| Interesting problems have interesting solutions. In my mind, it's rare that an interesting problem would have a run-of-the-mill solution, because if it did, you could hire a freelancer off Craigslist for $30 an hour. Interesting problems are rarely ones that can be solved with a Wordpress install, a few plugins, and a downloaded theme derived from Bootstrap. Boring problems don't usually have interesting solutions. I mean, you could make the solution interesting, you could over-engineer it, or choose to solve it in a novel and unique way, but it is not often that you'll be given that opportunity. Un-interesting problems with un-interesting solutions usually get given to the lowest bidder. I built a cat toy, it's a 42" LCD screen with a touch interface overlaid on top, and then wrote a "bot" that exhibits prey response and can be "caught" by the cat. Fun project, had to figure out how to do multiple toe bean rejection. And a whole bunch of other tech too. Built a cat toy, it's a home built 3D printed robot arm, that has a plastic rod as the end effector, with a feather on it, that is radio controlled, and can be controlled via a 3D application running in a web browser. I built a semi-autonomous, self-driving radio control car that can race a human controlled radio control car, and can also give the human operator a first person view, like a racing drone. It used various solutions from computer vision, low-latency video streaming, low-latency, long-range WiFi, and so forth. I built a human controlled robot to clean the litter box, which then farms out the job to people on Mechanical Turk. I built an app that helps you find the jigsaw puzzle piece you want when solving a jigsaw. I built an app that can scan your Scrabble tiles and the Scrabble board, and tell you which word to play for the most value. I built a number of bots and assist bots that play a popular MMORPG. I built a dashboard for my home that tells me what the weather is like, where my cats are, where the family wallets are located, where I left my phone. I built a resume website with a space invaders game embedded in it. Plus there are hundreds of other projects. Each one interesting in their own way. But what I studiously do is avoid the CRUD apps that are solved problems. Currently I am tinkering with a Star Trek Picard-like, flight deck transparent "holographic", curved display with head/eye tracking and touch interface. I am also building, as my day job, a computer vision solution that will do full body and face tracking for a new VR HMD. But yeah, the cat shit was kinda interesting. |