This is a list of ideas which, over time, have made their way onto my list, and then stayed there. Since it seems unlikely that I’ll pursue these, I’m sharing them publicly. Maybe someone will find one interesting enough to do something with. Also, if any of these already exist, please let me know. I’d like to use them.

These are ordered oldest first, though I don’t know how old they are.

“Internet layer audio record listen thing”

This idea was to have a page that simultaneously played and recorded audio for some short duration. Every time someone loaded the page, they would hear a layering of all previous recordings, and the sound from their microphone would be incorporated for the next user.

When I thought of this, I spent a bit of time looking in to the state of web audio APIs. They didn’t seem up to the task at the time, and I don’t know if that’s changed.

Upvote downvote anything

This one is a browser extension that adds Reddit-style voting buttons to every block element (or by some heuristic) on every page. Sorting the entire page by votes could then be toggled. Democratize the priority of all content!

Random rememberable sentences

Basically a way of storing data in generated English sentences that should be easy to remember. Sentence structure and vocabulary could both be used to encode data. Perhaps useful for sharing encryption keys?

Hex editor

Very generic. I was envisioning a nice text interface that let you add annotations to address ranges and such. With colour.

Deteriorating image format

I was thinking about how images deteriorate over time by being shared over and over to different sites and being recompressed. The idea is to make this property part of the format itself. Enforce that an image cannot be displayed without mutating the file on disk. I’m not sure if this is at all possible, but might be with some really crazy proof-of-work constraint.

GitHub issues happy birthday

This seems likely to have already been done. A bot that bumps GitHub issues that are a year old with a dank meme.

Shell script package manager

A package manager for distributing small scripts, powered entirely by Gists. I’m not sure why this would be necessary, honestly.

Git chat

Chat client using Git as a backend. It would have persistent logs, conversation branching, bookmarking, and attachments for free. PGP integration would also probably be useful.

Editor-invoking mail client

Git rebase interactive is my favourite terminal interface. I want a mail client that behaves similarly, making use of the filesystem and my $EDITOR. No curses garbage.

File metadata esoteric language

The most recent of my ill-fated ideas, an esoteric language which takes only file metadata as input. Names for ordering and comments, directories for structure, links for loops. Data could be stored in permissions and timestamps. Unfortunately, not all metadata is preserved across filesystems or by Git.