Ideas: July 2026 Release

THE MOTIVATION

The ideas section is a place to offload and share various ideas I’ve come up. Overall, these ideas serve to share the kind of practical imagination I have but also to share the journey into the future:

Scientific Reincarnation

When you die, your soul travels through infinite time and space in an instant, so in theory your consciousness could be recaptured in a future time and place, leading to reincarnation. Not that an exact copy of your brain reforms, but a brain, computer, something recaptures your soul the observer.

Event alarms

Be able to set alarms for calendar events, because push notifications are way too easy to be missed. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve missed a push notification for a text or something else, but an alarm forces you to notice it and turn it off, which is a feature strangely missing in calendar apps.

Celebrating digital health goals

Closing your rings on Apple health (or for non Apple users, basically completing your health goals for the day) should be highly celebrated. Currently for Apple completing all three of your goals for the day leads to be simple “Goal achieved” notification, there’s no special animations, special haptics, there isn’t even an exclaimation point. Whereas as a previous Fitbit user, completing your digital goals lead to those special animations, haptics, and celebrations that made you feel good about completing your health goals. There’s a lot of meat to the bone and Apple could be doing a lot more to help people build healthy habits.

Volumetric light

I think a nice design idea is to build an ultra-quiet volumetric display to produce a holographic light source like a lamp.

Anti-phishing contacts

For emails, you should be allowed to create contacts like you can with phone numbers, because scammers can pretend to be an email very close to an official one and there’s no easy way to counter that right now. (There are tricks like using a character from another language character set that looks like the regular character but is different that are very difficult to counter). Also there could be preloaded contacts for email and phone numbers similar to how there are preloaded events for the calendar, which could be facilitated by Apple, Google, or the government.

Next-gen gas stove

Gas stoves should detect when gas is on but not lit via an encoder on the gas knob and temperature sensor on the burner. If the gas is on but not lit, produces an alarm after awhile and if it goes on for too long, it just turns itself off. Also gas stove tops could have a temperature sensor display so that cooking can be more precise like baking.

Paid genome surveys

What if you could submit your genome to a website that pays you to answer survey questions along with your genetic data and shares the results with you. I think it would have a much higher response rate.

E-paper display approach

E-paper and scanner combo where the epaper gets power and data from the scanner to change it’s display.

Debit-credit card hybrid

Basically it’s a debit card that if you spend more than what’s available in the account, turns into a credit card. This is a much fairer way of handling overdraft fees that depends on how much you’re overdrafted by and for how long rather than expensive fixed fees that are like $35 per overdrafted transaction, which is really expensive when you’re poor.

Apple TouchID and FaceID

By having both TouchID and FaceID, you can either use whichever one is convenient or use both when you want extra security.

Drone swarm gunshot locator

Basically a swarm of drones with directional microphones attached to them that listen for gunfire and localize the source. Apparently an idea already being researched.