• fingerprints on the keys
• wearing on the keys
• positions being always the same, you can recognize the code even from a distance

Some of these also apply to touch displays and they all make typing in your code less secure.

Enter the Optimus Maximus keyboard.
Displays for each key, so you can configure them as you want.

So consider this: A numeric keypad with displays for each key, and each time you enter a code the position of keys on the keypad changes.

No more use in seeing the positions clicked from a distance. No more checking fingerprints for keys typed. And also no uneven wear on the keys.

It would be awesome to actually see something like this in action

What do most of us do with those kind of ideas?

• You either completely forget about them or ignore them for their insanity
• You write them down in a little black book of things you might do if/when you have the time. And of course you don’t ever do them.

I say: post them out there for everyone to see!

I was in the second group for quite a while during high-school. I thought ideas had a big value and wouldn’t tell them to anyone. I even thought my source code was a state secret and wouldn’t show it to anyone.

I’m over that. Ideas don’t have any value, the implementation is where the real fun/work/value is. And even in implementation I’m sad to say the technical part is not the most important.

So share your ideas on twitter, on your blog, anywhere you can. Maybe you’ll find people interested in collaborating with you on it. Maybe someone will have the time to implement it and if they’re successful they’ll buy you a beer later on.

To eat my own dog food I’ll post any random ideas I have on my blog/twitter, starting with the rest of this post.

Random idea: “pidgin plugin to automatically expand any short urls you receive. ( makes me wish I knew c+gtk+pidgin now ).”

Details: I hate the opacity of short URLs. At least for security purposes I’d like to see the real link of something someone sends to me on messenger. There’s already Long URL Please for the browser but usually you get a lot of links on any instant messenger things you use. I didn’t yet find a plugin for pidgin,yahoo messenger or others that does this. (They could even use the Long URL Please API for what I care ).

Random idea: “job posting site that automatically crawls/lists your open-source project contributions ”

Details: I probably saw something similar online but the idea popped into my head while reading about the Hacker Fair. So going on the same idea that developers should show/present their skills a good way would be to show for a person all open-source software contributions they made. This shows their interest, they coding style, what kind of software/issues/bugs they like and so much more. You could get all their commits from GitHub or other repositories of oss software projects, get their mailing list posts from mail-archive.com or something similar. You could even make it as an API for other job posting sites to use. It’s good because it shows actual contributions by the people you’re thinking of hiring, not what they wrote on their CV.

Will be posting other random ideas in the new “random_ideas” tag, but can’t say when because they’re random