Your bank account as a single JPG - which would be a collage of images, colours, phrases; that you would be able to translate into the state of your bank account.
From this image, you would be able to tell things like:
1. You are overdrawn. 2. You have just been paid. 3. Your mortgage has gone out. 4. The last 5 cach-machine actions took place in a particular geography.
So for instance the phrase "Houston we have a problem" could denote you are overdrawn; the phrase "The Eagle Has Landed" would denote you have been paid (or a picture of a moon-landing).
A house in the background, might denote that your mortgage is due - a phone box - your phone bill.
A picture of the Eiffel tower could denote that your cash card has been used in Paris.
Of course these would be unique to me; you would chose your own - it could look like a news site or a "my Yahoo!" type portal - or whatever. (left-handed site ;-) ? )
A casual shoulder-surfer wouldn't be able to make sense of the picture, and jpg stored on the local cache would be pretty useless.
The account name and password would be completely separate from your high-security banking details.-- monojohnny, Jul 02 2006 Annotated version http://monojohnny-halfbaked.blogspot.com/Example annotated [monojohnny, Jul 02 2006] [MikeOliver]'s Bank Account http://www.uscg.mil...on_Sinking_Ship.jpgKind of says it all :( [MikeOliver, Jul 03 2006] Could be worse, Mike... http://www.austlit....pix/raft-medusa.jpg [calum, Jul 04 2006] I have drawed a picture of what the output could look like, see link.-- monojohnny, Jul 02 2006 //The following error was encountered:
* Access Denied.//
I agree, that picture is secure.-- fridge duck, Jul 02 2006 [fridge duck] Bah! You made me look ! :-)
(Then I realised that it actually was really was unavailable - sorry!)-- monojohnny, Jul 02 2006 opens image expecting lush green landscape full of many possessions but finds nothing but a barren desert with a bloated grinning vulture pecking at a pile of strewn bones...... +-- xenzag, Jul 02 2006 [+] Different. Definately a possibility for the wiley.-- kuupuuluu, Jul 02 2006 fun! [+] and I hope the final version waivers negligibly from your example. That is fine work.-- daseva, Jul 02 2006 I like the fact that you could have a daily update emailed to you. My biggest problem with internet banking is that I tend to avoid logging on when things are getting a bit dicey as I don't want to know. I would be more in control if I couldn't really avoid seeing how things really were.-- wagster, Jul 02 2006 I'd forget what everything meant in a few months. Will the bank keep a file of what I picked to represent what? If they don't, I'll have to bone this idea.-- ye_river_xiv, Jul 02 2006 [ye_river_xiv]
You won't lose your standard internet banking login - which you would use to setup your low-security page as you wish.
The idea is that you can use this in places like internet cafes when you are away from home and just need a quick 'health-check', but don't want to leave your details hanging around on untrusted computers.-- monojohnny, Jul 02 2006 This set me to thinking about my bank account as an RPG.
"I offer the merchant half of his asking price".
"Make your repeat customer roll at a minus 4".-- normzone, Jul 02 2006 Could you provide more details as to how it might actually work?
If I understand your idea correctly, then I think you should use something like a .psd file instead of a .jpg file because you can store multiple images with different layers on a single .psd file, and .jpg files suffer from generational degradation.
Maybe there could be a master .psd file, and each time something changed about your account, a new image could be created from the .psd file and then saved as a .jpg to replace the old .jpg.-- BJS, Jul 02 2006 It's a picture. The idea is to publish the current state of your bank account as a collage. What format it is in, and whether or not it suffers from "generational degradation" (funny, so does my bank account) is completely immaterial to the idea.-- jutta, Jul 02 2006 ok, thank you for clearing that up.
maybe this idea should go in the business category then?-- BJS, Jul 03 2006 But what would a surrealist painting indicate?-- Cuit_au_Four, Jul 03 2006 Excuse me, I was just trying to reconcile my cheque stubs with this picture of roadkill...-- pertinax, Jul 03 2006 Very nice. Hell Panel Bosch every month for me, I think.-- calum, Jul 03 2006 It's an interesting idea. But I don't think anything beats seeing the numbers in my savings racheting upwards.-- timyang, Jul 04 2006 [timyang] You can still do that.
The idea is that somebody else won't be able to enjoy watching your savings racheting upwards - and maybe steal them.-- monojohnny, Jul 04 2006 [MikeOliver]'s Bank Account: :)-- monojohnny, Jul 04 2006 [BJS].
As per what [jutta] said, the file format is pretty immaterial - I said JPG because it's a common standard; in fact you could use a 'layered' format like you mention, but it would be 'burnt' into a single file to be sent to the user's browser.
The way it would work, would be to have a web application, probably written in ASP.net or JSP; (or something else - PHP?) which would talk to your bank account database as normal, but its output would be a dynamic image - based on your preferences and the state of the account.-- monojohnny, Jul 04 2006 random, halfbakery