Ideas to explore

• Portals: can I get some kind of usable windowing/hypertext system out of circular rotating scaling portals?
• Laser-cut omnitriangulation: can I use tusk tenons to make light, airy lattices out of cheap, thin laser-cut MDF?
• Reduced affine arithmetic raytracing: can I make a fast ray tracer with it?
• Reduced affine database: can I do a fast query on gobs of time-series data with it? (See An affine-arithmetic database index for rapid historical securities formula queries.)
• Circuit simulation: can I get SPICE working in a reasonable way with a Falstad-like UI?
• Database exploration: what does it look like to load my mail into Kafka/Samza, SQLite, Elasticsearch, LevelDB, Redis, Datomic, or just MySQL?
• Home kiln: can I get a reasonably efficient kiln working?
• Programmable logic: can I whip these 2114s and PALCE16V8s into some kind of useful logic circuit?
• Fabribot: can I get some kind of fabricating bot working? Clay cutting, 3-D printing, etc.
• Calculator rebraining: can I replace a calculator brain with an AVR running my software and get a super-calculator? (See Reflections on rebraining calculators with this RPN calculator code I just wrote.)
• Self-sustaining personal computer: can I wedge a Nokia cellphone display into a PS/2 keyboard and SD card and get a self-hosting computer out of the deal, one that can reprogram itself?
• Moiré servomechanism: can I use moiré patterns between sparse random screens with webcams to get high-resolution feedback on where a thing is?
• Garbage oscilloscope: can I make a reasonable oscilloscope out of common garbage? (See files VCR oscilloscope, TV oscilloscope, Laser printer oscilloscope, and Disk oscilloscope.)
• Digraph notation: can I come up with a much better way of describing finite state machines, electrical circuit schematics, dataflow graphs, and similar graphs? (See files Graph construction and Circuit notation.)
• Card-based hypertext: what does it look like to re-envision a text as a set of linked “cards” small enough that several can be on the screen at once, even on a cellphone? Is this Smallest Federated Wiki?
• RPN UI: can I extend rpn-edit to be powerful enough to handle most everyday calculations, maybe better than Excel and Python? (See An RPN CPU instruction set doubling as user interface.)
• Synthgramelodia: can I repackage synthgramelodia into a form that makes it easy to run and shows what it’s doing?
• Magic Kazoo: can I get a prototype Magic Kazoo running, maybe as an Android app? (See The Magic Kazoo: a synthesizer you stick in your mouth.)
• Power supply hacking: can I make an adjustable benchtop power supply that won’t catch on fire and displays the output voltage with an AVR on an LED display?
• Life clock: can I make an LED display of how many days someone likely has left to live?
• AVR programmer: can I make a serial programmer to load the Arduino bootloader into the various AVR chips I have lying around? Using ArduinoISP, say?
• Tiny bytecode machine: can I implement a tiny bytecode engine that allows me to do any further programming in a flexible way?
• Logarithm table memorization: can I practice mental logarithms enough to make them a useful calculation shortcut?
• Machine-learning/optimization stuff: what can I do in this area? Maybe I need someone else to suggest exercises. All kinds of physical and information design, plus control systems, seem like appropriate things to try.
• Tile grid systems: can I make a maze out of user-drawn tiles in DHTML?