Apart from cartography and other geography related stuff, I'm also interested in programming, electronics, modern history, politics, urbanism and to some extend generally all the science and culture stuff! On this page I'm going to show some of my ideas mostly unrelated to Lankarta Project but generally revolves around my interests that can be quickly summarised as "everything that can be on a map or in a computer".
Status: Small scale progress - Zero prototypes, not a single physical part bought or made, only concept arts.
I am a big fan of cycling and before I got to drive by car everywhere because of my current responsibilities, I used to drive at least 20 km almost every day! One of the accesories that I always wanted to have was a customized bike computer, as I just really don't like those tiny tamagochi lookin' bike computers with very limited functionality. I had two ideas to make a bike computer of my dream: one was to write a custom bike computer app, install it on some spare old phone and mount it with some rock-solid phone holder, and second was to buy RasberryPi computer, plug all the accesories like touchscreen, batteries, headlights, sensons and whatnots, design a case with handlebar mounter and 3D print it somehow, which would be a project of a complexity of launching a start-up!
Which will probably never happen, so only the first option is somewhat feasible.
The final obstacle for ever materializing any of this ideas is that I ride a bike far less often nowadays as car became my essential way of transport, already equipped with some form of computer, but not that fun.
Sony Erricson C510 was my first phone with Java Virtual Machine and proper web browser. The idea came up that after I cease to use it (to succumb into smartphone era) I could write some Java app (I've never written anything in Java), plug some sensors (to Sony Erricson prorietary socket, it didn't have USB or even a headphone jack) and have a quirky looking bike computer. That never happened and the phone's screen died too fast. But that's the image of how that I imagined it, so quaint lol.
Bike computer mock-up with proprietary LCS screen, 2000's style. I would need to make my own LCD panel with some chemicals or just order LCD screen with custom pixels which would cost a lot I guess.
Bike computer mock-up with green LCD screen with pixels, 2010's style. This type of screen is much easier to order in some chinese shops.
Bike computer mock-up with monochrome LCD screen, 2015's style. That setup would have 3 separate batteries so even when the baterry of the computer dries up, the lights are still on.
Status: Small scale progress - Large spreadsheet with some formulas and more than 800 songs, not updated since 2014, no working web app
The idea originates back in the times of elementary school and no Spotify, Youtube Music or any streaming services except iTunes and torrents. I wanted a robust list of songs that I like so I wouldn't forget the titles and authors and with no need to download them all. My plan also included the mechanism to organize mp3 files without worrying about folders, so songs could have multiple categories.
It also counted songs that my friends had shown me or radio stations/websites where I first discovered them.
Status: The very first steps - this entire lankarta thing that you see at this moment, image mock-up of the mobile app
One of my staple way of organizing the knowledge about the world is by assigning each minute info to each country or region in the world. I know by heart all the countries in the world and those creates a framework in my mind that can immensely helps me remember the names of thousands of cities, many subdivisions, rivers, natural regions, landmarks and other geographic features alongside a very chaotic collection of trivias about each of those places. That chaos makes me want to create the website where I can write down every little geographic thing I know which would just a nice app to have, even offline.
At first I wanted to make a subpage in this website for every country on Earth and populate it with some info by a simple text and links. As simple as it is, I abandoned this idea very quickly as the process would be very tedious and it's not really an interesting way of displaying trivias.
Mock-up of the mobile version of the app
That's just a quick mock-up made in Inkscape, please don't mind me that "GEOFEED" name (I didn't come up with better name right now), those colors, bland style, outdated radio buttons for mobile app and so on, I just want to convey how the central feed of the app might look like. The idea not shown here is that colors of countries change based on the number of articles related to each country, or (I didn't figure out how to add the switch to this functionality in the UI) how recent the articles are in each country, like: the more green color, the more recent article is available, the more grey, the older is the last article.
Recently I came up with the idea to make an interactive website where each info or trivia about anything is stored as microarticles with tags: 'subject', 'country' and auxilliary 'location'. The front page would be made of a search bar, the world map and buttons with tags. The interactive map will at first highlight all the countries that have at least one article related to them. With the searchbar the viewer can search for a place without clicking as the countries won't be signed unless hovered. The buttons with tags when clicked will display on the map only the countries that have articles related to that tag.
So for example the article about Hungarian wines would have tags: country - Hungary, subject - 'food and drinks' or the article about the city of Athens would have tags: country - 'Greece', subject - 'landmarks' and location - 'Athens'. Each article must have at least one 'country' and one 'subject' tag, but articles can have multiple tags and if it's related to the specific places, multiple 'location' tags.
That way, instead of tediously filing up every country page, I could just write some short snippets about any subject I came up at the moment, add tags, and the page about each country would be create automatically. Another huge benefit of this approach: no boring half-empty country pages, just countries with lots or few microarticles. I hope that the app would be as functional and popular as the atabook guestbook in the niche of personal websites or even twitter (pre-elon twitter ofc) but with heavy emphasis on localization of 'tweets'
In order to at least create a mock-up of my idea, I would definitely learn how to use static-page generators like Hugo and learn how to make interactive SVGs. In order to make the app actually functional I would meed to use some dynamic framework and host it somehow. There is also a chance that someone came up with it first and made some bundle of code to do it, but I don't know yet and maybe writing something like this by hand make me learn some valuable skills.
In general I think it would be a really cool idea for a less toxic, more educated social media site. Users couldn't just focus on one country to populate the world map with colors, they would learn some geography in the meantime, and couldn't just write whatever inflamatory nonsense without at least one country tag. I don't know much typical social media features would I like to put in this thing, like following and followers numbers, likes, dislikes etc. to not ruin the culture tho.
I'm also exploring the possibility of using ActivityPub protocole so for example the app would show posts from mastodon and pit them on the map on my separate app.
Status: Nothing - some broken and discarded keyboard javascript webpage
Since I finally made my own money, I always used second screen with my laptop, and it usually was some cheap second hand 17 inch LCD screen. About three years ago I treated myself and bought ASUS touchscreen monitor, for about 140€. It's a bit tiny for modern standards but the real purpose of that screen was not to display stunning image quality, it was meant for me to learn programming for touch screen on my computer and do some funky stuff with it!
My ideas for that screen:Status: Nothing - screenshots made with phone camera and fainting memories
I used to have a very old Windows 95 machine in my bedroom. I don't remember any specs, and even though I still have it at my parents' house, it would take some effort to launch it again, the CRT monitor got burned inside and disposed long time ago so there is no compatible screen to plug it. It doesn't feature HDMI (obviously), nor USB (1.0 was available in newer versions I guess, not in mine though) and there was no easy way to transfer any files to modern computers. The internet was never plugged and the Internet Explorer was probably uninstalled years before I get my hands on that PC, only the shortcut remained. I guess it was never a priority to plug that computer to the outside world.
Once I visited local electronic store to ask whether they got COM cable because I've read that really old systems have sockets in the motherboard (?), but I was quickly instructed that COM cable can transfer only a bunch of bytes per second so any regular file transfer would take minutes or hours.
The only viable option was 3.5 inch floppy disk drive and 5 inch drive that I've never seen being used. The problem was I was too lazy by the time to buy some empty floppies and try to save something on them, it was never a priority and they were hardly available anywhere. Maybe one day I'll get a bit more time and determination to save that legacy computer.
Screenshots made by camera. Silly images made in paint were one of the things that I wanted to transfer to my new computers.
I was always interested in interfaces. Pardon the long application loading time, my cringy sense of computer humor and 'Trush' typo.
Status: Some basic tables with phonemes - that I tweak once in a while so it's still useless
Writing system for both Polish and English langauges that allows to easily and most of all, consistently write words without diacritics. The most pressing things was to distinguish palpalized sounds, like soft 'ñ' in Spanish, without dots, dashes and so on. The 'system' so far is very incomplete, but it's just meant to be a fun excercise and a way for me to name stuff on fictional maps without constantly finding out how to write any kind of diacritics (Writing those 'ąćęłńóśżź' on my keyboard is easy, but for non-Polish setups it's pain to scroll through the options). The diphtong 'sj' suppose to sound like 'sh' in English or 'sz' in Polish.
Status: Nothing - the house full of unmarked baby clothes everywhere
I hate searching for stuff that I need, and looking for necessities in unorganized containers while I have to go somewhere with my baby anywhere is just pain. Signing baby's clothes is a requirement in kindergarden and it's another reason to marked them all, preferably in some reliable way.
Status: Nothing - whitered flowers
For me the best potted flowers are those that I don't have to interact at all, no watering, no soil swapping, nothing, they just standing there and look green. That doesn't mean that I don't like them, I just don't have any simple guidence how to take care of them so that ends up with some random maintanance work that seems pointless and often ends up with dry leaves and uncolored blossoms.
My ideal solution to this would be easily reachable tags for every single pot and an app on the phone that notifies what should I done for each flower at a time. The app like this probably already exist but I'm too lazy to gain info about each plant and organize it into a convenient system.