I had a great experience using Kaitai in a previous job. We were decoding proprietary binary messages from Teltonika OBD GPS trackers. The online editor, https://ide.kaitai.io/, is really nice for developing and testing your definition. You can store multiple binary files in local-storage and you get a nice detailed look at the data and how your definition is parsing it.
The All The Music project is something like that, but for melodies. They created all possible melodies of a 7 note diatonic scale and wrote them to disk as MIDI files, copyrighting them in the process. The melodies were dedicated to the Creative Commons Zero so that people could freely use them without worrying about being sued by someone else who had used that melody previously.
SwearySkyscraper: A startup that develops novel and personalized swear words to help people better cope with pain, and integrates these swear words into a liquid damping system to stabilize skyscrapers during earthquakes.
A building that requires human pain to stand? I guarantee you this is something at least a few architects have fantasized at length about. Like ours, it seems to be a profession that attracts outliers.
Berlin's Museum of Natural History (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin) has a nice app for identifying plants and animals called Naturblick. It's available in English.
"I have nothing to hide" really misses the point of what privacy is for. I don't close the door when I'm taking a crap because I have something to hide, I do it for privacy.
Also, blackmail isn't the only way to have personal or intimate information used against you. As the absolutely massive advertising industry can tell you, knowing more details about people makes them easier to influence and manipulate.
When working as the head of engineering at a start-up, I would get dragged into this process on the sales side. I would sit there cringing at all of the bonkers crap the Sales Engineer or Solutions Architect was spewing at the customer.
The senior technical person from the customer would ask me a couple hard questions and I would be pretty honest in my responses. Afterwards our Sales Success Customer Account Manager would be unhappy with me, but at least I wouldn't have to go to another one of those meetings for a while.
The deal would go ahead anyway because our management had convinced their management to make the purchase even though what we were offering didn't really meet their needs. They would only need to pay us if we actually delivered so they weren't taking a lot of risk, other than wasting their time, and we got to make a multi-million dollar "booking."
In the end I would either get along with their senior technical person pretty well because we could be honest with each other, or else they would despise me for being unable to deliver what my sales people had promised (Hi Sven!).
> The standards of driving in Australia is terrible.
I think this is common in many places where a significant portion of the population lives in low density areas (eg: American, Australian and Canadian suburbs.) Outside of major city centers it is very difficult to live without a car, so states and provinces choose to set a very low bar for acquiring and keeping a driver's license.
This makes me think of going to chain restaurants. Everything has been focus-grouped and optimized and feels exactly like an overfit proxy for an enjoyable meal. I feel like I'm in a bald-faced machine that is optimized to generate profit from my visit. The fact that it's a restaurant feels almost incidental.
"HI! My name is Tracy! I'm going to be your server this evening!" as she flawlessly writes her name upside down in crayon on the paper tablecloth. Woah. I think this place needs to re-calibrate their flair.
> a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date
I think of company wikis as a place where information goes to die.
A useful feature, which I'm sure exists somewhere, would be "freshness" checks on pages. A timestamp for the last time someone looked at this and said "yes, this is still valid". For pages that are important, a team could set up recurring tasks for people to do periodic freshness checks.
Surely this is already a common practice, although not any team I've been on. Undoubtedly there is some ISO-9000 process for this...
I worked with a guy who introduced himself by saying "Hi, I'm firstName and I'm the world's best Java programmer." He would say that while shaking your hand and looking you in the eye like an otherwise normal person. I gather he had won some international Java programming competition.
Luckily I didn't work with him very much. He was a technical consultant for a customer of ours. He was brought in to hold us to account so he wasn't going to be fun to work with even without the ego...
