in chunks would make it more likely. No idea. But I found the idea for being able to mark where you stop interesting.
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As I went to bed last night TikTok was showing me 90s cartoon intros. And I thought, "Maybe I should start a cartoon rewatch/discussion podcast."
This morning I still think it's a fun idea and my morning brain gave me "Toon in Next Week" as a possible name for it...
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Random note from 3 weeks ago that I have no recollection of and no idea what it means: "Presidents speak to the dead."
I assume this was a story idea but I have no idea where it came from or what the actual idea was.
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Last night I had a story idea for a dystopian shortstory. It has similarities to Upload (on Amazon), but enough differences I am still mulling over writing it up.
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Idea I had. I need a case for my wireless headphones with a built in battery so I can charge them while they are in my bag. Earpods and Airpods do this, why not larger headphones?
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Idea this morning: Yard cushions or a yard beanbag chair. I want to be able to go out into the yard and flop down. Ignore the fact I'd be piled on by my dogs.
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As I continue to re-listen to Project Hail Mary, and be inundated by Oppenheimer marketing, I can't help but think we should get a movie of the book in this same vein. Heavy. Serious. About a race to understand a potentially world ending disaster.
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Daily Science and Inspiration
Had this idea the other day. The way there are religious or philosophy books with daily entries or motivations, I would love to see something like that. A book I can make a morning routine about, that delves into a science discovery and what enabled it or how it happened, and what inspiration can be taken from it.
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Simple Feed Filter
Since FreshRSS doesn't really offer filtering by feed, I'm wondering if I should do a simple RSS pass through which takes in a RSS feed url and a string of filter terms and then spits out a corresponding RSS feed removing posts which get filtered.
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Hear me out. I want a dog bed which has an attached chaise lounge. Same fabric, same furniture piece. Just give me a place to chill with a supported back next to the dogs on the bed with me.
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Seeker of Power, a Rene Belloq story
I decided to put Raiders of the Lost Ark on this morning while doing some other things. One of my go-to movies that I can watch an infinite amount of times. This morning I was struck by how much I wish they would reboot this franchise in a new way rather than what looks to be Indiana Jones 5 coming our way.
Here's my idea:
Titled: "Seeker of Power"
- Movie opens with the finale of Belloq's life, a screaming soul racing at his face, and then goes black. Transition screen (X years before...)
- We see young Rene Emile Belloq growing up on his family vineyard, finding an old Etruscan artifact and igniting his fascination with historical relics. Something his family does not approve of, his father expects him to take over their vineyards. And thus he is driven by a constant striving for his father's approval.
- Next is him going to college at Sorbonne, where we meet young Indiana Jones as they become friends, bonding over their family backgrounds, before ultimately Belloq betrays Indy to snatch the Archaelogical Society Prize.
- We see the schism and the betrayal; Belloq tries to make his own way and leaving Indy behind him, and yet by nature of their careers they keep intersecting. Their stories repeatedly interweaving as they chase the same treasures. Imagine the map with flight paths overlapping or racing, etc.
- Then enters the Nazi intrigue as Belloq finds a growing source of money for treasures to be Hitler. And the growing discomfort with the Nazis as a benefactor, but as we've seen - he'll do anything to win. So he does more and more jobs until it leads to the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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Chess variant idea
There is a variant of chess called "Hand & Brain," which is two players. One is the "Brain" and they can only verbally name a piece on the board with no other context or hint. The "Hand" then has to guess which of the relevant pieces they mean and move it.
So, for example, if the Brain says 'King' that is easy as there is only one on the board. But, if they say pawn, then you have to do your best to guess which pawn they are referring to.
So my idea is to utilize this for chess training by having a computer engine act as the brain, it tells you the piece, and you try to figure out the piece and move it. This isn't a new idea, this site does exactly that. But in this case you're playing against a computer engine. I'd like to try this variant against another human + computer pair, playing the same model. Obviously the engines and players would need to be equal for the "best" games of chess. But I can imagine that this could be a good way of learning. If your human play instinct is to move a threatened piece and the computer engine tells you a completely different piece it makes you realize that your threat assessment was wrong. And I feel that that learning will be more powerful in the middle of the game rather than afterwards in analysis and review.
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A crazy idea: Blipapedia. It's Wikipedia, but for Twitter. No entry longer than a tweet. Is this a good idea? I don't think so. But I've had it in my head for a week and it won't leave. So here you go. I'm setting it free.
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I want an RSS reader which lets me temporarily mute stories which contain words. For example, I've not seen eight different stories in my feed about the euthanizing of Freya the walrus. I'd like to be able to mute 'Freya' for the next week while those stories get printed.
Add it to the list of features on my eventual homebrew RSS reader.
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New blog site idea (this digs back to an old old idea I had years ago.)
What if, instead of an author defined templated design, instead the blog presents you with options to build its layout to your liking. Not just overall layout, but lets you filter posts, etc.
Then, when you hit the site, it loads XML/JSON of posts and builds the page as you laid it out. Also, with this, it knows the last posts you saw, so it puts the ones which are new since your last visit front and center.
It (relatively) minimizes the server hit as you're being served an html page, js file, css file, and the post xml/json file.
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My post earlier, asking about the meme/joke social network, is because I was missing Facebook's 'poke.' It was a simple and silly way to interact with someone. It removed the social expectations of a full conversation, but it was a way to let someone know you were thinking about them. I remember Apple showing off a tech feature that let you send someone your heartbeat. Again, just a simple moment to let someone know they are in your mind.
I was thinking this morning about a simple 'emote.com' social network that was basically just reactions: Poke, hug, smile, etc. Something extremely simple which lets people connect for that brief moment.
Edit: 9:52am - A post on HackerNews got a reply that answered the original question of the joke app, it was the 'Yo' app.
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Mailbox-style Readers
Dave Weiner hits on a really good point about RSS readers and the popularity of the mailbox style UI. I have been so used to this UI design that I never considered an alternative, but he's 100% right.
Here's the idea I tweeted at him:
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I don't have time for another coding project.
Damnit Dave.
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Social Bookmarking Idea Dump
I have recently been spending a fair bit of time thinking about the concept of social bookmarking. In many ways it is a relic of an older version of the Internet, but I still think there might be something here as an idea. It got to the point a few weeks ago when I called my brother and excitedly spouted off to him about this idea in a ramble which I am sure was just this side of unhinged.
The seed of the idea is the now-defunct website "del.icio.us" and whether or not an evolution of that concept could work today. The site was a place for storing your bookmarks, tagging them, and in doing so making them findable by others etc. You could see what others had bookmarked and discover all sorts of interesting stuff.
This post is going to be a quasi-brain dump on the topic as I try to organize my thoughts on it. I am trying to go back and edit and make it cohesive, but no promises.
At the time of del.icio.us's heyday and the other players in "social bookmarking" the web looked very different. It was the heyday of blogs and the proliferation of publishing online. Mobile wasn't yet a power player for accessing the net. Video was still a relative oddity compared to its prevalence today. Social media was in its infancy. Safe to say a lot has changed in all vectors.
In many ways modern social media has supplanted social bookmarking, though more in the frame of social link sharing. To me, one of the things I loved about del.icio.us was going to someone's profile and looking through all their bookmarks and seeing what I could find. That use case isn't exactly straight forward for current social media. Yes, on Reddit, I can look through someone's profile to see what they've posted, but it isn't the same experience. Also, the motivations for posting to Reddit are different than having a bookmark. I post to Reddit show other people, not to save for my own reference, while making it available to others. I might tweet or retweet something out to go find later, but again, the primary reason is almost never for me to save for later. Facebook has the ability to save links, but that is just for you.
Interestingly, it's Reddit which makes me think this idea has a possibility. So often now, when I'm looking for a resource on a topic, I search Reddit first because I'm trying to use it like a social bookmarking site. But I think there is a layer of information lost through this because lots of things people research might not be something people post to Reddit because it's not interesting. There's also a possibility of need for privacy which seems counter to Reddit and this entire concept, but I think actually a shortlived Reddit competitor called Imzy had an interesting idea - they allowed you to create communities where all participants were anonymized. And I think there could be possibly a way where you could save a bookmark and expose it to the public or to a circle anonymously. There's definitely opportunities for abuse which would bear examination and management, but it seems like a useful seed of an idea.
Today, web browsers are much smarter than they were. Back then, they hadn't gotten on the "sync bookmarks" train and thus del.icio.us and other sites provided an easy way to ensure you had access to your bookmarks wherever you were and whatever computer you were on. Given that, a modern solution needs to integrate tightly with browsers as well as provide added benefits and features to make it worth using.
Another thing on this topic that I think about is an article I read from 2021 which talked about how the current youth are forcing academia to rethink lesson plans. Growing up with Google they have eschewed the "logical" practice of using folders to instead rely on search. I wonder how that impacts their use of bookmarks.
This is also a major challenge for the social bookmarking idea because if I don't bookmark something, the odds are very good that I will be able to find it later through the world of today's search. So, in some ways, this idea is competing with search engines - which are no slouch of opponents.
I think it's safe to say that a social bookmarking site which is just a repository of bookmarks which can be shared isn't going to be enough. It's going to need to integrate more with external sites but also things like smart tagging and doing everything possible to make bookmarks more useful.
In regards to the social aspect, I think I would approach it similar to Google's idea for Google+ with 'Circles.' You could group your friends into these groups, and also potentially open them to the public for people to join if they want. Then when you save something you would choose if it is was private, public, or select a group or groups to share it with.
Then there is the topic of discovery. Obviously part of this is the entire premise, social. So you'd discover stuff from those you connect with or follow. But more than that, this site would need to foster discovery. And that is where I think things like RSS feed readers, podcasts, integration with other social networks comes in.
After that comes the need to facilitate for discussion in some way. Folks need to be able to share their appreciation for a bookmark, feedback on it, share excerpts (akin to Kindle's highlight feature), etc. This naturally leads down the path Reddit went where initially it was just for posting links and eventually they enabled selfposts. It seems natural that this platform is going to need to go the same way to facilitate conversations in the groups.
It occurs to me this could also be a tool for learning.
With all of that, the site ends up a stone's throw from a full social network. All the building blocks are there.
The last question is the capitalistic one: how do I pay for this and maybe make money? Obviously advertising is the simplest and laziest answer, but I really don't want to go down that rabbit hole. And I don't want to have sponsored posts, etc. Which then leads to subscription, and that just furthers the massive need for it to be not just a fun distraction, but something of an indispensable tool for power users, to merit some sort of subscription.
One possibility is on the product angle. If I'm researching buying a new thing. I go read reviews and bookmark items on retailer websites. When viewing those bookmarks, you could potentially append partner codes (with full disclosure of course) but also do comparative shopping integrations of some sort, "You are interested in X, but this site has it for $25 cheaper."
Lastly, I don't want to replace the social networks. I can't imagine the headaches and struggle of doign something on that scale. Honestly, the dream is a "small community" feel that has a big enough audience to make the site useful and enjoyable, but also provides enough money to run the site and pay me for the work that goes into running it.
Maybe one day.
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We are all a Ship of Theseus of our emotions, beliefs and knowledge.
This was a seed of an idea I had during the day yesterday, eventually it coalesced into the above as I was laying in bed last night. I don't stop being me if any of these change. I might be a different me, but I'm still me.
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