24 
Learn the piano hack
Now I don't really read music, but I do enjoy being able to reel off a thing or two on the piano, sort of Bill-Murray-in-Groundhog-Day style (if you know what I mean). It's hard work... at least for me. So for a while now I've been thinking of adding to my list of homebrew projects a piece of software that could take midi files of piano pieces and highlight the piano keys being played on a keyboard during playback. It would be a kind of cheat for learning the piano.
Thankfully there's no need! I found this great little application that does the job handsomely. It's called MidiPiano and it's free. In fact the source code is available for those who want to tweak it.
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21
More Entrepreneurial ideas
In addition to the ideas I've described the last couple of days, here are a few more free entrepreneurial ideas. Coincidentally, the current series of Dragon's Den ended today but if you're interested, there's a sort of online version called Running the Gauntlet.
20
Virtual Ryder Cup
The Ryder Cup is great, especially when Europe wins. But to be honest, watching golf is difficult sometimes as the ball is so small. It's frustrating as there's no reason why it can't be made a lot more fun. Here's an idea that I hope some company like Virtual Spectator or the Hawk Eye people might implement sometime soon. Now Hawk Eye are the people who track cricket balls and more recently tennis balls using high speed cameras and Virtual Spectator are the guys who broadcast the Volvo Ocean Race and World Rally Championship races over the web in virtual form. So the idea is, you download a program with a 3d window a bit like google earth and instead of getting some TV images, you watch what's happening in 3D. Now, if you could track a golf ball the way Hawk Eye can and work out its position, you could broadcast the proceedings virtually. Watch from and control your own virtual camera angles, rather than the TV's. In fact you could even make it into a sort of video game. Users could try to make the putt themselves from where Tiger has just landed on the green. Show lots of golf stats, show the live TV at the same time, let users look at any archive rounds golfers made in previous years.
There are various other sports for which this sort of thing could be done. Perhaps it's the way sport will be broadcast in the future! Hope so.
19
Surfing in Devon
"Everybody's goin' surfin', surfin' USA in Devon..."Went surfing at Woolacombe beach over the weekend and found it to be every bit as good as in Hawaii. In fact, the waves were better - colder, but with a wetsuit on you couldn't feel it. I highly recommend it!
Free idea of the day - it struck me that the hardest part of surfing is the paddling out into the sea against the waves to where they break. It's tiring. If someone dug an underwater tunnel in some good surfing beach where you could then just pop out to catch a wave I think you'd be onto a winner. Surfers (at least the lazy ones) would flock to your beach. It may be a bit of a feat of engineering though. Perhaps if the eye-sore factor wasn't too much of an issue then something similar to a drag lift would do?
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15
There was quite a big spike in traffic to my online Duckworth Lewis calculator page yesterday... I think mainly due to West Indies beating India by D/L method in the DLF Cup.
If anyone has any comments or suggestions for improving the calculator, please make them here (any bugs too, please contact me). I know there's a flicker issue with version 1 at the moment.
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13
LibraryThing
LibraryThing is a social book recommendation site which, once you've catalogued (some of) the books you own, connects you with people who read the same things. This is more or less to books what Last.fm is to music.
On the subject of books, it's Banned Books Week this week. Check them out here.
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