A Screenshot Plugin for my Parents

Standard situation: My wife is on skype with her parents. Something on the other end doesn't work. They discuss for 20 minutes before my wife even knows what the issue is.

What we need is a plugin for pidgin, skype, adium and others that allows someone to take a screenshot with one button. A preview would then pop up and the user could touch (or click on) the region where the issue is. The screenshot would then be sent through and displayed on the other end.

My stepmother would push the button, click on the area of the screenshot and my wife would then see the screenshot with an enlarged set-in.

Alternatively, my wife could hit a button and the screenshot would be requested on my stepmother's machine.

Would be a life saver. Or at least a good time saver.

A Feed Reader Plugin for Pidgin

Pidgin is my favourite instant messaging client. I have been using it when it was still called gaim, mostly for Yahoo and XMPP messaging (like Twitter).

I recently discovered the Skype API Plugin which makes pidgin even more useful as we use skype chat a lot at my current work.

Now the only thing missing is a feed reader!

I am using SharpReader for my daily RSS fix, but having two different UIs pop up every now and again is beginning to be too disruptive.

Wouldn't it be great if my feed updates could be displayed in a pidgin chat window?

And no, I do not want to switch to Miranda. I am used to pidgin, and I am too old to change habits :-)

A "Social Meta Network" Site

Data portability is a good thing, I guess, but it does not immediately solve my issue: I'm sick of entering and maintaining my personal data on about a dozen sites.

The solution: A site that reads my information from any one site (or from my openid) and maintains it on all the others. That way I would only need to maintain one profile, say the one on Linkedin, and the software would update all the others. Or, I could edit my profile on my meta site directly.

My meta site would also show me news and information about all the contacts I have across all social networks (a bit like spokeo.com), and it has to be able to understand that some people have multiple accounts (e.g. via a merge feature like the one in pidgin).

Wouldn't that be a pip?

A "CSS Consolidator" or Tree-based CSS Editor

I was trying some new layout on a couple of my web pages the other day.

Whenever I do that I always end up with a bunch of different CSS files all over the place, and it becomes increasingly different over time to keep them clean.

Being a programmer, I'd like to follow the DRY directive: don't repeat yourself. In order to do so, my CSS files would ideally be organised in a hierarchy: some CSS directives apply to all my pages, so they should end up in global.css, while others apply only to the astronomy section of my pages and should therefore be in astro.css.

Also, I like to seperate CSS files according to function (layout.css vs. typo.css).

In the end, I always have enough of those files to lose overview.

What I would need is a tool that displays all of my CSS directives along with where they come from. That way, I could move them easily from one file to another, or up/down the hierarchy if needed.

The tool must have an automatic consolidation feature that would move directives up the tree as far as possible.

I would not want to be able to graphically browse through my (X)HTML and apply CSS rules using the mouse. I would really want this tool to be able to work on existing or create a hierarchy of CSS files.

Does that make sense?

A Digital Rights Management (DRM) Infrastructure for my Personal Data

The UK has seen a couple of odd cases of "data loss" lately. Government organisations have on at least 4 occasions lost data about UK citizens: names, birth dates, addresses, bank account details and even some hospital records. Some data was lost by subcontractors and one of those subcontractors was even in the US!

Things like this have not happened in other countries, yet, or maybe they were not made public. But they make me wonder: can I trust my country or my government know what they do with the data they collect from me?

As Jan Schallaböck of the German ULD suggested in a talk at 23C3: DRM might be the solution.

If whenever I hand personal data over to anybody, I could at the same time specify who should be able to use that data, and for how long, I would not be affected by data losses at all.

Of course, it is not that simple.

For this to work, there has to be some standard for "DRM-protected personal data". The different government branches who need my data would have to use software that can handle this standard format-to-be. And I would need some software on my end that would enable me to apply DRM to my data before I send it off.

Maybe it's another "egg or hen" situation as no government will buy software as long as nobody sends them DRM-protected data. And as long as they cannot read it, I am forced to send my data in plain format.

I would love to have a tool that enables me to send my data off with DRM enabled. I guess I would need to parts: one tool that does the "signing" of my content, and a second one that acts as a server and "watches" how my data is used, or enables some people or organisms to actually use the data. The latter one would also render the data unreadable whenever I want.

Of all the software I won't write, this is by far the most important. If anyone knows of a project - preferrably open source - then let me know! I'd absolutely participate.

A backup tool that is completely independent of any hardware

My friend Arnd and I were thinking about this some time ago:

Backup solutions have one bottleneck - the hardware. CDs rot, tapes lose information eventually, the neccessary readers are difficult to come by. So the ideal backup solution would be completely hardware independent.

There is such a thing: the Internet.

Here's how it would work: my data would be split into pieces. Those pieces would then be transfered to the machines of some of my friends. I would keep a .torrent file (for example in an email saved on GMail). With that torrent file I could download all of my data using a standard BitTorrent client.

For added security, I would advise the tool to store some of my data more than once.

Now what if one of my friends buys a new machine or loses his disk? Well, as soon as his new machine would be back online, the data would be retransfered to his disk automatically. And if he chooses not to join the group again, my data would be stored somewhere else.

I would obviously donate a chunk of my disk to other people in my group.

There are some solutions out there that work like this, but not free, and not using BitTorrent for the restore process.