I love re-interpreting existing tools or ideas as practice and fun, like how an artist does studies of master artists' work to improve their technical skills or just to gain some perspective.
So perhaps if you can't think of something new, try re-inventing something that exists, in a new language or one you already know and like?
Though I'm partial to people building doodads with things like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. :)
I used to be a lover of Fantasy Paperbacks ... but had to get rid of most of them when my husband and I sold everything to move to SV. Since then I now keep 90% of my books digital, which I fought against at the time, but appreciate it now! My husband had an even harder time with clearing out RPG hardcovers.
Between us I think we kept about a dozen books; autographed copies of things or gems that we can't get in digital, but that's it.
Programming books we long since switched to digital - those giant tomes were not only a huge waste of space but went out of date way too soon. Yay for O'Reilly.
Same. FWIW, I have used Backbone for a bunch of past projects (personal as well as large-scale apps for work). In my latest projects in both, I'm using Marionette on top of Backbone and I've been pleasantly surprised at how well it's working out when managing a complex SPA. I really appreciate Angular and what it's doing but every time I've tried to use it, it hasn't been the right fit. I'm hopeful for it though. Maybe eventually I can find a useful application for it!
Backbone is doing a good job thus far establishing itself as a decent and reliable JS framework. Marionette addresses the specific pain points of view and event management in a larger app that Backbone leaves up to you out of the box.