I've had this idea in my head but I doubt I'll ever use it for anything, so I wanted to write it down.

When I pause a TV show, on TiVo or Netflix I assume the play head will stop exactly where I left it. When I hit play it starts from precisely that point. This is great for when I pause to use the restroom or grab a glass of water.

However, when I pause and to go to sleep or to take care of dinner, I wish the play-head would slowly creep backwards until finally stopping at a good 20 seconds before where I originally stopped the play-head.

I often find myself hitting the 30-second rewind button on my TiVo controller whenever I come back to something I've been watching. It'd be nice if that could be programmed into what I'm using.

This idea though isn't about play-heads, it's about cutting out those small interactions we inevitably find ourselves participating in when we don't need to. My iPhone knows that if I just locked my device and decided to restart it within a few seconds it won't ask me for my passcode again. The same happens with the OS X screen saver password.

In both cases time affects precision or control of a variable which in turn, I think, provides a comfortable interaction. I like that.

Joshua's post about unbundling the tools for deploying publishing components reminded me of a service I wish someone would make.

I want someone to build a user preferences service that would free up developers from having to re-implement settings and preferences in their applications. Something like Cocoa's NSUserDefaults that provides an interface for retrieving and storing user preferences in a user's local library.

update: Someone pointed out I wasn't completely clear with this. The idea is the service runs in the cloud and provides an interface for any application to query and store key/value pairs per user.

I previously wrote about this idea (five years ago!) and I still want it.

Lazyweb: A bot that scours the web looking for "@torrez" and then tweets a mention at me with the URL.

Set up a PA system on a street corner where morning commuters are walking by with their mp3 players. Offer to plug their mp3 players into your PA system for a few minutes.

Coming out of weblog retirement (almost one month!) to point to Availabot. Availabot is: a physical representation of presence in instant messenger applications, which means Availabot plugs into your computer by USB, stands to attention when your chat buddy comes online, and falls down when they go away.

I still want a USB enabled telegraph.

This is my philosphy. I don't have much more to add to it. Buzz has a bit more to say on it so I'll just link there.

The Big Word Project is like the Million Dollar Home Page with a clever little twist. Pick a word, if it's available, pay a dollar a letter and have that word linked to your site. It's kind of fun to do. I bought two.

Found on daringfireball.

Oh jeez, this is so obvious and brilliant. Put all your credit card, phone, bank, airline, and other customer service numbers in your address book which ultimately end up on your phone if you're syncing.

Here's a bonus tip I do at home with my fire-proof lock box: I leave the key in the lock. If anyone came to steal it they'd just open it, see all I have is a passport and social security card and leave it. Nothing worth stealing in there.

I would like an RSS reader with a button that says "Gimme 5" and it loads only five posts people with similar subscriptions are reading within the last 24 hours. Then as I read each one, they disappear so that I once again have a blank inbox which I can click "Gimme 5" or just go on to do something else.

Yes, I'm inventing a little treat dispenser, but dammit I need portions.

I want a river of news items generated by all the people in my company and what they're doing. Something like the Torrez Notes/Sippey/Facebook design where I can see that Frank just closed the build, Justin fixed a bug, and James sold a huge campaign.

Thankfully we have a platform where we can direct that flow to an XML feed if we wanted to, but does this sound like something anyone else would like at their job? I think so.