A recent television commercial jogged my memory about a desired device that I had thought about in the past. I have no idea what the commercial is for, but near the beginning of it a man gets out of bed in his futuristic home, and while he is doing his morning routine in the bathroom mirror, a weather forecast is playing in the mirror. Although I desire a weather forecast at other times, getting dressed is easily the most important time. In fact, there is a web site whose entire premise is that the weather dictates your clothing choices. Pure genius.

What I want is that futuristic man’s weather mirror, but in today’s world. I know it’s either a) out there already in some sort of weather geek’s catalog, or b) hackable using wireless technology and some sort of computer programs and device. Most simple home weather forecast devices on the market estimate the conditions based on the current conditions when you set it up, and then the changing temperature and barometric pressure. I want my device to be a much simpler device, much like the getting the weather from television. It’s figured out and distilled for me, and given to me in the simplest form possible.

All I want to do is wake up, go to my dresser, and see the following:

• The temperature and conditions right now
• The temperature and conditions at intervals later in the day
• The most minimal amount of data I need to survive: temp, conditions and wind
• Nothing scientific (no barometric pressure, moon phase, etc)
• No clock (who doesn’t know what time it is?)

It also might be handy to have a configuration program as well, so that I might be able to change what information I see on the device, or perhaps changing the intervals, or perhaps even setting specific times that I want the forecast for (like if I know I’m going out at 10pm, I would want to know what it will be like outside.)

One way to execute this idea might be creating a program that grabs the weather from the Internet, parses it, and spits it out over wireless to this small device. Perhaps this device is a PDA? Who knows?

Any ideas or examples or existing products out there, anyone?

(If it helps, I have an old Handspring Visor and a (very, very) old Apple Newton.)

Please create a feature which allows me to map out alternative routes for directions. In particular, I would like to:

• Filter out the use of freeways. I would like to use your mapping software to get directions for riding my bicycle or scooter (or perhaps even walking), which means no highways or freeways.
• Filter by speed limit. If I am riding a small scooter, I may not want to (or be able to) go over a particular speed. If I am walking or bicycling, I would like to take a route that does not have cars whizzing by at uncomfortable speeds.
• Select or deselect particular streets, or stretches of streets. There are plenty of reasons I might want to avoid particular streets or areas, such as road construction, scenic detours, bad neighborhoods, preferred routes/streets, etc.
• Save routes and route preferences. I prefer going one particular way different from how you suggest. If you could remember that, it would be awesome. I could see saving these “hacked” routes as particularly useful information, both for myself and others. I imagine seeing how other people get around to places might benefit me. (For example, I would like to save a list of “ways to get home from work”. Depending on traffic and “feel”, sometimes I take the freeway, sometimes I take one of several side street routes. Saving those alone would be great. Now if other people could see these, and I could see other people’s “ways to get home” from the same location/area, that would be amazing.)

Thank you for your time. Love, Ben.

Dear Lazyweb, please make an iPod hack that will display the album art on my older iPod, using ASCII characters. Thanks in advance.

In this space I will chronicle my many del.icio.us wishes and Lazyweb requests. Feel free to leave your own in the comments.

• Create a del.icio.us user recommendation script/engine. The end result would be a list of users (ala Audioscrobbler’s “musical neighbors”):

• The most closely matched people based on purely similar linkage. If someone has linked to 60.7% of the things I have linked to, I probably want to subscribe to that user.
• The most prolific linker based on similar linkage. I want to know, based on similar linkage, who linked it sooner more often. I want to find people who find new things and/or are on the front end of memes I am interested in.
• The most prolific linker based on popularity. Same idea as above, just for all del.icio.us. (Perhaps date of post compared to most recent post by another user could be a factor in some of these calculations?)

• Show me all the people who subscribe to my links
• Show me all the people who my subscriptions link to, and possibly even 3rd degree connections (perhaps only multiply-related subscriptions)

There are many lifestyle choices that have fairly established symbols that can help a person be identified. Democrats have a donkey, Republicans have an elephant, the gay community has the pink triangle (although it wasn’t necessarily chosen by them), straightedgers have their Xs, etc.

What graphical symbol would you use to represent being single? Is it a different symbol if you are choosing not to get married?

Yes, I recently purchased an iPod. Yes, that means I am a big music nerd. Yes, that means I will further bore you with iPod minutia:

1. I would really like it if, after I sync my iPod with iTunes, it would submit any unaccounted playcounts to Audioscrobbler. I would suspect alot of people’s music consumption happens on their iPod instead of iTunes…
2. I would be a much more studious tagger if it wouldn’t keep switching away from the “rating” mode. I very rarely change the volume or fast forward into songs. All I do is rate. I want it to never leave that screen.
3. This is more of a product design thing, but I would really like to have the a more tactile option than the touchwheel. Sure, it’s nice and smooth, but I might favor a knob or thin disc with a little finger indent like on a home stereo. The main benefit would be to have it notched so that you “feel” the equivalent of a click as you browse menus or rate things. (I often select something wrong if I don’t squarely lift my finger off the touchwheel.) Success would mean being able to navigate/rate without ever having to look.

Another good one from Idea a Day: “Create a rating system for product packaging which evaluates ease of opening. Given that many products are absurdly difficult to open – CDs, milk cartons, blister-pack electronics, for example, the rating system might encourage more user friendly packaging. The rating organization could be either commercial or non-profit making and would allow use of a ‘Ez Open Seal of Approval’ for those products that qualify.”

Anil Dash’s unsolicited advice: “It doesn’t matter if you thought of it first, or if your idea is better. If you didn’t do anything with it, if you didn’t push it, then don’t come complaining when someone else get noticed for it, or gets attention for it, and their effort succeeds.”

Great idea on Idea a Day: Launch a web based news service that gives an alternative view of major news stories but with a positive and more realistic spin. For example, in the event of an air crash the site would give statistics on how many airplanes had taken off and landed safely that day. This would help mitigate the sensationalism that dominates today’s news by reminding us all that the world is generally a pretty great place.

Fast Company: Hidden Asset: All great ideas have at least one of these three key elements: You do things right, you do the right thing, or you do something new.