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https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas
:rocket: Ideas for everyone under a CC licence. Feel free to use. I'll send you a postcard if you build anything on this list.
https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas
creative-commons ideas sharing
Last synced: 22 days ago
JSON representation
:rocket: Ideas for everyone under a CC licence. Feel free to use. I'll send you a postcard if you build anything on this list.
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas
- Owner: captn3m0
- Created: 2014-08-13T19:57:47.000Z (over 10 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2024-10-20T14:00:13.000Z (3 months ago)
- Last Synced: 2024-11-08T05:42:29.754Z (2 months ago)
- Topics: creative-commons, ideas, sharing
- Homepage:
- Size: 488 KB
- Stars: 464
- Watchers: 22
- Forks: 49
- Open Issues: 0
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- Funding: .github/FUNDING.yml
Awesome Lists containing this project
- jimsghstars - captn3m0/ideas - :rocket: Ideas for everyone under a CC licence. Feel free to use. I'll send you a postcard if you build anything on this list. (Others)
README
---
permalink: /ideas/
---
> There's no such thing as an original idea. Every idea worth having has been
> had thousands of times already.
>
> - [swombat](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250793)
**Legend**
- ✨ - Favorite Ideas. I really like this, and you could possible build a
company of some of these.
- 🎁 - I'd love to help you build this, consider this like a bounty
- 🚀 Someone (might be me) built this!
- 🚧 There is a work-in-progress implementation.
- 👩🔬 Research ideas
:heart: You'll get a personal postcard from me for building something on this
list
The :poop: ideas (I thought might work at one point, but no longer consider
worth building) are at [BADIDEAS.md](BADIDEAS.md).
- [Introduction](#introduction)
- [✨🎁 Collaborative Bookmarking](#-collaborative-bookmarking)
- [🚀Lightspeed for Chrome](#lightspeed-for-chrome)
- [Personal Social Media Analytics](#personal-social-media-analytics)
- [API for Workflowy](#api-for-workflowy)
- [Email on top of keybase (or other social-media-proofs)](#email-on-top-of-keybase-or-other-social-media-proofs)
- [🚀 Newsletters for GitHub](#-newsletters-for-github)
- [🚀Hacking via OAauth tokens](#hacking-via-oaauth-tokens)
- [Pluggable Notify Daemon for Linux](#pluggable-notify-daemon-for-linux)
- [🚀Telegram To RSS](#telegram-to-rss)
- [🎁 Disable Local Fonts Extension](#-disable-local-fonts-extension)
- [Arch Linux Package Build System](#arch-linux-package-build-system)
- [Hacker News Research Bot](#hacker-news-research-bot)
- [🎁 🚧 Slack Dialer](#--slack-dialer)
- [Database Conversion Toolkit using an ORM](#database-conversion-toolkit-using-an-orm)
- [🎁 Tachiyomi Headless](#-tachiyomi-headless)
- [🚀 OPML Generator](#-opml-generator)
- [🎁 🚧 Bangalore Events List](#--bangalore-events-list)
- [🚀 Amazon Price Tracker with RSS](#-amazon-price-tracker-with-rss)
- [OPML Sync](#opml-sync)
- [✨🎁 Sanskari Proxy](#-sanskari-proxy)
- [Helm Charts for Self-Hosting](#helm-charts-for-self-hosting)
- [Fake Paytm Payment](#fake-paytm-payment)
- [✨ Automated Personal Finance](#-automated-personal-finance)
- [CardDAV on Slack](#carddav-on-slack)
- [✨ UPI on Desktop](#-upi-on-desktop)
- [Twitter Adventure Maker](#twitter-adventure-maker)
- [:rocket: Playstore RSS Feed for Version Updates](#rocket-playstore-rss-feed-for-version-updates)
- [Calendar Feed for Event Websites](#calendar-feed-for-event-websites)
- [SVG to PNG on the Edge](#svg-to-png-on-the-edge)
- [NammaBescom OCR/Overlay Bot](#nammabescom-ocroverlay-bot)
- [🎁 Mars: Terraform Remote HTTP Backend with End-to-End encryption](#-mars-terraform-remote-http-backend-with-end-to-end-encryption)
- [🎁 iOS OPDS File Provider](#-ios-opds-file-provider)
- [iOS/MacOS \*sonic File Provider](#iosmacos-%5Csonic-file-provider)
- [collaborative-bookmarking](#collaborative-bookmarking)
- [👩🔬 Boardgame AI Gym](#%E2%80%8D-boardgame-ai-gym)
- [🎁 ✨ Green/Yellow Pages](#--greenyellow-pages)
- [🎁 communities browser extension](#-communities-browser-extension)
- [onioncannon](#onioncannon)
- [🚀PyPi Notifier](#pypi-notifier)
- [codenames-ai](#codenames-ai)
- [Verifiable Code Execution on Cloud](#verifiable-code-execution-on-cloud)
- [Browser Extension: youtube-cue](#browser-extension-youtube-cue)
- [Stitch EPUBs from multiple URLs](#stitch-epubs-from-multiple-urls)
- [OpenAPI Specification Generator from HTTP Archives](#openapi-specification-generator-from-http-archives)
- [Open ISIN API](#open-isin-api)
- [A Survey of the Electron Supply Chain](#a-survey-of-the-electron-supply-chain)
- [2fa.wiki](#2fawiki)
- [Boardgame Rulebook Translation Guide :construction:](#boardgame-rulebook-translation-guide-construction)
- [Simple Firejail/Bubblewrap wrapper for AUR/NPM/pipx packages](#simple-firejailbubblewrap-wrapper-for-aurnpmpipx-packages)
- [Probe the Great Indian Firewall](#probe-the-great-indian-firewall)
- [A Practical MRNL Service (Mobile Number Revocation List)](#a-practical-mrnl-service-mobile-number-revocation-list)
- [A physical variable Fuzzy Clock](#a-physical-variable-fuzzy-clock)
- [A curl impersonation proxy](#a-curl-impersonation-proxy)
- [A Whisper UX Design Pattern](#a-whisper-ux-design-pattern)
- [Tareeqh pe Tareeqh](#tareeqh-pe-tareeqh)
- [Mobile App Traffic RE Platform](#mobile-app-traffic-re-platform)
- [One-Page RSVP Platform on Edge Compute](#one-page-rsvp-platform-on-edge-compute)
- [One Page Event Hosting platform](#one-page-event-hosting-platform)
- [Price Index for Indian Grocery Websites](#price-index-for-indian-grocery-websites)
- [Bangalore Adblock Art Project](#bangalore-adblock-art-project)
- [PURL Canonicalization](#purl-canonicalization)
- [Nutri-score calcuator](#nutri-score-calcuator)
- [Indian Grocery Barcode Database](#indian-grocery-barcode-database)
- [showtimes.in](#showtimesin)
- [India Automobile Privacy Review](#india-automobile-privacy-review)
- [Licence](#licence)
## Introduction
This is a open repository of personal ideas. Some of these are based on personal
interactions, bug reports, and discussions I've had with lots of people. I've
tried to give credit wherever possible. I also try to reference similar/existing
projects that might relate to the idea, so if you know of something that is
interesting in that space, file a PR or send me a link.
The emojis are just indicative. Make something people want is the YC motto, but
sometimes you must make something for no good reason other than "just because".
## ✨🎁 Collaborative Bookmarking
There are a dozen bookmarking services out there, many of them quite well done.
However, most services are focused on the idea that bookmarking is a lone-person
habit, which someone does in isolation.
I've often described the idea as "dropbox for bookmarks". The core concept is to
allow a bookmarking "tag/folder" to be shared with another user, two-way. This
means any of the shared members can add/remove bookmarks from that folder. All
updates (addition/deletion/edits) are notified to every member in the group.
Bookmarking for Teams, in essence. Some good alternatives are
[listed in this quora answer](https://www.quora.com/Hello-What-are-the-best-web-apps-for-sharing-bookmarks-across-a-team),
which you should read and follow if you're interested in this.
I've described this idea somewhat better in a chat log at
[collaborative-bookmark.md](collaborative-bookmark.md) Google Spaces did some
nice work here, but the product was shut down within an year of launch.
## 🚀Lightspeed for Chrome
[Lightspeed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLnSLFrQDG8) is an experimental UI
design (not implemented) for Firefox that focuses on making the New Tab page
more functional by giving the browser a decent way to search across bookmarks,
open tabs, and history.
It is a pretty neat idea (see the video linked above). My first thought on
seeing the video was that most of that stuff could be done using the Chrome APIs
for Chrome as well. Chrome does offer a way for an extension to override the new
tab page, after all.
The discussion on [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8151271) is also
very good.
_Update_: There is some progress on the WebExtension porting of Lightspeed,
given the recent Firefox updates. With this in place, it should be relatively
easier to port the webextension version to Chrome itself.
_Update_: [@tallpants](https://github.com/tallpants) made this:
https://github.com/tallpants/lightspeed
## Personal Social Media Analytics
WolframAlpha launched a [Personal Analytics](https://www.pcmag.com/news/hands-on-wolfram-alphas-personal-analytics-for-facebook)
feature for your facebook data back in 2013. It is no longer accessible, but
it generated some stock analytics and boring graphs.
They weren't really that helpful. I'd like an easy query interface that let me
"filter" data points, and get back open-data via the Graph API. This means, for
eg, getting the most liked music artist among a subset of my friends. The
interface I'm thinking of right now is like Gapminder, which allows you to
"play" the dataset as it evolves over time.
A recommendation engine built on top of my facebook data is a good idea, I
think.
Since the idea is a decade old, it seems everyone has given up on using APIs for this kind of work, and modern
incarnations of this idea are all based on data-export-dumps. See the following for example:
- https://github.com/skglas/tweetarchive-to-sqlite
## API for Workflowy
Workflowy is a cool tool that I use for note-taking. It allows infinitely nested
lists with @mention and #hashtag support. One thing it lacks currently is API
for me to access my own data. I think workflowy is a great tool that could
become a lot better if there were a way for developers to hook into it. (For
example using workflowy as a data-backend for a todo-app).
## Email on top of keybase (or other social-media-proofs)
Replace Keybase with [Keyoxide](https://keyoxide.org/), [Keys.pub](https://keys.pub/), [WKD](https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD),
or [rel=pgpkey](https://indieweb.org/OpenPGP).
Make it easier to discover encryption keys for users via email plugins
that pickup keys from one of the above sources.
1. Compose an email to [email protected].
2. Extension pops up: "Hey, I found a key for this email address
published under a social proof for twitter/@username as well as on the website
username.dev.
3. If user clicks yes, fetch the key, and use that to encrypt your mail.
**Caveats**: PGP is pretty terrible, and does not work in practice. It is probably
better to just use Signal or Wire or something else.
Once [Signal launches usernames](https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23953603/signal-username-feature-test-phone-numbers-privacy-security-pre-beta-2024-launch),
we should find a way to link social-media-proofs to signal usernames instead.
## 🚀 Newsletters for GitHub
A lot of github project owners would like to send out newsletters to all of
their stargazers. However, GitHub doesn't provide anything for that. An easy way
would be to integrate StarGazers with MailChimp, making sure that people can
unstar a project to unsubscribe from the mailing list.
Only the repo owners and collaborators (maybe) should have access to sending out
newsletters. For bonus points, you can replace mailchimp with your own solution.
This could even be monetized slightly for paying off your server costs:
newsletter access for projects with >1k stars (the mailers that would cost you
money) cost money to the repo owner as well.
So a tiny python package pays nothing to update its users about a new release,
but if Angular team wants to send out an update, that gets paid.
And finally, this should automatically subscribe you to any new GitHub releases
in any project you have starred. This is a missing feature that I think can be
best implemented by a third-party for now.
_Update_: GitHub now supports
[watching releases](https://github.blog/changelog/2018-11-27-watch-releases/).
There are **lots** of related projects in this thread:
https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/410
## 🚀Hacking via OAauth tokens
While pen-testing, once you've gained access to the target, it is often
necessary to install a backdoor to mantain the access. While this is easily done
in case of root access to the machine, this is not that easy if the target is an
email account, lets say.
Many online services today (with data of considerable value) offer developers
programmatic access to their data by use of APIs, which are usually
authenticated via OAuth tokens. What I intend to build is a suite of
applications (or a single large one) that allow you to use the application as
another user, just by setting up an access token.
While this is certainly possible with existing tools (such as the Facebook Graph
API Explorer), it is cumbersome and not user-friendly. The application will
mimic the interface, usability, and looks of the actual application to let you
maintain access easily enough.
### But OAuth tokens can be revoked
That is a good point, but one that fails in practice. A password change in most
services does not trigger an automatic token revocation because that would leave
a lot of developers and users unhappy. However, neither does any service warn
you to check your approved applications (especially after a hacking attempt).
### Procedure
1. You gain access to someone's account.
2. You create an application (using a fake account or the victim's own account,
so its not tied back to you)
3. You setup our app (direct deploy to Heroku)
4. You configure the app with the application credentials (app id, secret key)
5. You authenticate the victim's account against the app
6. You use the application to access the user's account
The account access will continue till the victim checks his/her approved
applications.
🚀 I made this:
## Pluggable Notify Daemon for Linux
Not another window manager daemon, because lots of them already exist and there
are already good APIs in almost all languages that make it easy to integrate
with all of them. However, Linux DEs are still missing an easy way for me to get
notifications about the thousands of little different things (such as build
notifications).
The idea is to have a simple config where you can connect your bazillian
accounts via OAuth, and we will poll all your accounts and give you "clickable"
notifications for each of them. (GMail notifications might open your mail client
if you click reply)
Keep it pluggable, otherwise its of no use.
## 🚀Telegram To RSS
This is fairly well solved at this point, see the following:
- [There is an existing `TelegramBridge` in RSS-Bridge](https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/pull/1175)
that just scrapes telegram HTML.
- https://docs.rsshub.app/en/social-media.html#telegram
- https://t.me/Channel2RSSBot
- https://notifier.in/ (Free for 100 messages/month, paid beyond that)
- https://tg.i-c-a.su/ (Free with reasonable rate-limits)
You can see a archive of the original idea at
[telegram-to-rss.md](telegram-to-rss.md).
## 🎁 Disable Local Fonts Extension
A simple browser extension for web developers that disable local fonts from
loading. Alternatively, it raises a grave warning if a web-font was bypassed for
a local font. This is helpful if you are a developer:
- And have some specific font installed locally (say Font Awesome)
- And are developing a website that uses that font locally
- And forget to include the Font in your stylesheet
The page continues to function normally in your development setup, but breaks in
production.
Based upon this
[chrome bug request](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=472136),
which asks for this feature.
I came to know about this because
[of a comment](https://github.com/captn3m0/disable-web-fonts/issues/1#issuecomment-143665811)
on my "disable-web-fonts" extension, which does the opposite. This might be
handy for people who want to make sure that web-fonts are working fine for all
users.
## Arch Linux Package Build System
The Arch Linux User Repository is great. Except, a lot of packages rely on
building-from-source since no binary releases are available. However, the build
steps for these packages work very well, resulting in a working build. The idea
is to create a AUR build server that takes in a AUR package name as input (it
can have a whitelist of such packages), runs it in a docker container, and
outputs a generated package file (`tar.xz`) that can then be directly installed
on any machine.
This has some security concerns, mainly how do you trust a binary package an
external server built?
Planning to solve this with attempting reproducible builds, and publishing
everything. You can audit any build artifact whenever you wish. I'll likely just
use the Docker ArchLinux image and build against that.
Moreover, the primary audience for this would be me. I would really like to get
packages that can be installed much faster because I don't have to build them. I
can just have a script that instead downloads the latest build from the server
instead of AUR and then just installs the package instead of building it
locally.
Take a look at https://github.com/Foxboron/arch-auto-build, which is a very
similar attempt at this idea.
This is already handled by the Arch Build System (albeit without Docker). Using
that might be a better idea.
You should also look at the https://github.com/archlinux/rebuilder/ if this
looks interesting.
## Hacker News Research Bot
A bot that posts paper abstracts and links to PDF whenever a paper referencing a
research paper is posted to Hacker News. Most scicomm posts that make it to HN
almost always have a primary paper reference, and someone ends up posting the
paper abstract along with a link to Arxiv or SciHub usually. A bot that
automates this for all HN submissions would be a fun project.
_Update_: Someone did this! See
[@randomdrake's comments on HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=randomdrake).
_Update 2_: The mods are not very happy with the
[abstract being posted](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16330366), but the
rest should be good.
For Bonus Points: Include a link to the fermat library URL of the paper (if
available).
## 🎁 🚧 Slack Dialer
All of our company has contact numbers added on Slack, but it is cumbersome to
find someone's profile on Slack. A simple dialer application that does
OAuth-verification on your Slack profile to get a list of the entire
organization, and present a simple dialer for all the people who have contact
details added.
Interface would be a simple grid of faces, click to dial, sorted by frequency. A
simple search-as-you-type box at the top. Can also be done as a PWA to easily
make it cross-platform.
Note that this requires a Slack team with a paid account. I'll help you get a
trial so you can build this.
🚧
## Database Conversion Toolkit using an ORM
Something that lets you switch your database between SQLite/MySQL/Postgres/...
by using an existing ORM framework to import and export out the correct
commands.
The grammar differences in most databases are taken care of by an ORM, and the
remainder is just switching your ORM to use an existing database as the source
of truth. Even a specific variant (say SQLite to MySQL) would be great to have.
Thought of this after spending a lot of time trying to migrate my Grafana/Gitea
setups from sqlite to mysql and trying every solution in
[this SO question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18671/quick-easy-way-to-migrate-sqlite3-to-mysql).
There are some closed solutions to this, but would like a open-source solution
that does this well.
## 🎁 Tachiyomi Headless
[Tachiyomi](https://github.com/inorichi/tachiyomi/) is a Android application
written in Kotlin that scrapes comics from various web sources. A headless
version of it would be great to have, replacing projects such as
with something much more stable.
The end goal is something that works as a "minor" (<200L) patch on top of
Tachiyomi, and does a JVM-desktop build which can be run anywhere. A sample
README would look something like:
A headless build for [tachiyomi][0] which you can run on your server on a
schedule to download comics. This downloads the comics in plain images and then
converts them to CBZ format with metadata intact. A new release is generated for
every Tachiyomi release.
Get the latest release from the [releases page][1]. Download the
`tachiyomi-headless.jar` file.
Run it as the following:
java -jar tachiyomi-headless -c config.yml
Where the `config.yml` file looks like:
```yml
dir: /home/comics/
format: cbz
# All the tachiyomi extensions come pre-loaded
# https://github.com/inorichi/tachiyomi-extensions
comics:
- http://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Marvel-The-End
- https://manga-fox.com/one-piece
```
## 🚀 OPML Generator
Simple web tool to generate OPML files to let you use RSS feeds everywhere.
I :heart: RSS because it gives me the control of how to consume and read the
content. While many services provide you RSS feeds, they do not give you an easy
way to export a list of things that you follow.
For eg: Every repository on GitHub has a releases RSS feed that you can follow.
However, you need to follow each one individually. Thankfully, there is a nice
spec called OPML which is used to pass around lists of RSS feeds.
What if one could generate a OPML feed for:
1. Releases of repos that you have starred on GitHub
2. Authors that you follow on GoodReads
3. Bands that you follow on BandCamp
🚀 I made a initial working demo recently for the first one, and you can check
it at . The source code is at
.
Related: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge (I have contributed a few
bridges to this)
## 🎁 🚧 Bangalore Events List
Similar in scope to http://webuild.sg/ or http://engineers.sg/ but for
Bangalore.
- Want to keep the name generic to support non-tech events as well
- ICS support (WeBuild.sg/cal for demo) is a must-have
- (They have a RSS feed as well!)
Domain name suggestions are welcome. Since blr doesn't have a TLD, I was
considering using `.events`.
Initial Work: https://github.com/captn3m0/gardencity.events There is also some
work from @tallpants on this at
## 🚀 Amazon Price Tracker with RSS
There are some nice open source trackers available for Price Tracking Amazon
products, but I would like to see something that generated an RSS Feed.
This could be built on top of
[RSS Bridge](https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge) fairly easily.
Configuration options would include:
- Min Price (Only add to feed if price is below X)
- Amazon Country/Domain (Use the specific Amazon website)
- Item Id
🚀 https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/pull/741
(While the above is merged, this doesn't correctly work because it doesn't cache
the information properly).
## OPML Sync
Instead of forcing users to do manual imports of OPML feeds, let them
auto-subscribe from feeds using a dynamically generated OPML feed. This is not a
product idea by itself, more of a extension idea for existing RSS Readers.
See related discussion on the
[tt-rss forums](https://discourse.tt-rss.org/t/subscribe-to-opml/1230).
## ✨🎁 Sanskari Proxy
A lot of Indian Government websites are inaccessible on the public internet,
because they geo-fence it to within Indian Boundaries. I made a list of all
[Indian Government Websites](https://git.captnemo.in/nemo/pulse/src/branch/master/domains.csv),
and the idea is to make a Indian Proxy service that specifically works only for
the Geo-fenced Indian GoI websites.
For eg, if `uidai.gov.in` is inaccessible, hitting `uidai.gov.sanskariproxy.in`
will get you the same result, proxied via our servers.
This is not intended to be used for actual usage, just research purposes. Will
help make the UIDAI (and other GoI) websites accessible to a much larger
community.
_Update_: I made
[a version of this](https://github.com/captn3m0/sanskari-proxy), the one that
comes with the least legal issues.
## Helm Charts for Self-Hosting
I self-host a lot of my services, and it would be great to take my existing
services, and convert them to compatible Helm Charts that others can re-use.
Basically: Helm Charts for Self-Hosting.
The input for these would be the terraform code at
https://git.captnemo.in/nemo/nebula
## Fake Paytm Payment
A fake webapp that goes fullscreen and does the following:
1. Has a QR Code Scanner and OCR Scanner that scans Paytm QR Codes
2. Lets users enters any amount
3. And gives a green check to say that the payment was successful.
Why: To demonstrate to Paytm that they need to educate their merchants better
about authenticating payments.
:warning: **Likely illegal to distribute.**
Update: There are already two such apps on the Play Store. However, they don't
work any more since they were based on the old UI Scheme. See
[@Oxyenyos's PR](https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas/pull/10) for some more
details.
## ✨ Automated Personal Finance
A personal finance application that tracks things automatically, but saves all
data on your systems.
A overwhelmingly large percentage of my finances are online or tracked somewhere
digitally. What is ditigal can be automated, but without any of the SMS-sniffing
applications that currently clutter the market. The idea is to have a simple
cross-platform application that:
1. Embeds a web-browser that lets you login to various online services.
2. Scrapes the order/payment history from these sites regularly.
3. And provides you with monthly budget/finance history that you can use to
track your spending.
For bonus points, figure out a way to track card expenditure. The very minimum
services required would be:
1. Uber (Has an API)
2. Splitwise (Has a API)
3. Paytm (Doesn't have API, but the website backend is very much a API)
4. Amazon
I've tried something similar before:
[captn3m0/gringotts](https://github.com/captn3m0/gringotts), but I made a few
mistakes:
1. Made it a ruby-command line application.
2. Made it output YAML.
A few related projects:
- [Praseetha-KR/billfold](https://github.com/Praseetha-KR/billfold)
- [alexjv89/cashflowy](https://github.com/alexjv89/cashflowy) - Might be worth
using this as core.
If I were to try it again, I'd ensure a few things:
1. GUI first, with a great UX.
2. Cross platform, but I'd priritize Mac if necessary.
3. Save all data in [plaintextaccount](https://plaintextaccounting.org)
compatible files. This would let people use other tools on top of this.
## CardDAV on Slack
While Slack calls are great, they are not the same as a Contact Entry in your
phonebook. Because with a phonebook entry, you can make outbound calls without
having internet, and you get contact details when your colleague calls you.
The idea is to run a Slack OAuth based CardDAV server, which:
1. Authenticates the user over OAuth
2. Fetches the list of all users in a team
3. Generates a CardDAV URL for the authenticated user
4. Which can then be used by the user on their phone to sync Contacts one-way
(From Server to Phone)
Why one-way? You don't want changes made on the Client side to be pushed to the
server.
Why CardDAV? It is an open-protocol built to exactly solve this problem.
And since you have the user's OAuth tokens, you can verify the token on every
request to ensure that it is still valid. If the token is invalid, you return an
empty Contact List, thus ensuring that users can't fetch contacts from teams
they've left.
Another cool hack this enables is that for teams on Free Plans, which supports
"Skype" field in your profile, but not Phone number, it allows you to use the
"skype" field to build contact sync which converts the field to a
mobile/telephone field as long as it is a valid telephone number.
## ✨ UPI on Desktop
A clean-room reverse engineered implementation of the NPCI Common Library.
Every UPI-supported app works using the NPCI Common Library, which takes care of
some crucial details:
- MPIN Entry
- Debit Card Entry for first time registration
Before encrypting those and passing them to the application code.
This project envisions to reverse-engineer the NPCI Common Library. This would
let people:
- Build Desktop implementation of any UPI Application
- Build BHIM on older devices
This is a necessary step, but not the final step since that would be reversing
the web APIs that common UPI apps use.
## Twitter Adventure Maker
Play your own Adventure on Twitter threads have gotten quite famous recently:
- [Being Startup CEO for a day: DON'T LET YOUR COMPANY DIE](https://twitter.com/scottburke777/status/1143356872633851906)
- [Being Beyoncé’s assistant for the day: DONT GET FIRED](https://twitter.com/CORNYASSBITCH/status/1142591156884127744)
[@ChettyArun was wondering](https://twitter.com/ChettyArun/status/1144534623642255360)
how these were even made with Twitter.
One line pitch: Make a simple webapp that uses the Twitter UI to generate Play
your own Adventures. For bonus points, add support for
[Twine](https://twinery.org/) or perhaps DNML to let people create these easily.
## :rocket: Playstore RSS Feed for Version Updates
An RSS feed to follow updates on applications would be nice. See [this issue](https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/issues/1352).
**:rocket:** RSS Bridge now has a Google Play Store Bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/pull/2110
## Calendar Feed for Event Websites
Would be great if I could open my Calendar application and immediately look at
events that are happening around me. Aim is to subscribe to "Fun Events -
Bangalore (Insider)" or "Plays in Bengaluru (BookMyShow)" calendars for eg.
Insider has an API that could help with this:
https://api.insider.in/home?filterBy=go-out&city=bangalore
## SVG to PNG on the Edge
I wanted to generate SVG images based on Social Media sharing templates that
could be re-purposed as header images for any of my articles. Such a solution
would help bloggers immensely, since your Open Graph images can be easily
dynamically generated. Same goes for people with static sites. (Generating a
static SVG is much easier than generating PNG images).
If you have a magic box that converts SVG images to PNG images just before
serving them to Open Graph scrapers. You can implement such a box using
CloudFlare workers for eg.
A few more links on this:
[[a](https://fransdejonge.com/2018/03/twitter-and-facebook-dont-support-svg-yet/), [[b]](https://github.com/BreakOutEvent/breakout-frontend/issues/234),
[[c]](https://indieweb.org/The-Open-Graph-protocol#Does_not_support_SVG_images).
Think of how powerful this could be:
`
bookmarks, and tab bar I add bookmarks and save them in a special directory. I
get a share option in the extension against every parent level directory to
share with other people
The interface is basically:
- Coding (shared with [email protected]) [Synced]
- Books
- Projects
- Elixir (shared with [email protected]) [Syncing]
If the other person checks their bookmarks directory, they see the same
directory and links
edits are synced as well, so you can edit bookmarks (title only) and it gets
synced back
There are lots of tools that already sync your browser bookmarks, but once you
have the base in place, you can make the "source/sink" configurable to things
like Google Save / Pockets / Pinboard etc.
## 👩🔬 Boardgame AI Gym
The idea is a mix of 2 things: reading research papers about Monopoly, and
playing a lot of boardgames. There is a lot of good research work around
monopoly [0] and certain card games (Poker etc), but modern board games (Catan
has a little research community) haven't been looked at much. I wanted to do
simulation-based research for modern games, but found that there is no easy
tooling available to do this.
CardWorld is "OpenAI Gym for boardgames". The complete idea is:
1. Have a board game framework in place that allows people to write rulesets for
their favorite games. These get registered as environments in the Gym.
2. Allow anyone to submit a agent script for this environment that plays this
game. This could be written in any language that the platform supports.
3. Have a runner system that runs these agents against each other.
The benefits I can see are these:
1. Crowdsource AI research on turn-based games. The easier it is to write a bot
that plays Hearts, the more people will try their hand at it.
2. Improve our understanding of Card Game Modelling. There has been some
research in this area earlier[1] involving languages specific to model this,
but I think there is a lot of scope of improvement here.
3. Give the boardgame community the tools to simulate and understand strategies
for modern board games. Everyone knows you must buy the Transports in
Monopoly, but what is the optimum strategy for Settlers of Catan?
Related Projects:
- [Open Spiel](https://github.com/deepmind/open_spiel), [Docs](https://openspiel.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html)
- [Ludii Games](https://ludii.games/contact.php)
- [RLCard](https://rlcard.org/overview.html)
Work so far:
- https://github.com/captn3m0/sushigo/
- https://github.com/captn3m0/gothok
- https://git.captnemo.in/nemo/boardgame2vec/
## 🎁 ✨ Green/Yellow Pages
A distributed directory for spam reports.
I despise [TrueCaller][tc], the current world-leader in this space, because
their entire business model depends on users selling their data to Truecaller,
which can then make as much money from this database.
When you look at the root problem that truecaller is solving, it is a
reverse-yellow-pages directory to avoid spam calls.
To solve this:
1. You need a way to check a number against a known spam list.
2. You need the check to be as fast as possible.
If you want to beat TrueCaller, this check should be completely offline, to
present a significant advantage.
### API
The API has 2 endpoints:
1. Register a number as spam.
2. Check a number and get a YES/NO spam response.
### Spam registration
To prevent abuse, you want the client to do some proof of work before _each_
submission. Publish a hash of the input number in a ledger.
### Data Store
Maintain a layered bloom filter ([research][res]) for each of the
country-domains. We don't store the original number, though, but the hash of the
phone number in the bloom filters.
### Check
Any party can request a check by sending us a hash of the phone number (so it
doesn't really leak _much_ info) along with the country code. We want a slow
hash function but since we want this to be verifiable on the client itself, the
ideal would be that it takes \~0.25s on a average mobile device.
Once we recieve the hash, check it against all the bloom filter layers in
parallel and return the results as a score.
For eg, if we have 1000 layers (to check upto 1000 reports), return the highest
layer number that has an entry for the number.
### Ledger
The above-mentioned ledger is an easy way of ensuring verified sync with any
other party that wants to maintain the same data store.
This is not a very robust solution, and an ideal solution would be to let the
client publish on the ledger, and everyone can just pick up from the ledger.
Different entities can create different directories depending on the client
properties. For eg, if a client has reported too many spam reports, you can
reduce their contribution.
A generator might also consider the frequency of such reports, along with their
age so that recent reports are given more weightage.
The nice thing here is that, since all violations are published on the ledger,
you can re-create the directory from the ledger at any time.
### Directory
A generated directory is a compressed export of the nth layer of the bloom
filter. `n` here can be decided by the customer. So you can pick n=5, for a
high-false-negative rate.
Over time, I expect this to be standardized as high/low/medium.
### Application
The application uses a list of country codes (which it can auto-fill from the
application context) as input to download directories from various known
sources. The remainder of the application is spent on interrupting inbound calls
and adding a overlay with the call score.
### Security/Privacy concerns
While hashing is the right choice here, it still has issues. A valid phone
number may be very small and we are already recording the contry code to reduce
the size and improve directory efficiency.
See [this][solomon] for eg, where the actual phone number is just 5 digits.
Even if you use a really slow hash function, and it takes 2 seconds to hash each
number, it only takes 37 hrs _total-compute time_, which can easily be run in
parallel to guess any numbers which may have been ever entered in the ledger.
The problem here is that we want repeated numbers to hash to the same value, so
as to ensure duplicates get recorded properly.
This might be possible if all clients can store a copy of the entire ledger, but
that doesn't sound like a good idea.
However, the mere fact that a phone number is in the ledger isn't as important
as _when_ it was added.
A client should ideally add a random delay (to the tune of hours) and batch any
writes to the ledger so as to reduce chances of leak.
If A calls B, and B immediately writes A's number to the ledger, A can pretty
much guarantee that it was B who did it.
There is a counter-argument here to be made about how you want honest clients
and immediate publishing would increase transparency and hopefully get more
_actual spammers_ on the list.
Another concern is about publishing the client identifier in the ledger, since
it can lead to the network figuring your calling patterns. However, since an
entry is only added voluntarily, and doesn't really have any PII, I think it is
a reasonable tradeoff to make.
### Deregistration
Phone numbers are not people. They can be transferred, and what was a spammy
telemarketer earlier could now be your number.
There is no easy way here, other than having a "negative" entry in the ledger,
with a far higher cost attached to it.
The client should always whitelist any saved mobile numbers as well.
Another solution is to have a second "verified" ledger of some sort, where
people can verify themselves as not-a-spammer by "some means". Not sure how this
could be done in a distributed manner though.
### Cost of Computation
- Verification should be fast
- Insertions should be slow
- Client registrations should be costly
By costly, I mean the compute price, not monetary. A nice way to equalize this
would be to make a registration as hard as 10 insertions, so creating a client
and reporting 9 further times would be much more cheaper to do.
This helps in ensuring that there is still a way to counter spam reports. I'm
sure there are better ideas, though.
### Terms
_Directory_: The actual data store holding a "Yes/No" filter of whether a number
is spammy or not. _Ledger_: A blockchain or ditributed log that maintains any
reports.
### References
- You should totally read
[Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers](https://github.com/googlei18n/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHOODS.md)
- [bitly/dablooms](https://github.com/bitly/dablooms) - an attempt by bitly to
solve spam problems with a layered bloom filter which is countable as well
- [scalable bloom filters](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020019006003127)
- [A multi-layer bloom filter for duplicated URL detection](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5578947/?reload=true)
[solomon]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_the_Solomon_Islands
[res]: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5578947/?reload=true
## 🎁 communities browser extension
Every community that I meet these days wants to use its own different app to
manage things, or alternatively create its own special forum and so on.
For instance:
- The dev-s community runs its own Slack channel (which is great) but wants its
own discussion forum.
- ReRoll Bangalore has its own WhatsApp/Telegram group (which is great again)
but lacks a discussion forum.
The idea is to make a Chrome/Firefox extension that:
1. lets you create a community (you get a unique id + social links you can give
out)
2. lets others submit their identity to the community tracker via the
extension.
The extension has the following features:
1. Allows you to add "communities" you belong to
2. Allows you to add your identity handles that you own. So you can specify
multiple twitter/reddit/facebook/HN/... accounts that you own
3. Link communities with your identities. So you can share your reddit handle
by joining a community.
4. Highlight a community member while browsing the site. So if you are browsing
hacker news and have added yourselves to the community listing, you can see
other discussions highlighted from other members.
The entire extension lives in browser space and localstorage. The backend just
maintains a mapping of community id to profile IDs, which is synced once in a
while. A community code might be required to add yourselves to the community.
This is like Reddit flairs, but flairs only work on a single subreddit, this is
intended to work across various discussion forums.
## onioncannon
Similar to [pushjet](https://pushjet.io/), but with the following idea:
- Push all app notifications to other clients
- Add/Remove clients at will
- All traffic reaches a central server
- All traffic is encrypted at source, but the uuid of the client can be used to
talk to them
### Related:
- https://www.ockam.io/
### Use Case
- I wanted to build a simple "auto-type OTP" Chrome Extension.
- Without using pushbullet (Should be FOSS)
- Without giving my OTP to anyone else (should be E2E)
- Without having to worry about NATs and firewalls (should be a publicly hosted
service)
Somewhat related to the idea is http://github.com/decant, which allows me to
build the "read SMS" part of it.
What I envision is essentially a simple client-registration protocol:
- `[Device A]` generates a UUID.
- `[Device B]` generates a UUID.
- B generates a QR code using the UUID.
- A scans the QR code to get the UUID and pushes a sample event.
- B gets the event, and can decide to push events to A if needed.
The QR code includes:
1. The UUID of a client
2. A public key fingerprint of the PGP key of the client
3. Metadata containing:
- Public Key
- URL where the public key can be found
- Misc Client Information
Any client who scans this can now start sending encrypted data to the client.
The nice thing is that you can transmit data however between these two parties,
once it is encrypted. Use GCM/pusher if you wish.
## 🚀PyPi Notifier
Problem: No way to get updates when any package I am using has a new release.
Solution:
- Sends an email when a package you are watching updates
- Get starred package list from github
- Webhooks are not possible
- PyPi -> GitHub mapping is impossible to maintain
- Parse PyPi RSS Feed
- Get list of packages updated and mail people
- Maybe parse package name from setup.py
- Allow uploading requirements.txt as well perhaps.
### Sources
Once it has your GitHub credentials:
- Starred github repos that are also on PyPi
- packages menetioned in setup.py and requirements.txt files from my own
projects
- Allow someone to upload a requirements.txt and use that as source
- Parse the PyPi RSS Feed to get complete updates
All the sources are merged together.
### Notifications
- Maybe have a curated twitter account that tweets about releases for the top
10% packages.
- Create a personal RSS feed for every user
- Send out emails (configurable) for every release.
- Optional direct tweets as well?
🚀 [Dependabot](https://dependabot.com/),
[Renovate](https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate)
## codenames-ai
Codenames is a word game, and you can see the rules here:
https://czechgames.com/files/rules/codenames-rules-en.pdf
The interesting challenge in the game is word-association:grinning:
- finding a single word that
- relates to one-or-more of words in Set A (Your color)
- while staying away from words in Set B (Your opponent's color)
- and staying far far away from a single word in Set C (Assasin)
The remaining AI is much simpler: Given a word and a count,
- find the closest words from Set (A+B+C)
I think using some clustering algorithms on top of word2vec should give decent
results. Maybe GPT-3 can do this much more easily.
## Verifiable Code Execution on Cloud
A common problem in the privacy world is that when a service says: we need your
data, but promise we won't store it - you have to take them at their word. This
is a common problem. Signal for eg, hashes your contacts, and sends them to
their cloud servers to see which of your contacts are on Signal. They manage to
do that
[by relying on Intel SGX](https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/),
which signs the code running on AWS and the Signal app validating that signature
to ensure that the code that's processing your contacts isn't doing anything
nefarious.
However, there is another trusted piece of infrastructure that can be used to
achieve a slightly lower degree of trust. Here's how you do it:
1. AWS Lambda is "verifiable infrastructure". You can fetch the code and verify
that it's the same code as what you've provided elsewhere (as a reproducible
build for eg)
2. We create a lambda for trusted-code-execution (say collecting hashes of your
contact list, matching them against a bloom filter). The code isn't supposed
to log these contacts, or save them in any way. We also provide this exact
code elsewhere, for people to validate and review.
3. You create a AWS IAM keypair that has permissions to get each revision of the
lambda code, validate the corresponding API endpoint against this lambda.
4. Instead of using a custom-domain API Gateway, you instead use the AWS execute
lambda endpoint (The ones that look like
https://api-id.execute-api.region.amazonaws.com/STAGE). The request directly
reaches the lambda - verifiably (I think).
5. Publish the keys for the AWS IAM keypair that was created above.
Anyone in the world can then call up the Lambda management API to validate the
code at any time with these credentials. If you trust AWS Lambda and IAM, there
is a verifiable trust in the code that is running on that lambda and that is
processing your contacts. If/when AWS supports Intel SGX on Lambda (or Nitro
Enclaves), additional guarantees can be provided by using that.
Lambda could quite possibly be replaced by similar services: Fargate/Cloud Run.
Links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837281,
https://stackoverflow.com/a/65798291/368328
Not sure what the actual product here would be. Perhaps a toolkit that makes it
easy to setup such infrastructure? Perhaps a global custody chain that acts as
verifying nodes?
## Browser Extension: youtube-cue
A browser extension of https://github.com/captn3m0/youtube-cue/ would be nice,
where you could click a button on the YouTube URL for a video to download a CUE
sheet.
## Stitch EPUBs from multiple URLs
I wrote https://github.com/captn3m0/pystitcher, which does a great job with
declaratively stitching PDFs. It would be nice if something similar could be
done for EPUBs. So you create an EPUB by writing down a markdown file:
```markdown
title: Thunder and Lightning author: Scott Rain summary: Book Summary
# Thunder and Lightning
# [Cover](cover.jpg)
# [Chapter 1: Everything goes south](https://example.com/ch1.html)
# [Chapter 2: Lightning](https://example.com/ch2.html)
```
Take the input, run it through a readability engine, and generate proper EPUBs
out of it.
See some related stuff:
- I wrote [url-to-epub](https://github.com/captn3m0/url-to-epub), which works
nicely for single-URL books.
- [percollate](https://github.com/danburzo/percollate) is a command-line tool
that turns web pages into beautifully formatted PDF, EPUB, or HTML files.
- pandoc, obviously
## OpenAPI Specification Generator from HTTP Archives
HAR is a JSON-formatted archive file format for logging of a web browser's
interaction with a site. Lots of tools already support HAR format, including
Chrome, Firefox, Fiddler, Charles Proxy, ZAP etc. There are
[JSON schema generators](https://github.com/stoplightio/json-schema-generator)
that will take a JSON object and generate a OpenAPI schema accordingly. The
usecase is:
1. Browse around a website or mobile app, which happens to have a JSON API.
2. Save a HAR file from your browser or proxy.
3. Generate a OpenAPI Specification file.
It doesn't have to be perfect, but the following can be easily adapted for:
1. List of various routes
2. Authentication scheme
I
[wrote a few reverse-engineered OpenAPI Specifications recently](https://captnemo.stoplight.io/)
and this would have been helpful.
Edit: Found a few projects:
- [akita-cli](https://github.com/akitasoftware/akita-cli#about-this-repo)
already supports this, but I haven't tried this yet.
-
## Open ISIN API
Based on https://github.com/captn3m0/india-isin-data.
## A Survey of the [Electron](https://www.electronjs.org/) Supply Chain
Electron applications are easy to build, but hard to maintain:
- using npm means the dependency tree is limitless
- using electron means most applications are static bundles containing:
- a full chromium runtime
- a copy of ffmpeg
- electron
- Chrome bugfixes take time to reach electron.
- Older versions of electrons provided a full Node.js environment in the
renderer process.
The [process model](https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/process-model) has
improved over time, but it's not perfect. There were 3 context isolation
bypasses reported in 2020.
A survey of existing applications might be worthwhile to see what's the lag
between:
1. A bug being reported in chrome
2. A security fix in electron
reaching end users.
I did some work on it:
-
-
## 2fa.wiki
A community maintained machine-readable wiki for information about 2fa recovery
workflows for various services. 2FA recovery workflows are often undocumented,
so this would be a good thing to document across the internet.
Having this machine-readable will be even better.
## Boardgame Rulebook Translation Guide :construction:
Translating technical guides (such as boardgame rulebooks) to Hindi is quite
tough. There should be a standard guide that documents common terms so as to
avoid confusion between various games using different translations for common
boardgaming terms.
## Simple Firejail/Bubblewrap wrapper for AUR/NPM/pipx packages
I trust packages in the distro far more than random dependencies.
It would be nice to be able to run a command with a prefix so that:
It only gets access to the files and directories mentioned on the command line.
Maybe automatically do this at install time, to wrap it.
## Probe the Great Indian Firewall
The Great Indian Firewall is what blocks Indian Government websites from being accessed outside of India.
This is bad for multiple reasons, including accessibility, archivability, and usability. There's multiple
ways this is applied, inculding:
1. GeoDNS based blocks (DNS resolves to a blocked IP outside India)
2. IP Address based blocks (Requests from an ASN outside India are dropped)
3. Block ASNs from Hosting Service Providers
Take an existing corpus of Indian Government websites (such as [mine](https://gist.github.com/captn3m0/4f3da8f07fe884e62bfab3ac85616936))
, and probe it in multiple ways to detect differences between the
"normal response" (What you'd get from an Indian residential IP) and a "blocked response" (what you see from outside India).
Take care to account for residential v/s cloud IPs, since those are commonly blocked.
The outcome should be a self-updating report/dashboard that documents the various sites that are blocked outside India.
## A Practical MRNL Service (Mobile Number Revocation List)
**Note**: [TRAI](https://trai.gov.in/) (India's Telecom Regulator) publishes a [Mobile Number Revocation List][mrnl] every month. It consists of any mobile
numbers that were disconnected this month. The list is public, and meant to be used by Indian businesses and service providers to protect
against account takeovers once these mobile numbers are re-assigned. The list is published in JSON/Excel/PDF formats, and is accessible over
an API.
As it stands, each business must write their own code to actually use this list. A usable implementation of this list would be
some service that could do one or more of the following:
1. Publish all revocations on a public queue, such as a publically accessible SNS topic, Amazon EventBridge, or a NATS/Kafka stream. Any business can subscribe to this, and consume it easily.
2. Let any business subscribe to a webhook where such lists are published.
3. Let businesses submit their existing customer dataset on a regular basis, so you can provide targeted webhooks to each business - you only get notified if your customer is impacted.
4. A Bulk-Lookup API that takes an existing customer dataset, intersects it against this month's revocation list and returns a response of impacted customers.
5. A historic database lookup that takes customer account creation dates along with mobile numbers as input, and returns impacted customers (mobile numbers that have been revoked since the account was created). This is important because a business might already have vulnerable customers
### Security and Privacy Considerations
- You do not want to store a copy of any business's customer database - relevant for (3). Especially do not link it to any identifiable Business Name. Finding a business from the list of mobile numbers might still be trivial however (if you know a subset of users for eg).
- Support bloom filters for bulk lookup APIs to reduce the request payload.
- Look at [Private Set Intersection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_set_intersection) to make bulk-lookups completely anonymous (The server learns nothing about your customer dataset).
- Provide clear guidance as to what guarantees the MRNL provides, and what businesses should be doing after getting notified. This might be very important for 2FA considerations for example, and require complete account suspension in cases where the mobile number is the only customer identifier.
### Cost Considerations
* Running a public SNS/EventBridge/PubSub service with third-party subscribers has a low enough cost, since you're responsible for reasonable egress and publishing costs.
* Running webhooks at scale does get costly, due to network costs, so don't do this unless you can monetize it.
## A physical variable Fuzzy Clock
I don't like the per-minute cadence of modern clocks. Fuzzy clocks reduce the
accuracy of time to fix this. I use the Fuzzy Clock on KDE, which is described as:
> The fuzzy clock shows the time as a spoken expression like “Twenty to six”.
Additionally, the fuzziness of the clock can be adjusted. At maximum
accurateness, it will change all five minutes, with increasing fuzziness
the time of changes will increase. At maximum fuzziness, it may only
say “Weekend”.
I like having accurate clocks at home when I'm getting ready in the morning,
but as the day goes by, I would like to care less about accurate time. I'd
like my clock to just say "Time to Sleep" beyond 10pm, but during working hours
be accurate to 15 minutes or so.
I don't know what a physical version would look like, but it would be cool
to come up with one. I am thinking of prototyping something with a e-Ink display.
## A curl impersonation proxy
[curl-impersonate](https://github.com/lwthiker/curl-impersonate/) is a cool
project which patches curl to impersonate browser signatures (TLS Cipher
Suites, TLS Cipher Order, headers etc). This lets you use curl-enabled
code to behave as if the requests came from a browser. It doesn't run JS
but is quite helpful for lots of usecases.
A common issue with curl-impersonate is using it in applications which already
have a HTTP Adapter, such as Faraday/Ruby or other HTTP clients. You need to
switch the client to curl, and then LD_PRELOAD the libcurl from this project.
However, most adapters already support a HTTP Proxy. It would be nice to have
a MITM proxy that was curl-impersonate aware, so it becomes a cheap and easy
way to run this in your existing codebase.
## A Whisper UX Design Pattern
You can "mute" triggers in most platforms, where a trigger could be a
hashtag, or a user, or a text pattern. However, the mute is always a
binary thing - either you see it, or you don't.
A well-stated problem with muting is the echo-chamber it creates. If you
mute all mentions of [political-term] from your feed, it could be the
equivalent of putting your head in the sand.
A "Whisper" is a more nuanced version of this - instead of hiding away the
mention, it is shown in a different style, or a different color. This way
you can still see the mention, but it doesn't dominate your feed.
You could also club posts with the same whisper tag, and show them together
in the feed.
I've been considering something like this for .
## Tareeqh pe Tareeqh
A website where you can visualize the pendency status of cases in courts,
and see the reasons why court cases are not heard. Give it a date, and
your case details - and it can use the existing data to estimate whether
your case will be heard or not (and give you probabilities for reasons).
## Mobile App Traffic RE Platform
A platform that helps with:
1. Patching an existing app to support traffic analysis.
2. Running the app against your network.
3. Generating HAR files using a proxy
4. Ingesting the HAR file to generate OpenAPI Specifications
5. Create appropriate dependency graphs for API calls
6. Automatically generate OpenAPI Workflows for specific calls
## One-Page RSVP Platform on Edge Compute
https://rsvp.ngo/ was almost perfect (doesn't work any more), but I'd like
something I can easily run on Edge compute such as Netlify Functions,
or Cloudflare Workers. It should be a single page that lets users
create events, and submit RSVPs, with a single function that is easily
embeddable to an existing website.
## One Page Event Hosting platform
Considering building this at `host.blr.today`: A single page no-login
website to help you host an event.
1. Event Date considerations (Show weather, protests etc)
2. No login required
3. Semantic structure with Schema.org/Event
4. Automatically generate banner images using something like bannerbear
5. Embeddable RSVP Form
6. Give a separate Payment Link.
## Price Index for Indian Grocery Websites
Pick a basket of common goods from Indian grocery websites, and track the
price of these goods over time across multiple popular apps (BigBasket,
Instamart, Blinkit, Zepto, Amazon Fresh etc).
Related work:
- A [Shrinkflation Database](https://www.shrinkflation.io/products)
- [Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites](https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071396799790275).
// [HN Discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37532973), [Code](https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise),
[Website](https://heisse-preise.io/).
- [9minutes.in](https://9minutes.in/) for searching across Zepto/Blinkit/Instamart/DMart
## Bangalore Adblock Art Project
Commercial Hoardings were banned in Bangalore throughout COVID and for quite much later:
https://www.deccanherald.com/india/karnataka/bengaluru/commercial-hoardings-will-not-be-allowed-in-bengaluru-says-govt-1125535.html
A cool art project would be to showcase the pre-post photos of the same places
with and without the hoardings in sight.
## PURL Canonicalization
[PURL](https://github.com/package-url/purl-spec) is the Package-URL format,
letting systems encode a package (+version) into a URL scheme. However, there
are often multiple ways to encode the same resource, such as:
- pkg:docker/library/php
- pkg:oci/php?repo_url=https://docker.io/library/php
both refer to the same package, with different semantics. This makes matching PURLs
quite difficult as two tools might encode the same package in two different ways.
A canonicalization scheme would be helpful.
## Nutri-score calcuator
https://github.com/openfoodfacts/robotoff seems pretty close.
Given A nutrition label (and some identifier), as specified by FSSAI, generate a [Nutri-score](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutri-Score) label.
Make this into an API, which can cache on the identifier (Vendor+Product ID) and provide a nutri-label.
Then build interesting things on top of this API:
1. A browser extension that works as you shop online, showing you the nutri-score of the product.
2. A web-app that takes your Grocery app export data (See ), and generates a nutri-score for all items you buy.
There are some apps on the market that rely on barcode -> UPC -> Lookup and
are probably reliant on openfoodfacts but there are no good Indian barcode
databases (hence the next idea).
If a good Indian barcode database exists, this could be extended to work with
that database instead.
## Indian Grocery Barcode Database
Barcodes are great, and UPC barcodes are quite decent at being identifiers for
products across sellers. Sites like exist to lookup
this data, but they rely on US based listings.
Go through all images across all product listings on Swiggy/Zomato/Zepto/Instamart/BigBasket.
Run OCR on these images to extract the barcode, and then provide the associated metadata
alongside each barcode. Also include the image URLs.
Submit everything to openfoodfacts.org
## showtimes.in
A simple website that shows you the showtimes of all movies playing across India. Easily doable using data from a few sources:
1. TicketNew, now owned by Zomato
2. Cinepolis App
3. PVR App
4. BookMyShow
does not support India currently, so it might be
worth selling them the data feeds as well. Splitting across 4 different
providers gives some redundancy as well. The majority of screens get covered
3 ways via this, however standardising the data might be a problem.
says they support India, but
I don't know what's the data source they use.
## India Automobile Privacy Review
I really wish there was a truly private modern automobile manufacturer in
India that used end-to-end encryption for all data that they collected, storing
it only on the vehicle (under device-encryption) and synced over E2E to their
app/website if needed.
Unfortunately, there is none. The best we can do to raise awareness on the matter
is do something akin to Mozilla's [Privacy not Included](https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/)
review, where they compared 25 US car companies and found out that none care about
[privacy](https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/).
This is a non-technical project, and quite easily doable by a bunch of policy/legal folks.
---
## Licence
This work is licensed under a
[Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Feel free to contribute via Pull Requests, or discuss ideas in Issues. Also feel
free to use these ideas in making the Next Big Thing. I promise to send you a
postcard if you ship one of these.
[](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
There is a list of other similar lists-of-ideas at [SIMILAR.md](SIMILAR.md)
[mrnl]: https://mnrl.trai.gov.in "Mobile Number Revocation List Portal by TRAI"