Roundtuit

I’m going a bit crazy with the Facebook apps this week. I think the best ones are those that allow you to share your current environment: iLike shares your recent playlist from iTunes, and there are those that share your blogs, del.icio.us tagged items, GoogleReader shared items, etc.

But what about an app that makes a thumbnail from your current wallpaper, and shows it on Facebook? I have a huge collection of wallpapers that I randomly rotate with WallpaperChanger. Many of them give me giggles, like that above.

And sharing giggles is the core activity of life, isn’t it?

Contributed by Rob Smith

Tagging content on the web is all the rage, and with good reason. But as I gather tags over the years, I find that errors in my tagging habits have accumulated.

Someone should build a tag cleaner (for instance, for use with del.icio.us)!

Some “cleanings” should be obvious: things like;
- eliminating plurals (or making certain singulars all plural, where the plural tag also exists)
- changing British tag spellings to US, or vice versa
- bulk substituting synonyms to the most-used in the system

But you could also do fancier semantic things, like looking for pairs of tags that can be substituted for a single tag.

At any rate, it’s something that is really needed!

Contributed by Rob Smith

I’m a huge fan of del.icio.us, the community tagging site. And I really recommend that those who also use Firefox try this advanced add-on from the folks at del.icio.us. This isn’t the standard del.icio.us add-on, but a complete replacement for the bookmark functionality in Firefox. I now have a bunch of special tags that I keep on my toolbar, and I couldn’t be happier with the way it all works.

However, there’s one thing I’d like: the ability to pull up a dialog that gives me the complete list of open tabs, from which I can select several, and tag them simultaneously with the same set of tags.

And maybe I could additionally mark the set of tags as a “bundle” (a group of tags that appear together in lists on your del.icio.us pages). In fact, that functionality should probably exist in the tool, regardless of the multi-tab-thing I’m suggesting here.

Contributed by Rob Smith

I was lucky enough to go through the recent liquid terrorist Heathrow Hell ! Not only was the total travel time increased from 8 to 16 hours, I had no precious laptop on board. I was forced to read the airline magazine, and watch Mission Impossible III, twice. The humanity!

And now there are banned laptops. Given the intrinsic power density of batteries (sure to only increase), I don’t really find this surprising.

I figure the next step will be stripping down and boarding in a white paper boiler suit. I don’t really mind.

But it does open the market up for a seatback PC, possibly with a USB port for a (FAA approved) personal computing configuration. Or perhaps we’ll all be using web apps, so all we’ll need is an airbourne internet connection.

Just an idea. It may be a been-done, but I’m not sure this patent ties up all the options. It seems to me all the real innovation is in the OS, office, and personalization.

Contributed by Rob Smith.

There are several kids in my life who have their own computers. They
are not sophisticated computer users: they simply do not understand
that they should not open random email files, pay attention to virus
warnings, firewall warnings, and the like; and they love to fill
every byte of drive space with music and crap. They need an OS that
takes care of the important things for them.

Their computers are antique hand-me-downs. Their main software use
includes MSN Chat, email, web browsing, file sharing, media playback,
and basic wordprocessing. The OS and software suites they currently
use are resource hogs, which means their computers are slow,
unstable, and continually problematic.

I’d love to see someone release a Un*x-based OS package that is
simple to install, has a UI designed to provide one-click access to
their primary software, is secure by default, is dead-easy to update,
sets up a drive quota such that the OS is guaranteed enough space for
its temporary files et al, yadda, yadda. It should install a default
application suite that is suitable for kids; the wordprocessing suite
could well be a simplified OpenOffice. And, of course, it should
have a UI that is simple to modify with custom icons and such; that
may end up being the big attractor over, say, WIndows.

And, heck, if it’s Un*x-based, it would be very easy to have a
parental admin account, parent-controlled IP-blocking and spam
control, and a reporting/logging system so that one can be kept aware
of what the children are viewing on the web. If one’s kid is viewing
a lot of man-on-goat porn, one may wish to know about it, so as to
nip that problem in the bud. If there’s one fault with the internet,
it’s that rare perversions can be presented as perfectly common
behaviour.

Contributed by David Priest
(sorry for the delayed post, David!)

A quick one today: Google Maps: you can search for things near a location. And you can search for routes between two locations. But what I’d like to do is search from things near the route! So, if I want to find hotels, or gas stations, or world’s largest balls of string that are within x-distance of your route, you just do a search.

Sounds like an easy and perfect mashup of gmaps with itself, to me.

Contributed by Rob Smith.

A few years ago, I was on The Weakest Link (Boffins Special) with a guy who invented this velcro programmable sign that you can wear in clubs to look really cool. He called it The Flasher.

I’m too old for clubs. And bars that play the music so loud you can’t talk. And kids running across my yard. Just kidding with that last one.

But I’d really like is an LED sign (probably embedded in my clothes) that senses what I’m saying, and displays it. A little voice recognition ought to work, at least enough to be a funny form of communication, if not an accurate one.

Perhaps it could do translation, as well (ala Babel Fish). That should be a real riot on the German Death Metal Club Scence.

Contributed by Rob Smith

Old timers know Ebay isn’t as cheap as it once was for many things. In some instances you can even pay more for items you could source cheaper (and newer online).

My idea is to build a handy tool to address this problem. Its a price comparison engine with a difference, called, Cheapr At Ebay? Basically it searches backwards at Ebay, looking for finished items or Buy It Now items. It searches for the finishing price on the completed items (finds an average), then searches other online comparison sites to see if stuff really is cheaper at ebay.

You can also opt to do it by category, so if you want to find a rare record, it will look at Ebay completed and current, Gemm, Opal, Amazon Sellers, Etc. To see if its worth bidding up for something or going to an alternative online supplier.

It will also allow you to compare Buy It Now auctions for new products with real world prices via searches like Kelkoo, Froogle or Price Runner. Given the affiliate opportunities this could provide, it could be a potentially lucrative scheme - using the Ebay API and some other search APIs under one hood to determine if the item you think you’ll get cheaper at Ebay really will be cheaper. If you turn this into a multimillion earning scheme, please remember where you got it

Contributed by David Lloyd

(this would make a nice Greasemonkey script, like BookBurro).

I would really like to have a large display screen, maybe just an LCD scrolling banner, that I could mount on my wall which shows the title, artist, and album of the music that I am listening to. I was thinking that it could hook up to an ipod dock or directly to a computer. Since I have more music than I can keep track of, it would be nice to know what is playing at a glance from across the room.

A related (and maybe cheaper to make) idea would be to have the same information scrolling very large across a computer screen as a screensaver linked with the music program. I haven’t seen one of these yet, and it does not seem like it would be that hard to make.

Someone please do this!

Contributed by Rebecca Maya Lessem

(any chance of a “been done” on the screensaver angle? I couldn’t find one)

In case you’ve been living under a stone, Greasemonkey is a great script interpreting Firefox plugin that enables dynamic redesign of web page content, often integrating content from several sites.

There are tons of user scripts for specific sites, and some for general sites.

But what I’d really like is a script about scripts. When I go to a site that is in the list of site specific user scripts, it’d be great if a little icon would tell me there are scripts I might like, that I can expand, to see the descriptions, and provides an “install” button for each.

Contributed by Rob Smith