Problem: Often, one finds onesself looking at things and wondering the exact details of what they are. Dogs, cars, mountains, landmarks, trees, flowers, presidents, patio furniture. All sorts of stuff.
Solution: Take a picture with your phone and email it to our whattheheckisthis.com service. Within 20 minutes you’ll get a message saying what the thing is.
I haven’t quite worked out the details of how this will work. Perhaps there will be a web site where anyone can identify the incoming nonsense and get paid for it. I’ve also got no idea how it would make money. Perhaps you pay once we have determined that we definitely can identify your thing? Well, a few things to sort out. But this is the general idea.
Problem: The book I’m reading, whilst fascinating, talks about amounts in dollars from Hawaii in 1905 and amounts in pounds from England in 1650. I have no real way of knowing if they’re a lot or a little.
Solution: A nice web site. You enter:
- Date
- Amount of money
- Currency
- Currency you want it converted into
and, hey presto, it tells you how much that amount is worth now. Anyone who knew about the web could get it up and working in an afternoon. Ad-supported is probably the best way to go on the web; cheap app on the phone.
Second problem: howmuchmoneyisthisamountinhistoryworthnow.com is a shit domain name.
Problem: All my contacts are in Outlook, but they have more up-to-date information on their Facebook pages.
Solution: Some app that runs on my computer and silently updates my Outlook contacts using information in their Facebook profiles. That’s it, really. This is perhaps the most blindingly obvious idea I’ve posted here so far. To make it original, every 30 seconds it plays a random sound effect from some crappy television show.
Problem: Earth not turning out to be quite as durable as we’d originally hoped.
Solution: The only possible solution is to move to other planets and pillage them instead. We need a web site to coordinate efforts. This would incorporate:
- Collection of ideas for planets to head for (with ability to filter by distances, quality of scenery, number of natural resources et cetera)
- Advance ticket purchases
- Packing suggestions (no water on many of them, so don’t bring a toothbrush, et cetera)
It would probably run on renewable energy or something, so we didn’t look too cavalier. This is going to be big.
Problem: You want to go and do something with your chums (hiking, in my particular case right now) and you need to pick a weekend. This currently done via a muddle of emails.
Solution: Simple web site – people’s names along the columns, list of possible dates down the rows. Text box on each date that you can enter anything you want in. If you enter anything in the box, the date counts as gone. Here’s a spreadsheet version of what I have in mind:
It could be complicated (where everyone has a login, it sends you reminders, etc) or simple (where anyone can type into anyone else’s dates). I will not be entirely surprised if this has been done already, in which case I’ll use theirs…