House husbandry, it seems, presents many opportunities for ideas to bubble to the surface of one’s mind, but few to drill down and implement them even roughly. So while I’m clearing out this side of my brain, here’s a list of ideas to read and perhaps riff on.

Mobile Apps

• 3d photos that ‘jiggle’. App takes a number of photos and presents options to merge through either onion-skinning, hologram simulation or stereoscopic manipulation. Instagram filters in 3d.
• Dictator app for text messages.
• Animated children's books for eReaders and the iPad \ Tablet computers
• Lego brick audit system. Key in which (and how many) Lego bricks your collection contains, and find out what existing models you can build with them...
• Lego augmented reality app for lego stores. Point your phone at a lego kit on the shelf and see a full scale completed model of it on your phone.

General Development Ideas

• Music playlist maker with minidisc mixing facilities. Essentially the playlist allows for additional metadata on each track allowing you to specify which parts of the track to be played down to 1/100th sec at start and end, and lengths of fades in and out. Also volume normalization values and beat matching. Effectively a playlist that defines all the characteristics of a mix, not just the tracks being used.
• Some way to filter ‘Too Much Medical Information’ on the internet for those of a sensitive \ hypochondriac nature. Perhaps a  way to meta-tag ‘grey data’ such as medical symptoms for worried parents. As I found to my chagrin, throwing in a few generic symptoms for your child can have sites diagnosing them with anything from a slight cold to first-stage ebola.
• An Internet Music Database. We’ve had IMDB since year zero for movies, and I know that there are far more music releases than movies but would it really kill someone to try? Discogs seems to be about the closest there is, but it’s far more nerdy than IMDB.
• A full .net wrapper around ffmpeg

Online but Non-Development Ideas

• An internet version of the Mercury Music Prize.
• An online alternative to the various film certification bodies across the world. I watched the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Ratedabout the MPAA in the US, and it strikes me that an online board using a fresh approach to certification issues – violence, sexual content, language etc – might be a good thing.
• Audiobook versions for those books out of copyright. e.g. Those books on Project Gutenbergare being recorded at the volunteer project Librivox.
• A Social networking strategy for the 2012 Olympic mascots, and to a larger extent, the games in general. Exactly how open or closed the games will be has yet to be openly disclosed.
• 3d modelling from photographs - more specifically, a massively collaborative activity, resulting in an open repository of models of real-world objects/buildings/etc
• Once and for all, someone needs to define 'fair use' within the remit of digital copyright law (see discussion in http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/aug/10/newport-state-of-mind-youtube)
• An “Archers sequencer”. cref the ‘Shatenerizer’.  Grabs individual lines from “The Archers”. Loads them into a sound font bank as samples. Use keyboard to perform an episode that may (or may not) bear any relation to real Ambridge life, but sounds uncannily realistic (or possibly surrealistic...)
• Many well-known songs follow similar chord progressions, as the Axis of Awesoe demonstrates here. But even the ones that don’t just stick to four chords tend to rack up duplicates. So where can I search for songs based on the chord progressions they contain? Where can I search for songs with similar progressions to a song I like, or one I’ve heard somewhere before? This site’s a pretty awesome start but is still a long way off going the whole hog...

Non-Computer Related

• A noise reduction system for cots containing crying babies. Making babies stop crying doesn’t count. This is the proof of concept – you could scale it up to larger items.
• Why is software engineering not an actual chartered professional job? Anyone can call themselves a software engineer even if they picked up a book on HTML last week. There must be a way to standardize a set of rolling exams \ proficiency \ QoS tests and to create a suitable official body for the examinations with which the buck stops.
• Why do universities and schools seemingly insist on using non-.NET languages in their programming courses? It would be interesting to do a complete survey within the UK higher education computing departments to find out what languages they teach and why?

Hope they’re useful.