Projects

[corvi]

My ongoing write-code-for-fun projects are:

1. A smartphone app that will send a push notification (beep, buzz, whatever your phone uses) when there is a good chance the aurora borealis is going to be visible in your area in the next couple hours. There are already apps that do this, but I feel strongly there should be a free one so anyone can see it.
2. Flashcard smartphone app for learning Mongolian and mongol bichig.
3. I wanted to make a flow chart of cheesemaking processes and what sort of cheese you got, but it turns out to be too complex to lay out in any sort of useful form. So I am now making a Cheese Your Own Adventure Game! Which is a less useful way to convey information, but hopefully fun anyway. juli  thought of the title. :)
4. The long-suffering Dream Atlas: scrape facebook for people writing status updates about their dreams, extract geographical terms (mountain, river, etc) and produce an Atlas of the Dreamlands based on what kind of geography people see in their dreams and where they live.

I'm really terrible at finishing things, I hope listing them here will inspire me. :)

Comments

[novalis]

Re 2: Isn't Anki already available for smartphones?

[corvi]

Hm, I had not heard of Anki. Definitely worth checking into. Thanks!

[spiralsheep]

3&4 both sound fabulous.

I also wanted to congratulate you on posting the interwebz' first ever chicken selfie. ;-)

[tim]

Fun! Have you considered open-sourcing your code very early on and/or trying remote pairing? I've never tried the latter, and don't know if you're a pair-programming kind of person, but it seems like either of those could help with the whole "let people know about it so you'll actually finish" thing.

The dream atlas in particular sounds wonderfully open-ended and fascinating!

[corvi]

I hadn't considered that at all, actually! Hm. I always feel like my code is terrible and Real Open Source People will laugh at me if they ever see it, which is possibly a silly thing to worry about. Hmmm.

[tim]

The thing is, if they pay attention to your code enough to know it's terrible, they're paying attention to it, which would be really great. I think the most likely bad outcome would be the one where no one cares enough to laugh at it :-)

[yam]

CHEESE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

[juli]

THE CHEESIEST TEXT ADVENTURE GAME