Ideas

Photo by Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden used
under creative commons license

The Region of Waterloo is getting serious about giant hogweed (GHW) this year. Serious enough to hire three summer university students to help curb the growth of this invasive species. I've stumbled across what I believed to be GHW, but I was never sure. Then tonight I had this crazy idea...

With the Region of Waterloo bursting with GPS and camera toting techies, I'm sure we can come up with a way to help the weed inspectors in their battle with this particularly noxious weed. So, here's the plan. If you see what you think might be hogweed in your travels, snap a photo with your phone and send an e-mail to lrs@region.waterloo.on.ca. Add that address to your contact list right now! If you send the photo, it will help with identification. If you add the coordinates, it will help the staff find and destroy the nasty plant.

You could likely use whatever photo and location services you see fit... maybe TweetPhoto or Flickr or whatever works. These social tools will help spread the details about GHW too.

By the way... do not try to handle this weed on your own. Get professional help. You can seriously harm yourself if you get the sap on your skin or in your eyes.

For more details, check out the region's news release.

Update: Here's some great photos of young GHW plants. Very helpful for identifying the weed before it gets taller than you!

Update 2: The government of Ontario released a Giant Hogweed Identification video. It's a good way to see what the plants look like when they're young.

Update 3: Here's a video made by YouTube user WorkSafeBC. It shows what the sap can do to your skin (nasty), how tall the plant can get, and how to safely remove it.

I'm thinking about writing a mobile application for makers. Why you ask? A few reasons come to (my) mind. Because I'm seeing a need and I'd like to fill it. Because I think stretching myself beyond my current level of geekery is fun. Because I can (and you likely could too).

The first problem I'd like to solve is the "Oh my gawd I can't believe someone is throwing that out I could so use that in a project I need someone to help me fish it out of the dumpster" problem.

Consider this... iPhone (or Blackberry, or Google phone, or whatever) in hand, you snap a picture and click the "Sound the Alarm" button. The application sends out notifications to all your maker friends (in the method they prefer). Maybe it checks their location to see if they might be around. Maybe it sends out an e-mail or tweet or Facebook post calling for help. The notes flying around tell them that you'll stick around for the next 10 minutes, and that you've got time later in the night (say 2:00 AM?) if anyone would like to help.

Maker friends... can you think of something else to add along this line, or even some completely unrelated mobile app that might be handy to have? Would you use this application? What other social networks sites would you want to connect with? Is there already an application like this, so I don't reinvent the wheel?

If you administer a Drupal site (or any other site that allows anonymous posts or comments) you will have to find ways to contend with spam posts. The auto-generated, link-filled kind of comment spam messages are especially annoying when you're trying to open up your site to comments from he community, since they can discourage people from reading and commenting.

If someone was skilled and creative enough, they could build a Drupal module that would allow administrators to flag comment spam like this and have it sent directly to a central web site. This collaborative "dead comment pool" service would parse the spam for foul links, then keep a list of spam websites. It could tally how many Drupal admins considered each site a problem.

After some time submitting spam, the Drupal Admin could turn on automatic comment filtering for their site. The filter could then consult the central site and start blocking spam comments. Filters could be adjustable. For instance, you might not want to automatically delete a comment unless there were 20 other administrators who had marked the site as spam, or you may want to just flag comments as spam and not have them deleted.

I know there are several useful spam-killing modules available for Drupal already, but something like this might be helpful too.

I was lucky enough to have my parents buy me a metal detector when I was kid. The handle was bright orange plastic and it was made for kids (I think it was from Radio Shack), but it did the trick and I always had fun using it until it gave out (after which I took it apart of course). I never found any real treasures with the device, but I was never short on bottle caps or rusty old nails :)

That metal detector was one of those formative toys in a growing geek's childhood. It sparked my interest in electronics, not to mention treasure hunting. I've thought about getting back into using a metal detector as a hobby again, but it would just have to compete with the kids and other side projects and it's just not really feasible at this time.

I've been mulling over an idea of combining a couple of my interests. I'm interested in robotics and electronics projects in general. It would be interesting to create a robot that could roam a field, narrowing down interesting places to dig. While the treasure hunter is investigating a marked spot, the robot could be locating the next place to dig. Covering the entire area programmatically would ensure that you didn't miss a spot as well (especially with an accurate GPS system installed). You could likely write the code for the robot to cover a potential find with several passes and several detector settings to qualify the find (e.g. using different frequencies for metal type detection and different depth settings). It might even be able to narrow down the size and shape of an item and show it graphically on a screen or send it wirelessly to a base station.

Then I got to thinking... where are some untapped locations for treasure hunting? Most people wouldn't have a lot of luck metal detecting in beach areas, especially along the shore and in the water where people might be unlucky enough to lose jewelery of one type or another. A submersible robot could be programmed to scour the shore for potential finds, and the treasure hunter wouldn't even have to get wet until a suitable location was found by the robot. With some attachments and a lot of skill, you could add a bucket to bring a scoop of sand to the shore for investigating.

Update 2009/09/15: Stumbled on an interesting RC car that can detect metal.

Your average "Mom and Pop" small town bowling alley is likely to have a paper score sheet for tracking a team's strikes and spares. For the novice bowler the scoring system can be daunting or just plain confusing. That's why many alley owners have moved to a computerized scoring system. Our local alley has an Amiga-based system that is costly to maintain and getting harder to support... you can't buy an Amiga these days unless it's a scrap system. The people that support such aging systems are likely finding it more and more difficult to source parts and programmers.

This is the kind of problem that the notion of Open Source is great at solving. If someone could take the time to create and document an Open Source hardware and software solution, then many people could benefit from the support businesses. People could sell systems and installation services, maintenance/support contracts, upgrades and enhancements/customizations.

The system should be designed to be "technology change resistant"... defining some standard (and well documented) interfaces for the hardware and software, each piece could be replaced independently with new technology as required.

Such a system would benefit a niche industry, would be good for the alley owners and would be great for the bowlers too... what more can you ask for? Can you imagine a customization that uses BlueTooth to send a copy of the scores to your PDA or phone or can sense when a person comes in based on the presence of their phone and then automatically change their Facebook status or send a Tweet?

Lots of possibilities here :)