This website present a cool spinning wheel to put random concepts together. It might be useful for generating creative ideas.
I got one so far. The wheel said “[something] inflatible food” and I came up with the idea of what if you could inject air into foods to make them feel more filling? Not a great idea, but at least the wheel is working 
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Have you seen this fascinating robot tux thing you can control via your computer?
I’m thinking for an upcoming project to buy one of these guys and then create a webpage where anyone can come and control it. There will be a webcam on it 24/7 so you can see it do what you tell it to or watch other people control it.
Perhaps if it got popular enough I could place it in a public place and you could interact with the crowd. Let me know if you have more ideas on this or if you’re interested in getting involved.
Another fun aspect of the project would be to create a scheduling algorithm so if someone was currently controlling the droid you could choose one of the next available times that would fit your schedule. The system would then email you when your allotted time is coming up. If you failed to sign in, it would email other people on the list who might want to use your time.
P.S. Here’s an animated online simulator of the Tux Droid you can play with until I’ve completed the website.
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You now have access to the following libraries when you write a Utility Mill utility:
re, datetime, time, calendar, difflib, math, urllib, and random
Thus here’s the code for the Regex Evaluator utility:
regex=re.compile(REGEX)
matches=regex.finditer(TEXT)
for match in matches:
print 'Found "%s" at position %s' % (match.group(),match.start())
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I also just made a text diff utility with the newly added libraries. Can you improve it?
If you haven’t checked out Utility Mill, go do so now. It’s a fast way to create web utilities. All that’s required from you is a small snippet of Python code to make something happen.
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Over on Answer My Searches, I recently mentioned Yould, the pronounceable name generator as an interesting method for devising new names for products.
Here’s another interesting method for coming up with a clever name from this Wikipedia article:
The name “Samba” was arrived at by running the Unix command grep through the system dictionary looking for words that contained the letters S, M, and B in that order (i.e. grep -i ’s.*m.*b.*’ /usr/share/dict/words).
I gave it a try to see what naming options I missed for Grocist:
grep -i 'l.*i.*s.*t.*' /usr/share/dict/words
And “Wiliest” did look promising, but I’ll keep “Grocist” for now.
BTW, I came up with “Grocist” by saying “grocery list” as fast as a could until it turned into one word. That was back before I knew about these ‘fancy’ methods 
There’s also a conversation about company naming going on over here.
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Have you ever needed to write a quick program or calculator? Have you ever had a problem that would be trivial to write a program for, but you still didn’t do it because you didn’t want the overhead of planning the interface, setting up version control, creating a GUI, distributing it to different systems, and figuring out how to share the code?
Utility Mill will handle all of that overhead for you, you just provide the core Python code to transform input to output.
(A storm is coming … a utilty storm)
I have the first prototype up and running at www.utilitymill.com
Please try it out. I really need alpha testers, and if anyone wants to work with me on this project (think Utility Mill co-founder!), please drop me a line. And of course, if nothing else, feel free to post ideas for utilities to make in the comments here.
If you need some ideas for utilities you could try making:
Stay tuned, I’ve got lots of exciting features planned soon: web services to access utilities, chain utilities together, download a utility as a desktop app, and more.
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