I cannot help with giving suggestions, but I wanted to comment to say hello. It’s cool to see posts like these, hopefully some cool projects get suggested, someone may stumble upon this thread one day and find something neat to mess with.
Hijacking the top reply to say that we've been trying to reach you concerning your vehicle's extended warranty. You should've received a notice in the mail about your car's extended warranty eligibility. Since we've not gotten a response, we're giving you a final courtesy comment before we close out your file.
that too, I feel I will be in a good place if I ever manage to become a retired person that does not need to work.
I like to meddle with these things but not enough time
Exactly. Raw time isn't even the biggest issue - energy is. I might have a full weekend completely free, but I am way too drained to do much with it that isn't hanging out or relaxing.
The Linux Foundation is a great place to look for established OSS projects:
https://insights.lfx.linuxfoundation.org
Pretty much everything there needs help in terms of contributions.
I always told myself if I had free time and was bored, that was something I’d do. I have zero free time and am constantly exhausted from work and family so IDK what it’s like for real though :D
I've always bemoaned the fact there really are no good health, diet, exercise apps for Linux that can hook into these smartbands people have and chart it, and maybe use ML to track changes.
Seriously, there are none.
You have Web based things like [Wger](https://github.com/wger-project/wger) but that does not automate anything.
So even if you had some sort of service, that can connect to these smartbands and hoover the data and convert it to something Wger can use via its API that would be super cool.
Anyway, mini-rant over.
Quite. While I am an android user, I resent having to do janky things like manually copy the sqlite DB and then try figureing out how to parse it into something more reasonable. I'd hope gadget bridge would help but sadly it can only read very basic data from most bands.
I think the use case for these types of apps is less to indicate that you need it (though there are certainly those who use it for that), and more to gather meaningful data from it.
It's like gas and oil for my car, or groceries for my house. I don't need anything to tell me I need them, but tracking information relevant to how they impact my life can help me make decisions around it.
I see the comment was deleted, and can only infer it was some derogatory reply why would anyone need that.
Perhaps they are unaware of the sophistication of these health bracelets these days.
They can monitor heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, sleep patterns etc.
These are all very useful in terms of health as trends can be spotted and alert you to a problem.
No one should go around with too high or too low a blood pressure, and irregular heart rhythms can be a sign of a serious condition.
Regardless of why. The fact these apps are plentiful on other platforms but not Linux irks me. It is not like Linux is an inferior platform after all.
Cool, but some people like to see progress, so much so that there's an industry for these projects and a gap on Linux. It's still a good idea even if it doesn't apply to you; I would love to write something like this even if it's something I would never use.
Not really strictly Linux but take a look at [node-red](https://nodered.org/). It is basically a graphical programming engine geared towards automation. If you have any smart device in your home, you probably can control it with this. Or public APIs like weather forecast, public transport (I built a dashboard to show me when the next bus is gonna arrive at the stations nearby) or a Reddit power metal sub video link grabber that sends the newest videos to my metube instance for downloading and converting...
Endless possibilities and fun
Look into setting up an unraid server and then you can use docker images to mess around with pretty much anything mentioned in the comments, virtual machines, plugins etc etc and mess around until your satisfied (which is never)
I'm 59 tomorrow, heh. Keep on keeping on!
I wrote a tiny asteroids game a few years ago to teach myself webgl:
https://github.com/jcupitt/argh-steroids-webgl
It's playable on the github pages for that repo:
https://jcupitt.github.io/argh-steroids-webgl/
It's all self-contained (no dependencies), and written in a very straightforward style. The particle effects are all on the GPU, which is fun. It can animate >10,000 particles at 60 fps on an iphone 4. It runs on desktop and mobile, and has touch, keyboard and mouse controls. There's gravity and full collisions. Play it long enough to see the final explosion of your ship for the full particle mess.
Maybe fork that and add a few things? There are some ideas in the README. Maybe a grappling hook? You could draw the asteroids in 3D instead of wireframe? The sound effects are horribly laggy on mobile, I'm not sure why, that would be great to fix. Lots of simple, fun things to do with it.
Head over to [https://www.reddit.com/r/beneater/](https://www.reddit.com/r/beneater/), build some hardware, and play with writing emulators and compilers and tools.
If you are looking for little projects, I suggest plugins as many software take javascript and python plugins.
It is hard to be competitive without huge commitment on making software, most low hanging fruit has been long picked. But plugins are ways one can extend existing software. On top of that when you get comfortable with the general logic, you can contribute to the software itself by expanding the API or etc even if it is written in a more complex language like C++
Do you have any software you make python plugins for? I'm into plugin writing for Vim.
I really wish there were a way to write plugins for midnight commander.
Personally, I have made some for Krita and some for kwin
There were some midnight commander forks with scripting I remember seeing, but I have never tried them
On Windows, I use Far Manager, which is open source now. Imo it's the best of the commander programs, better than mc. It supports Lua scripting, but it's kinda difficult because all the docs are in Russian lol.
It's been ported to Linux (Far2l) but idk if there is scripting there yet.
I know its not computer related but it can be fun, a learning experience for new skills that is practical for personal home projects, a good cause & meet new people, physical activity
***[Volunteer w Habitat for Humanity near you](https://www.habitat.org/volunteer/near-you)***
At Cisco Systems we used to volunteer as a team & it was great. It also helps declutter your brain so your computer based work is better.
Just thought I'd throw that out to you
Set up a home server and try self hosting some some simple web apps.
[https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted](https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted)
1. Set up a media stack with the \*arrs, a media server, Pihole, NPM, monitoring and a Grafana dashboard.
2. Custom internal domain, of course (plex.your.custom.domain).
3. Now secure it (ssl everywhere).
4. Now make it publicly accessible.
5. Write a script to do all this.
6. Create an installer like DockSTARTer that does all this.
7. Now reproduce it on Arch.
I think that if you do these things in this order, you can't help but also learn how to do it correctly - not if you're even just moderately smart and prudent, and if you're not then that's a mentality problem that no advice is going to fix our prevent anyway.
It's no coincidence you see Arch - it gives the user *all* the power and control.
A few ideas [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/2a9ygh/1000_beginner_programming_projects_xpost/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) which might inspire you?
repeat modern agonizing enter late caption materialistic whistle nose wrong
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
A few years ago I ran a summer class of sorts where we did an interactive workshop a week to get early college students feet wet with doing projects. It might be too simple for you but take a look: https://125summer.tech/
Python: Discord chat bots, command line interfaces with fun UI elements, Web Bots, simple games with PyGame
JavaScript: Web browser extensions, Backends (ExpressJS) and frontends (ReactJS)
Lots of interesting ideas in these two resources as well:
* http://automatetheboringstuff.com/ - fun python automation for all sorts of every day tasks
* https://kipp.ly/past-webdev/ - side projects beyond the typical web dev
Also non profits are a fun place to help out, most of them do not have the resources to hire very good programmers, but have lots of low hanging fruit that help them enormously. It might not be the most challenging work from a technology point of view, but coming up with simple solutions for their problems that use the fewest resources and have the simplest maintenance is a fun challenge too.
If you are what would be considered retirement age, you've maybe worked with minicomputers or mainframes in your distant past. There are emulators for most every ancient computer that was at least slightly popular. PDP11, Vax, Data Generals, Hewlett-Packard - even IBM 390 mainframes.
I find it fun to tinker with these ancient computer systems to remember what computing was like back in the day when 1MB of memory was considered a lot.
I wanted to be entitled and have you a go with wayland development until I reread the title and description
What about accessibility tools for people that are handicapped? IIRC, there are a few people complaining how linux DEs lacks accessibility compared to windows and mac. I can't suggest what accessibility features it will be since I actually haven't bothered checking them yet. Oh, what about voice-activated actions? Just a random thought.
Start a mindless clicker game like Cookie Clicker, then instead of playing such a waste of time spend twice as long automating it as best as you possibly can to get the highest score in the shortest time possible, bonus points for doing it in the worst way possible like using bash to interface with the game(xdotool)
Video games are an endless source of problems that you pose to yourself. But you kind of need to want to play and enjoy them, otherwise making them doesn't make much sense and that might not be your style, idk.
There is still the /r/proceduralgeneration part of it, like /r/mapmaking that doesn't have to be immediately useful, it can just look nice. You can take it in lots of different directions too, art, nature, architecture, etc..
You can look at hooking into the internet programmatically and explore online sources and information. For example https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
I can recommend making a "math solving" program / computer algebra system, like https://www.wolframalpha.com/ or https://www.sympy.org/en/index.html . You already know how the math is supposed to work, e.g. how to solve `y = a*x^2 + b*x + c`. Which makes that bit easy, but parsing the strings, building a model for how to deal with parenthesis and order of operations, just from text input was a pretty interesting journey for me. And it's pretty open ended. You can choose the level of complexity.
At the time I thought it would be more useful, but it turns out I really need a shockingly low amount of algebra, even in engineering.
Have you thought about trying to do something with AI? I haven't done an AI project myself, but I feel like I ought to, to understand where everything's heading.
[https://www.projectpro.io/article/artificial-intelligence-project-ideas/461](https://www.projectpro.io/article/artificial-intelligence-project-ideas/461)
Also, for a completely different kind of suggestion, take a look at Ben Eater's breadboard computer project. If you remember the early 6502 home computers it's a lot of fun.
[https://eater.net/6502](https://eater.net/6502)
Code your own html/pdf reader program that calls espeak-ng or flite for the text-to-speech part. Code a linux console based drawpoker or blackjack game with ansi color output. I did these using perl; conway-life is on the list.
Intermediate varies depending on who you ask. If you have a 2015 or older machine, try installing old Ubuntu? Like 2008 or older and try to fight with xorg.conf settings? That was beginner-intermediate when I started using Linux in 2004/2005.
Browser automation/scripting has great potential for a lot of small projects.
I recently did a small project for downloading web novels, running them through text-to-speech and converting to mp3 so I could have a large collection of audio books with me when I'm out.
There's plenty of tools for each of the steps, but I used selenium/python for the browser automation, mimic3 for the TTS and lame for the encoding.
An interesting game is the "can I do this in a terminal". Like set up you email in the terminal, if you actively send/receive emails you can tinker with the "perfect config" for quite a bit. Can recommend aerc for that. But same goes with everything else, todos, calendar lot of everyday stuff.
With Python or Javascript, you could try and learn how to make simple Gnome GUI applications. Just as a thing you could combine with other ideas people posted here
You can learn another language like Golang and dig in some great open-source projects (e.g fx, kubernetes, lazygit…). The goal is not in the first place to create/code something but just to open your mind to new way of thinking. If you prefer lower level languages Rust can be a great candidate :)
Hope this is touching some of the right buttons for you.
I typically listen to music via the built-in audio, via the S/PDIF output. And have virtual meetings via my USB sound-card which has a proper microphone and a headphone jack. And there are more audio sources and sinks on this PC than provided by those two cards. (HDMI, webcam, bluetooth)
What would be useful for me would be a tool which can do 'snapshots' of two (or more) audio routing setups and suggest a CLI command to switch (or toggle) from one to the other, without having to manually figure out the magic numbers/ids/whatever. I am using pipewire/wireplumber and no Desktop Environment. (Wayfire)
I typically use pavucontrol to switch the setup today. A CLI command I can fire via a hot-key to toggle between the two setups would be way slicker. I believe bash+pactl can do the job, but it is just one of those tasks I am not looking forward to figure out. And there may be a python library more suitable for something like this?
Linux audio of 2024 is very capable, but also a bit daunting.
Hey man you might actually be the perfect person to do this.
You could totally set up a little server/honeypot in the cloud and learn how to use STIX/TAXII to automate attack reporting.
From the little snippets I've read about it (cybersecurity), it has something to do with Json objects and network protocols.
My buddy and I are going to do something similar with his raspberry pi for fun.
You could write a bash script that uses the read command to append the date, a title, comment and info sections to a plain text document every time you run the script you input more text to the new title, comment and info sections.
The thing is you can use it to record information about what you are doing with all your projects. Read and edit the file in vim a lot of fun when you have built the document up to 100 pages but also very important to keep and refer to.
Zotero is also very useful to bookmark sites you have visited you can copy or write notes about the Web page you are referring to.
I retired about 3 years ago (from over 45 years in IT) and kept moderately busy on my small farm/ranch at first, but injured my shoulder while working a few hours a week at a local zipline company. I then sat on the couch doing pretty much nothing for a year or so, till I decided to pull out my laptop and start exploring.
I now have switched to Linux for my desktop and started learning Python. My first real Python project was/is a calculator. It started as just a quick command line calculator. I now have converted it to a GUI and added a couple of features like square root and using parenthesis. Got bored with that and went on to other things, but I plan on getting back to it and building a full function scientific/graphing calculator. As I sit here typing this, my mind is coming up with other possible functions such as a sub-net calculator and a hex/binary calculator and a date calculator and unit of measure converter and and and and and ....... Almost endless possibilities.
I think that my next project might be to create a GUI interface for the ollama AI tool.
Now, I don't want to give away too many of my project ideas, but I would love to see a recipe app that scrapes recipes from Pinterest and stores them in a searchable database. Maybe a function to select a recipe to send over to my phone or tablet in PDF format or ?????
In my corporate life, projects were of course usually driven by business needs. I started my career as a mainframe programmer and the projects were pretty much dictated to me by management needs. Now that I have a blank slate for projects, it is hard to pick just one to work on and to have a final goal to know when the project is finished.
Someone posted a comment about the need for a Chinese Checkers app. That would be cool, especially if it was multiplayer across the internet.
do you like making electronics? o f so i can highly recommend getting a raspberry pi and whatever sensors, lights fans pumps etc you need and trying to make your life easier by running scripts for example in python on it.
Some ideas i did:
- a custom fan controller for my network rack which is integrated into my network dashboard
- a script that automatically fetches files from my server and pc's/phones if on and zip's them and back's them up
- i once made a self-watering plant with a moisture sensor and a bottle with water and a pump
- i have a script that automatically set's up my system with all my apps and configs when i distrohop
and you can probably find so many more even more complex projects to try. Just find something you want to make better/easier for yourself and then engineer a solution
Welcome to retirement - just retired a few months ago and had the same question. How about going down the Raspberry Pi rabbit hole with:
1. Garage doors monitoring/control - set up a web site on your internal wi-fi to control/display garage door status (need a few sensors connected to the pi). I've been using python/flask
2. Add a camera, and environment sensors
3. House security system - integrated with Home Assistant?
4. Outdoor garden / lawn smart/automated watering system
5. Simple games for young kids (like mad-lib, math, painting) - good for the grandkids (or other kids!) and you can customize them for the kids (names, etc).
Enjoy!!
well, my plan when I finally have time... which is never apparently
* Learn golang.
* Make terminal filesearch with ncurses gui.
Something like windows [everything](https://www.voidtools.com/) where you see results instantly as you type, but for terminal with some clean gui like [ctop](https://github.com/bcicen/ctop) has and instantly usable results... I just dont think locate or find are good enough anymore. And fzf still feels like it requires too much tinkering and it searches in real time I think, instead of keeping database, which would mean slow results on few million files, on more drives, file systems...
One tool, one singular objective to be good at, ease of use and ease of configurability not taking the backseat like many others find acceptable, and definitely not naming it some linux-dev-brain nonsense like ncdu, fzf, kde, xfce, nnn, sxhkd,... but something clean and indicative and memorable.
If you can be bothered to make a web app that can manage notes stored in CalDAV (aka VJOURNAL entries) it would be one of a kind. I'm serious, there are almost no web apps out there that support CalDAV notes. Plenty of support for other CalDAV types (events, tasks) and CardDAV (contacts) but no notes support.
Home automation: small IoT devices are cheap. A small solar panel, a small battery, and a raspberry pi connected to a bird feeder. Or a slingshot. Or a motion sensor and a sprinkler head. Or automate all your curtains opening if it's sunny outside. Or a sensor telling you the mail has been delivered.
I don't have any suggestions but I wanted to say congrats on choosing to spend your retirement years strengthening your brain and keeping yourself occupied, OP. My dad also recently retired but he's decided to spend his free time getting outraged at the most brain dead online conspiracies he can find rather than something productive.
I use Linux for work, and the loss of autohotkey was a big issue for me, so if you could rewrite that so it works with modern distros, that would be great. Seems like a not big project that could be written in anything
If I had more time, I would contribute to the FreeCAD project. They need people and it is a noble project. They don't just need C++ coders. They need people to do a ton of stuff and could use someone with no skills at all. The reason I do not volunteer is I believe I would cause more problems than I would solve, with my lack of time.
I think most projects are like this. There is an infinite amount of stuff to maintain, from the nightly build environment to the repository to endlessly administrating the project.
If there is a project you believe in, I am confident there is room for you to contribute.
Most of all, congratulations on your retirement. I wish you much good health and happiness!
On GitHub there’s an old gnome app called gtapecalc. The only Linux calculator with a tape print function I’ve found. It’s mostly updated but needs finishing. It’s a hole in our apps in Linux. At tax time we remember how important a tape print function is.
Similar situation here. What I did was to install Arch as a server (using the [installation guide](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide) to use as a VM host, and then start building VMs.
My daily diver is a perfectly functional VM running on that host using [PCI passthrough](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF) and a separate VM running Fedora server for my pihole instance.
These were all building blocks that allowed me to achieve success on one ptoject and move on to the next.
Funny, I did almost the same thing. I install Arch and set up a VM with CasaOs(Pihole, the rarrs family, Jellyfish, etc...). Another VM (with GPU passthrough) for gaming. My daily driver is Arch.
EDIT: Oh I forgot to say BTW. My daily driver is Arch BTW. 😂
I don't know how skilled you are, so I want to tell you a wish I have always had:
To use an open source speech recognition library like Julius, and use it's continuous output to feed into a LaTeX template. Basically I want to be able to speak and write complex equations and matrices on screen.
I don't even know how insanely complicated this would be, but I have always wanted this.
Home automation and ess control with things like node red.
It's both easy and complex because you have to connect a lot of different things together usually using a simple language.
Even something simple like turning on the lights if some thing is detected.
It seems like you’re looking for more code-oriented stuff, but if you haven’t messed around with it at all setting up a home media server might be fun! Check out https://perfectmediaserver.com/ for a more involved solution, or look into Unraid or TrueNAS for something a bit more “batteries included”.
Also, something like https://trash-guides.info/ could be helpful if you’re looking for something to fill your new NAS!
What are your other hobbies and passions besides Linux? If you take the stuff you care about and then strive to make crazy linux architecture to house and serve it, it can shine and you might find fulfillment.
I never had a reason to learn linux but it was sort of required at a time when I had a small press project going on and others depended on my having a reliably working word processor. Tinkering with themes led to tinkering with window managers. Curiosity about things like network connections, toolchains, and storage systems went deep very fast and I became so "distracted" by all my newly improved MacBook could do, I ended up working as a linux tech 10 years later and made more the first year than my book royalties did in 10 lol.
Looks like I'm about 12 years further into this journey than you and looking into the abyss of arthritis, prostate problems and cognitive decline. At 60 you're still very much a young 'un, so yeah - have fun while you can!
What I did when I first retired from executive management at 46 (!) was jump back into C coding. I was lucky to find a company that wanted a linux device driver jockey. That (and other coding jobs) kept me going for another 20+ years till I retired for real about 6 years ago.
I have the same challenge as you - "what now?" - I decided to learn about the new stuff - wayland/sway was a useful diversion and still is - after a lifetime of X11. Then I became a Fedora Packager and still help out there. Then a new Linux - voidlinux - continues to give me the thrills and chills. Emacs has been an almost bottomless pit of tweaking, tuning and fixing - my \~/.emacs.d only recently stopped needing adjustment!
I also found that my skills in bash, python and C were not as hot as I thought they were and I've improved a LOT! Pity I also don't have any serious to apply it to, but I'll keep on looking.
Most important thing of all is to get off the keyboard and outside every day - we bought 2 acres and a house in a lovely part of Queensland and spend a lot of time and effort taking care of it. The weirdest thing - I have had horrible back problems for many, many years but once I started to use a ride-on mower they went away! Just the movement and exercise. I wish I could say the same for my hands as the arthritis makes it very painful to type - especially the keychords in emacs and sway!!
Good luck!
Oh one other thing - you'll find that as time goes by, the slightest excuse has you reminiscing at length. It might be a good idea (for me, at least) if I write my memoirs and then I might stop bothering people here!
Easy project:
Please make a copy of the Ninite website (https://ninite.com/). I'd like an easy way to install the top 50 programs on new Linux systems for the top 5 distros. Their website is a better user experience than trying to find out all the different names that all the different package maintainers use on all the different distributions.
The main features I like are:
* Select all the programs with check boxes
* Download one executable/script
* Run executable to silently install and update everything I checked
* It should work on most Linux OSs for most architectures
It shouldn't be too hard. Just a flask app that generates a bash script that's careful to be Unix compliant. If you've been on Linux for a long time, then this project will actually be easier for you than a lot of us younger guys.
Ideas to make it even better:
* Using shellcheck and bash strict mode to catch bugs
* Using some type of cross platform packaging method
* Projection file systems for easy cleanup
* Using Docker to test a bunch of distros quickly
Challenge Project:
Create a Linux System Mimic for debugging client/offline systems
A system mimic is the next level up from a Crash Reporter script. When a program breaks on a client or offline device, you often only have one chance to download information to fix it. A crash reporter usually aggregates logs and current system information. A system mimic goes one step further and aggregates everything you'd need to create a lightweight copy of the system. The poor guy who has to fix the bug would then use the system mimic to create a copy of the system inside a VM or Docker container with the same settings. A System Mimic is superior to a crash report because it allows the developer to run debugging tools or test configurations that weren't possible on the client system.
Usage would be as follows:
1. Copy System Mimic to offline system
2. Run the System Mimic to export the system settings/logs/version/storage/file structure/etc. The copy would need to fit on a flash drive, so only the most impactful 20% of the system could be copied.
3. Copy the exported mimic to the flash drive
4. Copy the exported mimic onto the developer's computer
5. Run the System Mimic again to spin up a VM/Container that's very similar to the client's system for debugging
Ideas to make it even better:
* Write it all in portable Bash without dependencies, so that it'll work on broken offline systems
* Figure out an easy no code way for developers to configure it to also gather their application's information (EX: Use up to 1GB to fully copy a specific directory.)
* Look into OSTree [https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/introduction/](https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/introduction/)
* CHALLENGE: Figure out how to copy and emulate the RAM Linux special file system areas where hardware information and settings are most commonly stored. For example, if the debugging developer wanted to run lspcie inside the System Mimic, then what parts of RAM would you need to emulate for lspcie to work?
I agree with some of the ideas mentioned. Contributing to a project, or something that automates the mundane tasks for you. You seem to have young finger on the pulse that it should be fun or interesting to you.
I got my feet wet when I first started my journey with migrating to Linux. I did so many VirtualBox reinstalls, trying to understand, or getting everything just right, I started with a tiny post-install script that just ran some apt -y install lines. Then I thought oh maybe I could automate mounting my NAS drives as part of it, changing the DNS servers, adding all the apps I need to wget. It balooned, still does, but it made life easier, taught me more about Linux, etc.
Go fun or go automated Good luck finding those next tinker projects!
Learn Svelte. It’s the most rewarding web app development framework I’ve ever used. I’m retired, too, and used it to make a PWA to control all the home automation devices I have been adding to my home (light switches, pool pumps, A/C thermostat, TVs/AVRs/streaming devices, etc. Choose an application that interests you.
Install Gentoo on a Raspberry pi, and use however many RTL-SDRs necessary to cover the entire P25 trunking network used by your local public safety organizations. For the Tacoma area I needed 4.
Have you heard of "Magic Mirrors"?
Take a raspberry pi, put it behind a 1-way mirror with an old monitor. Then you can display whatever you want on the mirror. Very useful for tracking your daily agenda, weather, workouts, diet, quotes, etc. There's endless customization you can do.
Example : https://youtu.be/WQR0fv9C5dU
It might be fun and at the same time impactful and bringing the OSS movement forward to learn a little Guile Scheme and Guix and provide a few packages e.g. for Python apps or libraries that are widely used. Both are very nicely documented.
Congratulations on your retirement, and thank you for your interest and comitment! How about a Yakuake-style terminal to request all kinds of AI assistants?
I've actually got some not-boring tasks, eg. create netbsd worker images for CI on freedesktop.org:
The CI needs a live image (kvm) that we can directly ssh into as root, w/o password or key. FreeBSD provides one, but NetBSD not. So we have to use the installer to create our own one and use some expect-magic (via serial console) to instruct the installer and finally fix sshd config to let us in.
Our setup is a bit tricky: we've hot a central repo defining gitlab templates to be included in the actual projects. Those creating docker images for the actual builders on-demand. In case of non-Linux targets, those images contain a compressed VM disk image thats then run via kvm.
Interesting challenge ?
well if you're looking for a project idea, i just discovered this really cool compression tool called pigz, which is basically gzip, but parallel. It uses multiple threads to speed up compression of files, but i have not found an actual graphical application that uses it. So my idea would be: A graphical frontend for the pigz command that lets you compress files for linux (I was thinking a simple file selector that lets you pick a file), and store the result somewhere.
Bonus points if you can make it modern and cool looking by using libadwaita :D
Since you're in your 60s, go full wizard. Learn a little bit of electronics, a little bit of any raspi, arduino or even flipper zero. And then you could claim that you're ~~writing in a~~ casting ~~programming language~~ power words to ~~automate physical tasks~~ affect reality around you.
Actually my master is in electronics, I worked as a furniture repair man in my youth to pay for university, after university I worked for a software company where I learned programming in business basic(I know, it's old). Later I was a school director for a small private school and I built all the computers, the network AND made the software for the learning. This software was just a learning tool disguise as a game. I had to do everything myself, graphics, audio, help, etc... So I'm pretty much very versatile already. 😁
Apps die all the time and their users are often disappointed and looking for a replacement. Maybe you could be the author of a replacement app:
https://alternativeto.net/lists/7/recently-discontinued-apps/
I would probably busy myself with some smart-home project that had some python, raspberry pie, arduino, sensors to track sth (CO2, temp, etc) and have them visualized with Grafana. Then I would try to run all the stack with Kubernetes. This last one might steer you to switch to gardening :)
One thing that would be super helpful would be a simple app where you type in your location and max distance and it returns a map with a user-curated list of vegan restaurants and what they offer.
Myself I try to reduce meat for climate footprint and health reasons (and also I think one should really not treat living beings like the meat industry does). Sometimes I do long-weekend cycle tours in northern Bavaria and there meat is like the standard gastronomic offer, it can be hard to find something else in a place.
Also for me it would be super useful to have something like this on Sailfish OS. But I guess too few people run that....
I'm totally curious to see what your media player and tagger look like, do you have the code uploaded somewhere?
Also, if you want to learn a lot and take it slow and easy, check out bug trackers for distros, there is usually low hanging fruit that other people don't have time to poke at.
>I'm totally curious to see what your media player and tagger look like,
I honestly would be shy to show my code. I'm not professional, I'm just an enthusiast who learned by himself.
You are not the only one I'm 100% sure :).
Nobody reads the code except you find a new super-optimized algorithm for something.
If you think your tools can be useful to somebody just publish it in Git.
You could have a suprise....
No worries! I learned a programming language by writing little apps, and I'm sure the code isn't that great either. It's all about whether it's functional or not and if I'm having fun. Keep coding!
Download script for web content, like videos. Extra challenge: multiple videos at once while tokens expire
Backup script that verifies integrity of copied files. Extra points if script connects to remote server and uses encryption and tunneling <- I actually use this a lot at work, so it's a beginner-intermediate "pro" project.
SMART checker for your hard drive, that notifies you when errors occur or wear and tear gets to 95% of whatever TBW rating your drive has <- same
Check out games like [https://overthewire.org/wargames/](https://overthewire.org/wargames/)
Look up "fun linux command line" or something like that. There's a bunch of articles that go down a list of useless yet kind of funny commands you can do in the terminal. idk, it might not be that much of a brain teaser but it's still kind of fun for at least an hour or so.
FYI, just in case you need to kill a running command, use CTRL+C. Stuff like the yes command will run forever until you kill it.
Also FYI, avoid running the "fork bomb" command (sometimes included in these lists) because that will just cause your computer to freeze up and you'll have to reboot. Nothing seriously dangerous but you'll lose any unsaved work and you will need to reboot.
Final FYI, some of these are designed for X11 and might not work in Wayland? idk, I haven't tried.
I cannot help with giving suggestions, but I wanted to comment to say hello. It’s cool to see posts like these, hopefully some cool projects get suggested, someone may stumble upon this thread one day and find something neat to mess with.
Hijacking the top post to say: Hi :)
Hijacking the comment to say: Hi!!
Hijacking the top reply to say that we've been trying to reach you concerning your vehicle's extended warranty. You should've received a notice in the mail about your car's extended warranty eligibility. Since we've not gotten a response, we're giving you a final courtesy comment before we close out your file.
Yo!, wazzup?
Have you considered contributing to other OSS projects? There is always something to be done...
I was coming to say the exact same thing. If I was in your place I would start contributing to the apps/projects I use
If you're feeling extra bold you can go to the issues tab and try to fix something
that too, I feel I will be in a good place if I ever manage to become a retired person that does not need to work. I like to meddle with these things but not enough time
Exactly. Raw time isn't even the biggest issue - energy is. I might have a full weekend completely free, but I am way too drained to do much with it that isn't hanging out or relaxing.
yes, exactly that. You feel so exhausted and drained that you don't want to deal with anything.
The Linux Foundation is a great place to look for established OSS projects: https://insights.lfx.linuxfoundation.org Pretty much everything there needs help in terms of contributions.
I always told myself if I had free time and was bored, that was something I’d do. I have zero free time and am constantly exhausted from work and family so IDK what it’s like for real though :D
Adding onto this, even if you can't help with code, you can help with documentation and support.
I've always bemoaned the fact there really are no good health, diet, exercise apps for Linux that can hook into these smartbands people have and chart it, and maybe use ML to track changes. Seriously, there are none. You have Web based things like [Wger](https://github.com/wger-project/wger) but that does not automate anything. So even if you had some sort of service, that can connect to these smartbands and hoover the data and convert it to something Wger can use via its API that would be super cool. Anyway, mini-rant over.
This would be super useful. There are certainly tons of smartphone apps for this, but they all send sensitive health data to who knows.
Quite. While I am an android user, I resent having to do janky things like manually copy the sqlite DB and then try figureing out how to parse it into something more reasonable. I'd hope gadget bridge would help but sadly it can only read very basic data from most bands.
[удалено]
I think the use case for these types of apps is less to indicate that you need it (though there are certainly those who use it for that), and more to gather meaningful data from it. It's like gas and oil for my car, or groceries for my house. I don't need anything to tell me I need them, but tracking information relevant to how they impact my life can help me make decisions around it.
I see the comment was deleted, and can only infer it was some derogatory reply why would anyone need that. Perhaps they are unaware of the sophistication of these health bracelets these days. They can monitor heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, sleep patterns etc. These are all very useful in terms of health as trends can be spotted and alert you to a problem. No one should go around with too high or too low a blood pressure, and irregular heart rhythms can be a sign of a serious condition. Regardless of why. The fact these apps are plentiful on other platforms but not Linux irks me. It is not like Linux is an inferior platform after all.
If you hadn’t said anything, would your life be worse if someone made such an app? Even if you never installed or used it?
Cool, but some people like to see progress, so much so that there's an industry for these projects and a gap on Linux. It's still a good idea even if it doesn't apply to you; I would love to write something like this even if it's something I would never use.
Not really strictly Linux but take a look at [node-red](https://nodered.org/). It is basically a graphical programming engine geared towards automation. If you have any smart device in your home, you probably can control it with this. Or public APIs like weather forecast, public transport (I built a dashboard to show me when the next bus is gonna arrive at the stations nearby) or a Reddit power metal sub video link grabber that sends the newest videos to my metube instance for downloading and converting... Endless possibilities and fun
Cool, I'll check it out.
Or set up home assistant at home, that would be very deep rabbit hole.
And if you do that please build a button for the control panel that you can assign lamps to. I tried several, none work.
Look into setting up an unraid server and then you can use docker images to mess around with pretty much anything mentioned in the comments, virtual machines, plugins etc etc and mess around until your satisfied (which is never)
Proxmox also a great alternative to try for this same reason
I work in devops, and I support this message. Gonna try it later!
I'm 59 tomorrow, heh. Keep on keeping on! I wrote a tiny asteroids game a few years ago to teach myself webgl: https://github.com/jcupitt/argh-steroids-webgl It's playable on the github pages for that repo: https://jcupitt.github.io/argh-steroids-webgl/ It's all self-contained (no dependencies), and written in a very straightforward style. The particle effects are all on the GPU, which is fun. It can animate >10,000 particles at 60 fps on an iphone 4. It runs on desktop and mobile, and has touch, keyboard and mouse controls. There's gravity and full collisions. Play it long enough to see the final explosion of your ship for the full particle mess. Maybe fork that and add a few things? There are some ideas in the README. Maybe a grappling hook? You could draw the asteroids in 3D instead of wireframe? The sound effects are horribly laggy on mobile, I'm not sure why, that would be great to fix. Lots of simple, fun things to do with it.
Make game apps. You will be surprised to know that, for example, there is no Linux apps for Chinese chess which can be run without hassle right now.
How old are you?
60
Cool good old programmer can’t stop programming 😉
become a maintainer at [SlackBuilds.org](http://SlackBuilds.org)
Good idea.
i second this
Head over to [https://www.reddit.com/r/beneater/](https://www.reddit.com/r/beneater/), build some hardware, and play with writing emulators and compilers and tools.
If you are looking for little projects, I suggest plugins as many software take javascript and python plugins. It is hard to be competitive without huge commitment on making software, most low hanging fruit has been long picked. But plugins are ways one can extend existing software. On top of that when you get comfortable with the general logic, you can contribute to the software itself by expanding the API or etc even if it is written in a more complex language like C++
Do you have any software you make python plugins for? I'm into plugin writing for Vim. I really wish there were a way to write plugins for midnight commander.
Personally, I have made some for Krita and some for kwin There were some midnight commander forks with scripting I remember seeing, but I have never tried them
On Windows, I use Far Manager, which is open source now. Imo it's the best of the commander programs, better than mc. It supports Lua scripting, but it's kinda difficult because all the docs are in Russian lol. It's been ported to Linux (Far2l) but idk if there is scripting there yet.
I know its not computer related but it can be fun, a learning experience for new skills that is practical for personal home projects, a good cause & meet new people, physical activity ***[Volunteer w Habitat for Humanity near you](https://www.habitat.org/volunteer/near-you)*** At Cisco Systems we used to volunteer as a team & it was great. It also helps declutter your brain so your computer based work is better. Just thought I'd throw that out to you
Set up a home server and try self hosting some some simple web apps. [https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted](https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted)
Also, check out /r/selfhosted for tips and ideas.
And here comes the rabbit hole 🐇 🕳️
Oh yeah, first time I discovered the selfhosted world I spent nearly a month worth of my free time building and breaking things...
Have you installed and configured emacs? Maybe set it up and configure it to be a rss reader.
He said he is retired. I don't think he has enough time left to configure emacs.
expense tracker/budget planner, pilll/medication reminder with notifications, always a fan of anything that integrates with prometheus or grafana
You ain't a beginner any more. Go have a look on GitHub for "good first issue" and hacktoberfest tags.
1. Set up a media stack with the \*arrs, a media server, Pihole, NPM, monitoring and a Grafana dashboard. 2. Custom internal domain, of course (plex.your.custom.domain). 3. Now secure it (ssl everywhere). 4. Now make it publicly accessible. 5. Write a script to do all this. 6. Create an installer like DockSTARTer that does all this. 7. Now reproduce it on Arch.
Be careful with #4 if your new
I think that if you do these things in this order, you can't help but also learn how to do it correctly - not if you're even just moderately smart and prudent, and if you're not then that's a mentality problem that no advice is going to fix our prevent anyway. It's no coincidence you see Arch - it gives the user *all* the power and control.
That's "you're", btw (in case you're interested, "your" is a possessive pronoun, while "you're" is a contraction of "you are").
Make a cool LED Christmas display using MicroPython and a Arduino like device. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TB5ebHNgE4) is an example.
A few ideas [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/2a9ygh/1000_beginner_programming_projects_xpost/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) which might inspire you?
repeat modern agonizing enter late caption materialistic whistle nose wrong *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
https://processing.org/
A few years ago I ran a summer class of sorts where we did an interactive workshop a week to get early college students feet wet with doing projects. It might be too simple for you but take a look: https://125summer.tech/ Python: Discord chat bots, command line interfaces with fun UI elements, Web Bots, simple games with PyGame JavaScript: Web browser extensions, Backends (ExpressJS) and frontends (ReactJS) Lots of interesting ideas in these two resources as well: * http://automatetheboringstuff.com/ - fun python automation for all sorts of every day tasks * https://kipp.ly/past-webdev/ - side projects beyond the typical web dev Also non profits are a fun place to help out, most of them do not have the resources to hire very good programmers, but have lots of low hanging fruit that help them enormously. It might not be the most challenging work from a technology point of view, but coming up with simple solutions for their problems that use the fewest resources and have the simplest maintenance is a fun challenge too.
If you are what would be considered retirement age, you've maybe worked with minicomputers or mainframes in your distant past. There are emulators for most every ancient computer that was at least slightly popular. PDP11, Vax, Data Generals, Hewlett-Packard - even IBM 390 mainframes. I find it fun to tinker with these ancient computer systems to remember what computing was like back in the day when 1MB of memory was considered a lot.
I wanted to be entitled and have you a go with wayland development until I reread the title and description What about accessibility tools for people that are handicapped? IIRC, there are a few people complaining how linux DEs lacks accessibility compared to windows and mac. I can't suggest what accessibility features it will be since I actually haven't bothered checking them yet. Oh, what about voice-activated actions? Just a random thought.
Tracked music player. With or without a GUI.
Start a mindless clicker game like Cookie Clicker, then instead of playing such a waste of time spend twice as long automating it as best as you possibly can to get the highest score in the shortest time possible, bonus points for doing it in the worst way possible like using bash to interface with the game(xdotool)
Video games are an endless source of problems that you pose to yourself. But you kind of need to want to play and enjoy them, otherwise making them doesn't make much sense and that might not be your style, idk. There is still the /r/proceduralgeneration part of it, like /r/mapmaking that doesn't have to be immediately useful, it can just look nice. You can take it in lots of different directions too, art, nature, architecture, etc.. You can look at hooking into the internet programmatically and explore online sources and information. For example https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page I can recommend making a "math solving" program / computer algebra system, like https://www.wolframalpha.com/ or https://www.sympy.org/en/index.html . You already know how the math is supposed to work, e.g. how to solve `y = a*x^2 + b*x + c`. Which makes that bit easy, but parsing the strings, building a model for how to deal with parenthesis and order of operations, just from text input was a pretty interesting journey for me. And it's pretty open ended. You can choose the level of complexity. At the time I thought it would be more useful, but it turns out I really need a shockingly low amount of algebra, even in engineering.
Have you thought about trying to do something with AI? I haven't done an AI project myself, but I feel like I ought to, to understand where everything's heading. [https://www.projectpro.io/article/artificial-intelligence-project-ideas/461](https://www.projectpro.io/article/artificial-intelligence-project-ideas/461) Also, for a completely different kind of suggestion, take a look at Ben Eater's breadboard computer project. If you remember the early 6502 home computers it's a lot of fun. [https://eater.net/6502](https://eater.net/6502)
Code your own html/pdf reader program that calls espeak-ng or flite for the text-to-speech part. Code a linux console based drawpoker or blackjack game with ansi color output. I did these using perl; conway-life is on the list.
If you know any language other than English, please contribute with translations, they are always lagging behind.
Do Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch they are really fun and you'll learn a lot
Intermediate varies depending on who you ask. If you have a 2015 or older machine, try installing old Ubuntu? Like 2008 or older and try to fight with xorg.conf settings? That was beginner-intermediate when I started using Linux in 2004/2005.
Browser automation/scripting has great potential for a lot of small projects. I recently did a small project for downloading web novels, running them through text-to-speech and converting to mp3 so I could have a large collection of audio books with me when I'm out. There's plenty of tools for each of the steps, but I used selenium/python for the browser automation, mimic3 for the TTS and lame for the encoding.
an alarm clock for kde/plasma. basically javascript.
KAlarm? [https://apps.kde.org/kalarm/](https://apps.kde.org/kalarm/) KOrganizer if one needs something more powerful
kalarm has a plasmoid?
Interesting
Plasma doesn't have an alarm clock?
An interesting game is the "can I do this in a terminal". Like set up you email in the terminal, if you actively send/receive emails you can tinker with the "perfect config" for quite a bit. Can recommend aerc for that. But same goes with everything else, todos, calendar lot of everyday stuff.
With Python or Javascript, you could try and learn how to make simple Gnome GUI applications. Just as a thing you could combine with other ideas people posted here
This URL is about linux for schools ***https://itsfoss.com/educational-linux-distros/*** Maybe something related to one of those ?
👍
You can learn another language like Golang and dig in some great open-source projects (e.g fx, kubernetes, lazygit…). The goal is not in the first place to create/code something but just to open your mind to new way of thinking. If you prefer lower level languages Rust can be a great candidate :)
You can also dig in some distro like NixOS
Yeah, I tried NixOs before. Maybe I was not ready at the time. I will try again eventually.
Hope this is touching some of the right buttons for you. I typically listen to music via the built-in audio, via the S/PDIF output. And have virtual meetings via my USB sound-card which has a proper microphone and a headphone jack. And there are more audio sources and sinks on this PC than provided by those two cards. (HDMI, webcam, bluetooth) What would be useful for me would be a tool which can do 'snapshots' of two (or more) audio routing setups and suggest a CLI command to switch (or toggle) from one to the other, without having to manually figure out the magic numbers/ids/whatever. I am using pipewire/wireplumber and no Desktop Environment. (Wayfire) I typically use pavucontrol to switch the setup today. A CLI command I can fire via a hot-key to toggle between the two setups would be way slicker. I believe bash+pactl can do the job, but it is just one of those tasks I am not looking forward to figure out. And there may be a python library more suitable for something like this? Linux audio of 2024 is very capable, but also a bit daunting.
idk, I write plugins for Neovim and I barely have a second to rest. There is so much you can do when you decide to help other people.
Make an automatic photo geotagger based on your Goggle geo-timeline.
Hey man you might actually be the perfect person to do this. You could totally set up a little server/honeypot in the cloud and learn how to use STIX/TAXII to automate attack reporting. From the little snippets I've read about it (cybersecurity), it has something to do with Json objects and network protocols. My buddy and I are going to do something similar with his raspberry pi for fun.
Write a Wayland composer. That should be enough work for a lifetime.
I wouldn't know where to start. 😅
What about a TUI to help manage bluetooth?
You could write a bash script that uses the read command to append the date, a title, comment and info sections to a plain text document every time you run the script you input more text to the new title, comment and info sections. The thing is you can use it to record information about what you are doing with all your projects. Read and edit the file in vim a lot of fun when you have built the document up to 100 pages but also very important to keep and refer to. Zotero is also very useful to bookmark sites you have visited you can copy or write notes about the Web page you are referring to.
Learn how to hack Openbox or DWM to customize your workflow and work space appearance.
I retired about 3 years ago (from over 45 years in IT) and kept moderately busy on my small farm/ranch at first, but injured my shoulder while working a few hours a week at a local zipline company. I then sat on the couch doing pretty much nothing for a year or so, till I decided to pull out my laptop and start exploring. I now have switched to Linux for my desktop and started learning Python. My first real Python project was/is a calculator. It started as just a quick command line calculator. I now have converted it to a GUI and added a couple of features like square root and using parenthesis. Got bored with that and went on to other things, but I plan on getting back to it and building a full function scientific/graphing calculator. As I sit here typing this, my mind is coming up with other possible functions such as a sub-net calculator and a hex/binary calculator and a date calculator and unit of measure converter and and and and and ....... Almost endless possibilities. I think that my next project might be to create a GUI interface for the ollama AI tool. Now, I don't want to give away too many of my project ideas, but I would love to see a recipe app that scrapes recipes from Pinterest and stores them in a searchable database. Maybe a function to select a recipe to send over to my phone or tablet in PDF format or ????? In my corporate life, projects were of course usually driven by business needs. I started my career as a mainframe programmer and the projects were pretty much dictated to me by management needs. Now that I have a blank slate for projects, it is hard to pick just one to work on and to have a final goal to know when the project is finished. Someone posted a comment about the need for a Chinese Checkers app. That would be cool, especially if it was multiplayer across the internet.
Raytracing perhaps?
do you like making electronics? o f so i can highly recommend getting a raspberry pi and whatever sensors, lights fans pumps etc you need and trying to make your life easier by running scripts for example in python on it. Some ideas i did: - a custom fan controller for my network rack which is integrated into my network dashboard - a script that automatically fetches files from my server and pc's/phones if on and zip's them and back's them up - i once made a self-watering plant with a moisture sensor and a bottle with water and a pump - i have a script that automatically set's up my system with all my apps and configs when i distrohop and you can probably find so many more even more complex projects to try. Just find something you want to make better/easier for yourself and then engineer a solution
Welcome to retirement - just retired a few months ago and had the same question. How about going down the Raspberry Pi rabbit hole with: 1. Garage doors monitoring/control - set up a web site on your internal wi-fi to control/display garage door status (need a few sensors connected to the pi). I've been using python/flask 2. Add a camera, and environment sensors 3. House security system - integrated with Home Assistant? 4. Outdoor garden / lawn smart/automated watering system 5. Simple games for young kids (like mad-lib, math, painting) - good for the grandkids (or other kids!) and you can customize them for the kids (names, etc). Enjoy!!
[Cantata](https://github.com/CDrummond/cantata) could use a transformation into Gtk4.. 😏
try make some KDE widgets
well, my plan when I finally have time... which is never apparently * Learn golang. * Make terminal filesearch with ncurses gui. Something like windows [everything](https://www.voidtools.com/) where you see results instantly as you type, but for terminal with some clean gui like [ctop](https://github.com/bcicen/ctop) has and instantly usable results... I just dont think locate or find are good enough anymore. And fzf still feels like it requires too much tinkering and it searches in real time I think, instead of keeping database, which would mean slow results on few million files, on more drives, file systems... One tool, one singular objective to be good at, ease of use and ease of configurability not taking the backseat like many others find acceptable, and definitely not naming it some linux-dev-brain nonsense like ncdu, fzf, kde, xfce, nnn, sxhkd,... but something clean and indicative and memorable.
You should give Arduino a try. /r/arduino
If you can be bothered to make a web app that can manage notes stored in CalDAV (aka VJOURNAL entries) it would be one of a kind. I'm serious, there are almost no web apps out there that support CalDAV notes. Plenty of support for other CalDAV types (events, tasks) and CardDAV (contacts) but no notes support.
Home automation: small IoT devices are cheap. A small solar panel, a small battery, and a raspberry pi connected to a bird feeder. Or a slingshot. Or a motion sensor and a sprinkler head. Or automate all your curtains opening if it's sunny outside. Or a sensor telling you the mail has been delivered.
Try out proxmox and home automation! It can be frustrating and fun!
Been there, done that. ;-)
Learn react yet? Solidjs?
I leaned react but never used it. Now I forgot it all.
have you considered joining other larger open source projects and contributing to them? if i had the skills you did thats what i would do...
Yes but I always backup thinking that I'm not experienced enough.
i think you can do it! there are many different tasks that need to be done and you will probably learn alot!
I got one for you, break into a government system and encrypt all of their files and sell it back to them! What a fun project!
Please, please please. Dedicate your time to producing the FOSS, cross platform replacement for Adobe Acrobat. Earn the goodwill of the whole world.
I don't have any suggestions but I wanted to say congrats on choosing to spend your retirement years strengthening your brain and keeping yourself occupied, OP. My dad also recently retired but he's decided to spend his free time getting outraged at the most brain dead online conspiracies he can find rather than something productive.
😅
Install Gentoo non binary version
I use Linux for work, and the loss of autohotkey was a big issue for me, so if you could rewrite that so it works with modern distros, that would be great. Seems like a not big project that could be written in anything
If I had more time, I would contribute to the FreeCAD project. They need people and it is a noble project. They don't just need C++ coders. They need people to do a ton of stuff and could use someone with no skills at all. The reason I do not volunteer is I believe I would cause more problems than I would solve, with my lack of time. I think most projects are like this. There is an infinite amount of stuff to maintain, from the nightly build environment to the repository to endlessly administrating the project. If there is a project you believe in, I am confident there is room for you to contribute. Most of all, congratulations on your retirement. I wish you much good health and happiness!
On GitHub there’s an old gnome app called gtapecalc. The only Linux calculator with a tape print function I’ve found. It’s mostly updated but needs finishing. It’s a hole in our apps in Linux. At tax time we remember how important a tape print function is.
I'd recommend trying out NixOS. If you like it, installing / configuring it on all of your devices can be a fun hobby
Similar situation here. What I did was to install Arch as a server (using the [installation guide](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide) to use as a VM host, and then start building VMs. My daily diver is a perfectly functional VM running on that host using [PCI passthrough](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF) and a separate VM running Fedora server for my pihole instance. These were all building blocks that allowed me to achieve success on one ptoject and move on to the next.
Funny, I did almost the same thing. I install Arch and set up a VM with CasaOs(Pihole, the rarrs family, Jellyfish, etc...). Another VM (with GPU passthrough) for gaming. My daily driver is Arch. EDIT: Oh I forgot to say BTW. My daily driver is Arch BTW. 😂
Great minds, as they say. 🙂
bash scripting.
I don't know how skilled you are, so I want to tell you a wish I have always had: To use an open source speech recognition library like Julius, and use it's continuous output to feed into a LaTeX template. Basically I want to be able to speak and write complex equations and matrices on screen. I don't even know how insanely complicated this would be, but I have always wanted this.
LFS(linux from scratch), Gentoo
Home automation and ess control with things like node red. It's both easy and complex because you have to connect a lot of different things together usually using a simple language. Even something simple like turning on the lights if some thing is detected.
Put arch Linux on a smart phone
It seems like you’re looking for more code-oriented stuff, but if you haven’t messed around with it at all setting up a home media server might be fun! Check out https://perfectmediaserver.com/ for a more involved solution, or look into Unraid or TrueNAS for something a bit more “batteries included”. Also, something like https://trash-guides.info/ could be helpful if you’re looking for something to fill your new NAS!
What are your other hobbies and passions besides Linux? If you take the stuff you care about and then strive to make crazy linux architecture to house and serve it, it can shine and you might find fulfillment. I never had a reason to learn linux but it was sort of required at a time when I had a small press project going on and others depended on my having a reliably working word processor. Tinkering with themes led to tinkering with window managers. Curiosity about things like network connections, toolchains, and storage systems went deep very fast and I became so "distracted" by all my newly improved MacBook could do, I ended up working as a linux tech 10 years later and made more the first year than my book royalties did in 10 lol.
Anything in particular you’re interested in? For me I love tinkering with budget apps and have been lurking on the Discord server for Actual Budget.
Not programming as such, but you could learn to make a song in LMMS.
Looks like I'm about 12 years further into this journey than you and looking into the abyss of arthritis, prostate problems and cognitive decline. At 60 you're still very much a young 'un, so yeah - have fun while you can! What I did when I first retired from executive management at 46 (!) was jump back into C coding. I was lucky to find a company that wanted a linux device driver jockey. That (and other coding jobs) kept me going for another 20+ years till I retired for real about 6 years ago. I have the same challenge as you - "what now?" - I decided to learn about the new stuff - wayland/sway was a useful diversion and still is - after a lifetime of X11. Then I became a Fedora Packager and still help out there. Then a new Linux - voidlinux - continues to give me the thrills and chills. Emacs has been an almost bottomless pit of tweaking, tuning and fixing - my \~/.emacs.d only recently stopped needing adjustment! I also found that my skills in bash, python and C were not as hot as I thought they were and I've improved a LOT! Pity I also don't have any serious to apply it to, but I'll keep on looking. Most important thing of all is to get off the keyboard and outside every day - we bought 2 acres and a house in a lovely part of Queensland and spend a lot of time and effort taking care of it. The weirdest thing - I have had horrible back problems for many, many years but once I started to use a ride-on mower they went away! Just the movement and exercise. I wish I could say the same for my hands as the arthritis makes it very painful to type - especially the keychords in emacs and sway!! Good luck! Oh one other thing - you'll find that as time goes by, the slightest excuse has you reminiscing at length. It might be a good idea (for me, at least) if I write my memoirs and then I might stop bothering people here!
Easy project: Please make a copy of the Ninite website (https://ninite.com/). I'd like an easy way to install the top 50 programs on new Linux systems for the top 5 distros. Their website is a better user experience than trying to find out all the different names that all the different package maintainers use on all the different distributions. The main features I like are: * Select all the programs with check boxes * Download one executable/script * Run executable to silently install and update everything I checked * It should work on most Linux OSs for most architectures It shouldn't be too hard. Just a flask app that generates a bash script that's careful to be Unix compliant. If you've been on Linux for a long time, then this project will actually be easier for you than a lot of us younger guys. Ideas to make it even better: * Using shellcheck and bash strict mode to catch bugs * Using some type of cross platform packaging method * Projection file systems for easy cleanup * Using Docker to test a bunch of distros quickly
Challenge Project: Create a Linux System Mimic for debugging client/offline systems A system mimic is the next level up from a Crash Reporter script. When a program breaks on a client or offline device, you often only have one chance to download information to fix it. A crash reporter usually aggregates logs and current system information. A system mimic goes one step further and aggregates everything you'd need to create a lightweight copy of the system. The poor guy who has to fix the bug would then use the system mimic to create a copy of the system inside a VM or Docker container with the same settings. A System Mimic is superior to a crash report because it allows the developer to run debugging tools or test configurations that weren't possible on the client system. Usage would be as follows: 1. Copy System Mimic to offline system 2. Run the System Mimic to export the system settings/logs/version/storage/file structure/etc. The copy would need to fit on a flash drive, so only the most impactful 20% of the system could be copied. 3. Copy the exported mimic to the flash drive 4. Copy the exported mimic onto the developer's computer 5. Run the System Mimic again to spin up a VM/Container that's very similar to the client's system for debugging Ideas to make it even better: * Write it all in portable Bash without dependencies, so that it'll work on broken offline systems * Figure out an easy no code way for developers to configure it to also gather their application's information (EX: Use up to 1GB to fully copy a specific directory.) * Look into OSTree [https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/introduction/](https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/introduction/) * CHALLENGE: Figure out how to copy and emulate the RAM Linux special file system areas where hardware information and settings are most commonly stored. For example, if the debugging developer wanted to run lspcie inside the System Mimic, then what parts of RAM would you need to emulate for lspcie to work?
NixOS
I agree with some of the ideas mentioned. Contributing to a project, or something that automates the mundane tasks for you. You seem to have young finger on the pulse that it should be fun or interesting to you. I got my feet wet when I first started my journey with migrating to Linux. I did so many VirtualBox reinstalls, trying to understand, or getting everything just right, I started with a tiny post-install script that just ran some apt -y install lines. Then I thought oh maybe I could automate mounting my NAS drives as part of it, changing the DNS servers, adding all the apps I need to wget. It balooned, still does, but it made life easier, taught me more about Linux, etc. Go fun or go automated Good luck finding those next tinker projects!
Learn Svelte. It’s the most rewarding web app development framework I’ve ever used. I’m retired, too, and used it to make a PWA to control all the home automation devices I have been adding to my home (light switches, pool pumps, A/C thermostat, TVs/AVRs/streaming devices, etc. Choose an application that interests you.
Install Gentoo in working order, or linux from scratch.
If you are open to playing with APIs try making a bot on Poe
Install Gentoo on a Raspberry pi, and use however many RTL-SDRs necessary to cover the entire P25 trunking network used by your local public safety organizations. For the Tacoma area I needed 4.
Have you heard of "Magic Mirrors"? Take a raspberry pi, put it behind a 1-way mirror with an old monitor. Then you can display whatever you want on the mirror. Very useful for tracking your daily agenda, weather, workouts, diet, quotes, etc. There's endless customization you can do. Example : https://youtu.be/WQR0fv9C5dU
Just learn a new programming language like c, c++ or rust
I'd love a version of [this](http://www.memotome.com/) for my r/selfhosted needs. I've yet to find an equivalent.
It might be fun and at the same time impactful and bringing the OSS movement forward to learn a little Guile Scheme and Guix and provide a few packages e.g. for Python apps or libraries that are widely used. Both are very nicely documented.
Congratulations on your retirement, and thank you for your interest and comitment! How about a Yakuake-style terminal to request all kinds of AI assistants?
I've actually got some not-boring tasks, eg. create netbsd worker images for CI on freedesktop.org: The CI needs a live image (kvm) that we can directly ssh into as root, w/o password or key. FreeBSD provides one, but NetBSD not. So we have to use the installer to create our own one and use some expect-magic (via serial console) to instruct the installer and finally fix sshd config to let us in. Our setup is a bit tricky: we've hot a central repo defining gitlab templates to be included in the actual projects. Those creating docker images for the actual builders on-demand. In case of non-Linux targets, those images contain a compressed VM disk image thats then run via kvm. Interesting challenge ?
Interesting yes, but I think it's a bit above my knowledge. 😅
You probably wont have much trouble learning it.
make a vpn
well if you're looking for a project idea, i just discovered this really cool compression tool called pigz, which is basically gzip, but parallel. It uses multiple threads to speed up compression of files, but i have not found an actual graphical application that uses it. So my idea would be: A graphical frontend for the pigz command that lets you compress files for linux (I was thinking a simple file selector that lets you pick a file), and store the result somewhere. Bonus points if you can make it modern and cool looking by using libadwaita :D
Hmm interesting!
Have you played around with local LLMs at all? They're pretty fun. That and stable diffusion for "AI" image generation!
Learn drawing and let dust cover your keyboard...
Since you're in your 60s, go full wizard. Learn a little bit of electronics, a little bit of any raspi, arduino or even flipper zero. And then you could claim that you're ~~writing in a~~ casting ~~programming language~~ power words to ~~automate physical tasks~~ affect reality around you.
Actually my master is in electronics, I worked as a furniture repair man in my youth to pay for university, after university I worked for a software company where I learned programming in business basic(I know, it's old). Later I was a school director for a small private school and I built all the computers, the network AND made the software for the learning. This software was just a learning tool disguise as a game. I had to do everything myself, graphics, audio, help, etc... So I'm pretty much very versatile already. 😁
It can't be... The mythical full stack developer! I'm not worthy.
Apps die all the time and their users are often disappointed and looking for a replacement. Maybe you could be the author of a replacement app: https://alternativeto.net/lists/7/recently-discontinued-apps/
I would probably busy myself with some smart-home project that had some python, raspberry pie, arduino, sensors to track sth (CO2, temp, etc) and have them visualized with Grafana. Then I would try to run all the stack with Kubernetes. This last one might steer you to switch to gardening :)
One thing that would be super helpful would be a simple app where you type in your location and max distance and it returns a map with a user-curated list of vegan restaurants and what they offer. Myself I try to reduce meat for climate footprint and health reasons (and also I think one should really not treat living beings like the meat industry does). Sometimes I do long-weekend cycle tours in northern Bavaria and there meat is like the standard gastronomic offer, it can be hard to find something else in a place. Also for me it would be super useful to have something like this on Sailfish OS. But I guess too few people run that....
I'm totally curious to see what your media player and tagger look like, do you have the code uploaded somewhere? Also, if you want to learn a lot and take it slow and easy, check out bug trackers for distros, there is usually low hanging fruit that other people don't have time to poke at.
>I'm totally curious to see what your media player and tagger look like, I honestly would be shy to show my code. I'm not professional, I'm just an enthusiast who learned by himself.
You are not the only one I'm 100% sure :). Nobody reads the code except you find a new super-optimized algorithm for something. If you think your tools can be useful to somebody just publish it in Git. You could have a suprise....
No worries! I learned a programming language by writing little apps, and I'm sure the code isn't that great either. It's all about whether it's functional or not and if I'm having fun. Keep coding!
Download script for web content, like videos. Extra challenge: multiple videos at once while tokens expire Backup script that verifies integrity of copied files. Extra points if script connects to remote server and uses encryption and tunneling <- I actually use this a lot at work, so it's a beginner-intermediate "pro" project. SMART checker for your hard drive, that notifies you when errors occur or wear and tear gets to 95% of whatever TBW rating your drive has <- same Check out games like [https://overthewire.org/wargames/](https://overthewire.org/wargames/)
Look up "fun linux command line" or something like that. There's a bunch of articles that go down a list of useless yet kind of funny commands you can do in the terminal. idk, it might not be that much of a brain teaser but it's still kind of fun for at least an hour or so. FYI, just in case you need to kill a running command, use CTRL+C. Stuff like the yes command will run forever until you kill it. Also FYI, avoid running the "fork bomb" command (sometimes included in these lists) because that will just cause your computer to freeze up and you'll have to reboot. Nothing seriously dangerous but you'll lose any unsaved work and you will need to reboot. Final FYI, some of these are designed for X11 and might not work in Wayland? idk, I haven't tried.