Developing eWrite

I lost my Jawbone bluetooth earpiece the other day, it keeps falling out of my pocket. I didn’t know I had lost it, my phone just kept disconnecting and connecting again as I moved around the place.  With the help of the bluetooth connection connecting and disconnecting I was able to find the rough direction, found it by the front door. I think the dog was running around with it for a while.

• As a result, I was thinking a cool little invention would be to idependently power one of those tiny bluetooth usb dongles and attach it to a set of keys so a person could use their phone to find their keys, or the remote control or their dog. It only takes 5v to power a USB dongle.
• It would also be cool to be able to power down a blue tooth earpiece using the phone.

I get such great use from my bluetooth earpiece. I highly recommend the new Jawbone II. My mobile only gets reception in certain places here so I leave the phone on the windowsill and use the earpiece for the calls.

All I have to do now is find a land line desk phone that can connect to the earpiece and I’ll never have to touch a phone again.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tiny Bluetooth dongle easily updates your laptop
• Jawbone releases new Bluetooth headset
• Switched On: From Bluetooth to the bedroom and the backyard

Image by Irish Typepad via Flickr

• It would be great if it was possible to tell Amazon what books I currently have so that it could recommend books to me that I might like based on what I already have, regardless or where I might have purchased it.
• I love reading and I’d love to get my hands on one of the Sony eBook readers. Instead of reading books on it though, It would be cool to have a blog plugin that could send me PDF versions of blog posts so that I could read them on the eBook reader. A service that makes PDF versions of websites might be cool too so one could have a PDF version of php.net or something similar to reference from time to time offline.
• I would love some sort of small intelligent programme in Windows XP that would prevent the window changing focus when I am mid typing. Some pop ups are important, like IM pop ups but I don’t want to auto focus on them when Im already typing somewhere.

Skipped a week last week, not enough ideas floating around the noggin.

I planned to do 4 weeks of Friday invention ideas. Might keep going, but less frequently, maybe I’ve used up all the ideas floating around my head already.. thought there’d be more.

• A version of Google which shows you the least relevant results for your search.
• A video search that allows you to capture 10 second a video of a video your watching with your phone, send it to some web service and it will tell you the film its from.
• An extension for Thunderbird that will tell you if you have mail from a particular person. Ideal if you don’t check your mail purposely to be productive but you want to be interrupted when you get a mail from a specific person.
• Google Reader allows you to subscribe to the same RSS feed over and over again. It would be handy if it told you that you are already subscribed.

Running low on ideas this week, long week.

• Coffee flavoured porridge would be cool.
• A active directory of Irish business websites similar to Irishblogs.ie would be excellent. I know there are similar directories already such as browseireland.com. It would be good to incorporate other Irish business solutions, such as Loudervoice to show reviews of business as you search the directory. Attach to Yell if it changes to allow a user to be notified if a site changes. Show their Google Rank,  Show how long the website has been online, Show how many pages in a site, now many pages recently updated, any related businesses, how far are they from your current position.

In an earlier blog post of other Friday invention Ideas, I thought it might be interesting to have a Thunderbird extension that would record email stats. I continued to think about this one, instead of creating a Thunderbird extension I created a PHP script to monitor and record emails coming into my POP3 email inbox directly.

Using Cron, I now have a PHP script that checks my email inbox periodically to record details of the emails passing through. The details are stored in a mySQL database. I’m going to let this run for at least a week and then review the stats it records.

I think I will write another PHP script in the near future that will summarize the results with the help of Google Charts.

Here is the PHP code for checking an email inbox and recording some stats, use it for your own email inbox if you like.

log_email_stats_php_script

To use it, download or Copy & Paste the PHP code and upload it to your server. Use Cron to schedule it to run whenever you like to check your email inbox. I have mine set to run every 15 minutes.

The script needs to be told your mySQL database details and email address details. It will create a table and record the details there. If you have any feedback, let me know!

Last week, I decided to start writing down some of the ideas I have that might make useful additions to programmes or even apps of their own. I don’t expect that they are world changing ideas or anything I just think they are better served out there rather than in my head.

• An image search engine, that allows you to upload an image and it will search for related images or perhaps show you where the image you uploaded originated if its not your own.
• Theres blogging and then theres micro blogging with Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce. Is there a gap in the market for something in between?
• An extension for Thunderbird that monitors sending/receiving email trends. It would be cool to feed this info into some web app and see stats like who emails you the most, who do you email the most, most popular time to receive an email, busiest email hour of the day, bussiest day of the week etc.
• Have there ever been any temporary domain names? A domain extension like *.temp might be good idea for events, films or causes that only have a limited life span. A domain like this could be bought for a fee for shorter periods such as 2,3,6 and 9 months instead of yearly increments.

Thats all for this week. Read last weeks ideas.

I often have ideas that would might make useful web apps, I’m sure I’m not the only one. Rather than write them down somewhere and loose them I’m going to write them on this blog. Perhaps there would be someone else that could run with some of them.

I’ll keep this going each Friday for the next 4 weeks or so, to see if I can consistently come up with ideas. If anyone would like to take any of these ideas and run with them go ahead, a comment on the blog would be cool too though. Also, if I happen to have an idea that’s already out there, feel free to give out to me

Some loose ideas this week, mostly related to Google Reader:

• It would be handy to have the ability to post comments on a users blog while still inside Google Reader, rather than having to go to the users site to post comments.
• The ability to read blog comments within Google Reader too rather than heading to the site to read them.
• I comment on other blogs and other item such as Forums. It would be cool to have some method of storing all the messages I’ve posted in various places.
• Google Reader should be able to filter out the same story if it appears in multiple feeds, it can be annoying seeing the same iPhone story again and again.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Saving the Spark: Developing Creative Ideas
• How to Come Up With Niche Ideas