Most writers know that ideas are the cheapest, easiest thing in the process. It’s the writing that takes the most work. I expect this holds true for most every other thing in the universe. However, where I can sit down and write stuff when I have a good idea, I have good ideas that I can’t really do anything about because I don’t understand engineering or file encoding or whatever industry my idea falls into, and I don’t have the 10,000 hours to master the field. So, I’m releasing these ideas into the wild.
Charity rewards: stop sending me canvas bags and little address stickers. I know you get them for free, but they either go in the trash or are donated to Goodwill. Instead, send me a postcard or an email telling me what my money or contribution was used for. Lie to me. Make shit up. Tell me that the pint of blood I donated was given to a homeless alcoholic so she didn’t die of a bleeding ulcer. I’m good with that. Tell me that my $30 donation to Red Cross gave a blanket to someone standing outside in the cold when their house burned down. I guarantee you, I will give more if I believe it’s doing good.
I want a digital camera that saves the file with an incorruptible date, time, and GPS stamp. That way, if I take a picture of an ivory-billed woodpecker while on vacation, there is that much less doubt that it’s been Photoshopped or faked or whatever. It would also be useful for documenting anything that needs verification - law enforcement, insurance, news, whatever.
I want a standardized medical history on a universal thumb drive that I can hand over to my doctor, the ER admitting nurse, or whoever else, instead of filling out the same damn forms every single time. The first damn thing that should pop up is drug allergies.
Here’s an idea for a website that I thought of but don’t have the skills to set up.
Jeff Russell’s Starship Dimensions is a really cool site which has starships from various SF series and movies. The cool part is he has them all in scale so you can see how large, for example, Serenity and the Enterprise are in relation to each other.
I’d like to see a website with the same basic concept applied to famous paintings. We’re used to seeing images of paintings that are all scaled to the size of the page. So we all end up thinking that all painting are approximeatley the same size.
Obviously this is not the case. For example, if you put the Mona Lisa and Guernica next to each other, they’d look like this:
I’ve been thinking about such a thing for a while… to really make it more secure I think you need a central website of some sort that CRCs are cryptographically submitted to, etc. But with the amount of wireless there is these days, that shouldnt’ be hard. I think it would be very useful for law enforcement, although if you want to do something like take a photo of bigfoot and have people know that you didn’t fake it, you still have to have some way to prove you didn’t just take a picture of a picture of bigfoot, if you see what I’m saying.
Hell, I’d be happy to get a microchip implanted, so that if I have to go to the ER they can just run the reader over my left shoulder (or wherever) and find out that I’m allergic to half a dozen antibiotics, and what medications I’ve been prescribed. Insurance info would also be good to have, especially the plan number and plan group.
I’m VERY tired of filling out a form by hand each time I go to the doctor’s office. My handwriting was never very good, I wasn’t one of those girls who used to spend hours practicing my cursive. And after years of keyboarding, my handwriting and my cursive now resemble the doctor’s writing.
I emailed Nintendo and asked them to make those itty bitty games with neon, glow in the dark plastic covers instead of dark gray, which is by the way the exact same color as the interior of of my car. One of those little buggers gets lost in the car, under a dresser, behind a bed, or in the couch and I guarantee you will never find again without the full lite of day.
At the very least, a universal patient information form that all medical offices will accept. Like a 1040 or something.
A clothes washer and dryer all in one. No shifting, no forgetting and leaving the stuff to get moldy.
A small unit that I can idividualize and attach to my keys, wallet, my kids, my thumb drive, my glasses, and anything else that gets misplaced on a regular basis, then find with a GPS or something. Like those cell phones that ping a signal.
Not to shill for them, but the Eye-Fi SD card can do the instant-upload-from-the-camera bit, and there are GPS cameras and geotaggers for cameras. Now you just need to work out how to make the images non-editable.