Just a collection of things that might be worth implementing. Maybe giving someone ideas :)
I compared pure computing power, but a) power consumption and b) GPU performance would be interesting. Maybe in autumn, when Tokyo over day temperature is below 30°C and the raspi4 is running better ;)
powertop can show consumption, but there is nothing for recording such data. PMDA-denki or PMDA-power could do that. Ideas for this. German video "Einfluss von Software auf den Ressourcenverbrauch (bub2018) — Jens Gröger" from the “Bits und Bäume 2018” conference. Also this talk (german) shows that the same work is sometimes done by various pieces of software with very different energy consumption.
https://energy-charts.de/ has very nice graphs, but only regarding Germany. Data for the whole world should be collected and made available like this, also comparing countries.
There is Unicode巨大地図, but it seems not open and costs money. Such a project, done in the open would be nice. I.e. a website where one selects a range of unicode codepoints, and a pdf file is generated containing the characters from the selected unicode codepoints.
After reading an article on AI and how it helps propaganda, I wonder if one could make a counterproject analyzing news, and trying to understand trends and what the propaganda machine is trying to tell. The influenced people suck up the propaganda eventually, but probably without noticing it. How about algorithms seeing these trends and attempts for propaganda before we notice?
This post on languagelog shows the distribution of the word “this” in America. Would be fantastic to see such distributions over the world, with a freely selectable search term.
Moving into a very small flat in Tokyo, with no good view outside? Ideas of using computer screens to replace windows are coming up. Most interesting is to collect content: waterfalls, nature and so on, free content. Kickstarter projects are also around: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atmoph/atmoph-window-your-room-can-be-anywhere
http://www.kanjidamage.com/ and related books look like the sane approach to learn Kanji. There should be a free version of kanjidamage.com which
lang-8.com is a great website, one can write texts in various languages and get them corrected. In return, one corrects others texts. A karma system helps to spot if people are contributing or only expecting others to check their texts. Ideas which could help to improve future implementations of lang-8:
Imagine having media files like pdf, mp3 and videos on multipe computers. You watch the first half of a movie on the desktop, later you enter the train. When starting to play the same video file, it should continue at the place where I stopped before. Same for audio files and pdf. This should be done in syncing the current “media place state” to a server process which always runs. The media players like mplayer and evince would need how to deal with this, for storing the current “play state” and also fetching the state to continue with playing. Apple started to provice this functionality, but there is nothing opensource as of now, AFAIK.
This xkcd++ would be worth implementing: http://xkcd.com/350/ . Nested KVM could help
How much of a blockdevice has to be changed so the filesystem can not repair it? If a single bit gets changed, how are chances that this one bit will lead to lost data? Or even go unnoticed? One could in a blockdevice modify single bits, and then verify a) if mount notices something b) if fsck notices something c) if files ontop change silently. Comparing this for multiple filesystems.. is interesting.
Everybody has books around from childhood: books explaining things in simple words, and simple storys. Those books are not of big value to us, they are in danger of beeing thrown away without fulfilling a further purpose.. but this kind of books is important to others learning this language! Hm.. one could setup a web portal to exchange such books. Doing the environment a favor, and helping each other to learn languages!
Recently visiting an old fellow at a research centre at Garching i saw they use video-chat on a daily basis. Also for things where i would simply prefer instant messaging. There are many things, all provided by one single app:
Hamachi provides an instant messenger, users can establish vpns connecting each other. Thats a great idea, just that hamachi isnt free but proprietary. Why has noone yet suggested a jap to implement this into jabber? Maybe using openvpn as backend?
No such package as of now.
Websites make your browser execute javascript, and use the returned values for fingerprinting. Browser plugins could in some area fake the repplies, to make fingerprinting harder. I have not seen such a project yet. Details on fingerprinting: https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-113142-the_elephant_in_the_background .
I get requests for more Japan content, in different ways. More specifically:
Both countries have so much in common, problems like aging population and declining birthrates. Yet, so many differences: more taxes in Germany, but these are for example spent to pay universities, while in Japan one has to pay that by oneself. Would be a good project to compare where both countries are spending their taxes on!