This page is really a TODO list for future (or ongoing, on-hold) project. Feel free to leave comments to vote on what you think I should focus on, or leave other project related feedback.
Anki is a great flashcard tool, and there are many others. I love that there is a large ecosystem of curated decks for Anki. Duolingo is very nice too.
However, I found that existing solutions are not really great for systematic learning of vocaulary, and could be improved a lot:
I need to think about whether to build a web app, a mobile app or just a native mac/windows app (e.g. Tkinter or native terminal UIs)
I really want to finish up a satellite tracker to do some satellite or EME based digital HAM modes. Unfortunately, there is a lot of ground to cover
Haven’t played with packet for a long time. Seems most people just use APRS, but I’m longing for the time 40 years ago where a TNC-2s or so would maintain a mailbox just from the 32KB Eprom.
I want to do something Peloton-like with my Keiser bike. I need to set up a espxx(xx) to monitor cadence and resistance and then maybe use an existing exercise app.
I’d like to be able to turn alarms off conditionally. E.g., my phone should NOT wake me for early tennis exercise when it has rained overnight and the courts are wet. There’s hopefully a way to do this with IFTTT instead of having to write native apps.
Well, maybe not too much fun, but I want to write up some of the pitfalls I ran into that made the Pis not very reliable. Foremost, auto-updates and too small SD cards were killers.
Also, I should improve my monitoring/alerting setup and consider some dockerization as described in Andreas Spiess’ excellent video.
Yes I know, Google Photos and many others exist. I hardly take pictures with a real camera anymore, my smart phone is good enough 99.5% of the time. Family has many more.
However, I have a bunch of old photos. My spouse has photos, in a different account.
I do my best to occasionally collect all photos in a central place and make backups.
However, keeping all photos in the cloud is expensive, comes with risks (data loss, account loss, …) and there’s invariably a ton of duplicate pics (because, pack rat I am, I rather make another folder with old photos rather than searching if those pics already exist anywhere else and mistakenly delete photos irretrievably.
I’d love to have some conceptual photo vault where I just drop things in and it will do its best to index them. Apple photos is atrocious. Google photos seems pretty good but it would be too expensive for ALL photos.
This is probably nostalgia speaking, but I really enjoyed working in front of amber (less so green) CRT monitors in the day and I absolutely adored the ATARI SM124 or Sunstation B&W monitors, or gas plasma displays.
I’d wish there were a desktop environment where color was used way more rarely. I feel that would help with focus.
E.g. There is a neat Google Chrome extension (by Google itself) that make the content window grayscale. But the browser itself will have colored tabs, and the OS itself will sprinkle colors everywhere. MacOS does have a nifty way to become monochrome, but if do this, then there’s no possibility of color anywhere, so that’s too far. For really important things, color can be great.
There’s a few other places where people discuss old-timey color themes.
One of these days, I’d like to tackle this and come up with a “mostly-monochrome” color theme.
Written on September 17, 2020