Projects

Published

March 23, 2025

Current team member projects

James

Current projects:

Planned:

  • Personal assistant based on daily markdown notes.
  • Personalized homepage with todos and daily news.
  • Information visualization, especially timelines.

Deepak

Gratuitous bird carnage game
Deepak is looking for collaborators for his bird killing game, especially someone with design experience.

Ideas for projects

Borkish Matchmaker App (or “Sverdish Metchymookr-a Appy Börky Börk!”)

  • This is an app that speaks Borkish, the language of the Swedish Chef in The Muppets.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJjh2DJ_r00
  • You answer a bunch of questions about yourself.
  • If you meet someone who also has the app, you hold your phones together and the phones speak to each other in Borkish, to work out if you are compatible.
  • If you are compatible the apps excitedly say “Smörty-flört!”.
  • If you are incompatible they dejectedly say “Nerpty derpty no smörg-a-börg”
  • or something like that…

Shopping Troll (or “Trolley troll”)

  • When you set the app up you select your goals and preferences.
  • When you go shopping at the supermarket, you point your smartphone camera at the items in your trolley.
  • ⁠⁠The shopping troll appears and rudely interacts with stuff in your trolley:
  • ”You’re buying cheesecake? Did you forget your diet? Do you really want to look fat on the beach this summer, chubby?”
  • ”Gillette is a USA brand. Buy Bic razors instead, they’re French. Down with Trump!”
  • ”Avocados in March? You realize those have probably been flown half-way round the world? Buy some local veg. Jerk.”

Dicey

  • ⁠Dicey is a character that helps make your life more entertaining by introducing randomness.
  • You tell it what you are doing and it comes up with options. One of them is a bit stupid or out of the ordinary.
  • ”I’m in town with a friend, what should we do?”
  • It lists six options, the last one is “Go to the Humana shop which is near by and buy a whole new outfit, something you wouldn’t normally wear. Include a hat. The parade around in the city in your new fabulous new outfit!”
  • or option six could be “Go to a bar and find someone to have a conversation with (I can help you choose!). Tell them something very personal about yourself that your friend doesn’t know either.
  • or whatever. Dicey then asks if you want to roll the dice, and makes you promise if the stupid option comes up you have to do it.
  • This idea is partly based on the novel “The Dice Man” by Luke Rhinehart, which I recommend.

Freaking genius

  • You configure this app with the stuff you want to become knowledgeable about (current affairs, Medieval history, biology, whatever).
  • The app presents you with items (news, articles, papers, whatever) related to the subject each day.
  • You read whichever items you find interesting.
  • Afterwards, the app gives you a little test with a few questions (in the form of cards) about what you have read (for example, if you chose current affairs and just read an article that stated who the prime minister of Japan is, it might ask “Who is the prime minister of Japan”?
  • ⁠⁠When you have thought of the answer you turn over the card to see if you are right (alternatively you could say the answer to the app).
  • There should be a “don’t care” option if you don’t like the question.
  • If you answered the question that question then becomes part of your deck.
  • The app uses Spaced Repetition to ask you a few more questions from your deck using the principle of spaced repetition.
  • There is a clever and amusing explainer on spaced repetition by Nicky Case here: https://ncase.me/remember/

Gaia (or The Green Man)

  • ⁠An app that assumes the character of the Earth or Nature.
  • You give it access to your calendar and other information about your activities.
  • It gently persuades you to be more environmentally friendly.
  • It tries to create alternatives that are positive wins (rather than worthy sacrifices).
  • For example: “I noticed that you’re driving to a meeting to Valencia on Friday. I’ve done the math and if you include petrol and parking, taking the train is only 10 euros more, but you would gain about four hours of time, that’s half a working day! If you take that into account then the train is so much cheaper. You can get half a days work done on the train. It would be foolish to drive, wouldn’t it?”
  • (Gaia is the ancient Greek personification of the Earth. The Green Man is a traditional character thought to be of pagan origin found carved in some churches)
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Man

Creating 3D models for printing

  • Create an app to generate 3D models of fractal shapes (for example snowflakes).
  • ⁠⁠Could do this with Claude Artifacts, using threejs
  • Export the models as STL file.
  • 3D print — decorations.
  • Generate small frames for pictures.
  • Generate procedural buildings to build miniature cities.
  • Print your own bespoke building blocks/ lego bricks.
  • Generate different-sized draw tidy boxes that clip together.
  • Import map data, print contour maps. e.g. print the Pyrenees.
  • Procedurally generated fantasy maps.

Romantasy choose your own adventure

According to The Guardian, “Romantasy” novels are in vogue.

  • Create an app. that asks you for personal details, and it generates a Romantasy story where you are the hero/heroine.
  • ⁠⁠Generate interactive “choose your own adventure” Romantasy stories where it generates choices and your choices affect the story.
  • Create interactive stories that you can win or loose, and use plot devices to make them more exciting and game like. e.g. ticking bomb scenario - can you save the day?
  • There are book printing services that print individual books fairly cheaply. It could be a present idea - you give details of the recipient to the story generator, it generates the bespoke story and you have the option to submit it to an online printer. It could generate a suitably cheesy Romantasy cover image.

I think it needs an app that uses the API. The story needs to have consistency. So for example, as it progresses you have key facts to a SQLite table, and that becomes part of the context for each subsequent prompt. Also, when you have finished, you could get it to write out the complete story with the interactive parts removed, so it is a flowing story. You could also try to generate images with consistency (for example, character consistency) which is hard to do.

Also you could have an interface (being able to click on buttons to choose rather than typing - easier on a phone) and you could add more interactivity - like being able to pick things up for use later in the story.

I think keeping consistency is the biggest challenge for this type of thing. One question to ask yourself is - if I was going to sell this as a product, what would it need? I think that can highlight ways in which just using the standard prompting is not sufficient for this type of application. Or alternatively - if I were to show this app to grandma/grandad, would they be able to use it?

Book buddy

  • ⁠An app where you tell the app the books you’ve read and what you thought of them.
  • The app asks questions to get a better idea of what you thought of a book and to quantify how much you like different aspects.
  • ⁠The app saves stuff into a database that builds up over time.
  • The app keeps data on when you read etc.
  • It can generate web pages about your reading.
  • It encourages you to read (like Duolingo?).
  • It makes suggestions for what to read next.

Tea with Proust

Team maker

  • ⁠⁠You record the dialogue in meetings of a group of people.
  • The app uses personality assessment techniques like Myers-Briggs, DISC, big five etc. to work out the personality of the different members of the group.
  • The app pairs up compatible individuals in pairs or teams based on the compatibility of their personalities.

The Matchmaker

  • ⁠⁠At dinner parties the matchmaker listens to the conversations and at the end of the night suggests romantic parings, giving reasons.
  • Could be very amusing.

Jerkbot

  • Fight provoker
  • To make parties more entertaining the app could listen to conversations and use psychological profiling to deliberately cause fights between incompatible pairs.
  • Could be like a more interactive version of Aella’s Askhole. https://askhole.io