Discuss: How do you think of miniprojects that are suited for learning new technologies?

As I’m sure many of you curious developers do, I have a huge list of technologies, libraries and languages I want to try, all written down in a note.

While some people would argue that the main difficulty to go through this list is finding time, I have another issue that stalls me even more. To learn something new, I need to have some kind of idea, some goal, something to motivate me during the process. More specifically, I usually need to find an idea to go past the Hello-Worlds and the useless examples — I want to at least make something demoable.

However, while adding new technologies to the list seems very easy, coming up with little real-world projects isn’t. Finding that idea that motivates me to work with a new technology is my main difficulty and barrier to start, so my question to you is, how do you deal with this? Which kind of miniprojects do you develop to learn a new technology? What qualities do these projects have and why do you think they are good for this scenario? How do you go about finding ideas for them?