Mushrooms should be picked with a basket. But it is cumbersome to carry a basket just to maybe find a mushroom.

Instead carry an ordinary plastic bag and something to expand the bottom of the bag. The same something should be foldable to be equally easy stored in a pocket. I am thinking of a spring in an O shape or a springy band of metal or a plastic surface or whatever. 10cm of twine and a found bendable twig should do the trick too.

An Id should be unique in an HTML document.

I have yet to find a plugin that checks for duplication.  I want the info to be clearly visible but unobtrusive; a bit like Ghostery’s info box.

Since many years consumer marker power drills (or any hand power tool) come with a case. Nice to store and protect the tool. But otherwise mainly useless.
But why does the case always have room for only the tool and nothing more? It is not a space question because if you put a hand power drill in a rectangular carrying case there will be room left. Unless the manufacturer makes sure the free space is unusable. More expensive tools are not much better even though there are those who stand out. A bit.

Think like this:
You have a power drill. You are most certain to need the very drills too. so make room for a cartridge or two. You have a sanding machine. You most certainly need papers; and possibly some space for lightly used papers. And the small tools for making adjustments.

Now when the carrying/storing case is usable; make it more usable. Putting a ruler, either right in the plastic or as a sticker doesn’t cost a penny. Make the case usable as a straight edge. And a square. Make it possible to open it to 45, 90 and 135 degrees (at the time of writing I can’t see the use for this but at the same time I can’t see the contra usefulness for it either). Hand saws have had 45/90 degrees handles for years.
Make the cases compatible and stackable. Get together for a standard, license free of course – users are tired of tie in, to be stackable with competitors. Make room for an extra cable. And a torch. And let the cable have a LED indicating voltage.

Make the case usable in such a way that the owner can invent uses himself. No one can foresee all possible needs and hacks. Here is one: A couple of times in my life have I been on the need of a make shift lathe. If the case had been part in whatever I made up for solving the problem I would also have remembered the case as a part of the tool. Not as just a cheap plastic case with no use.

When cool switching (alt tab) with virtual machines one often switch application on the caller.  This is not wrong per se because if we’d change this we would instead have the problem with not being able to cool switch on the calling machine.

If you use virtual machines and alt-tab you know the problem.

Can’t we use alt-caps-lock for this?  Yes we can.  But how?

Sites for selling used stuff might be too global. If not other, scamming is increasing due to the anonymity.

Why not a site that is oriented around your neighbours? “is there anyone around here that has a used bike for toddlers?” “is there anyone in the block that has a used sewing machine?”

Now think about the attic and cellar. Stuff you don’t necessarily need to keep but don’t put in an ad due to the hassle. Just jot down what it is you’ve got with a picture and let the ad linger.

When I take notes in an editor or Googledocs or Evernote or whatever I use at the time I sometimes have information I really want to jot down in the contents of the notation.  An example would be name of a server and then usr/pwd at the same or next line.
Having 1 secret thing in a document makes the whole document equally secret.  That is a shame when the rest of the document can be read by colleagues and customers.

A solution can be to encrypt just the sensitive stuff.  In an editor it could be prefixed with <encrypted> or <encrypted login=”uniquename”> like so:

Just copy everything between, or including, the tags to an application and enter the password that corresponds with your name.  If you have an intelligent enough editor you can have a macro for the same; position yourself in the tag and choose Decrypt from a menu.

This way you can have a document with secret data without being afraid of it getting into the wrong hands.

One could also replace the encrypted data with a URI to an online storage or application for your secret data.  Working within the Microsoft stack one could have ones domain usr as name/login and let it work without having to enter any password.

One can have the same concept within a (text) field in a database.  Instead of encrypting the whole field and missing out on all the index capatibilities just encrypt the secret stuff.  This could also simplify some user management.

I see some difficult design choices when I mentally try to adapt the idea to a team and a person and a team of teams and some roles.  What makes it difficult is more of user/passphrase handling and not of implementation crypto wise.

Emacs has something like this with its org-crypt.el.
Evernote has it built in.  The encrypted text is replace with a small icon.  Open it and enter you password.  Simple enough.

When a site is overloaded we get an error message in return.  Why not a queue ticket instead?

Here is the real world example behind the idea:
A telecom company released a good offer and reached tens of thousands of potential users.  Soon the site was overloaded and everyone got error messages instead.  Then it gets even worse since people start reloading and increase the load even more.  Plus some customers might be irritated and skip the offer.

So:
When the site gets overloaded: pipe the requests to another server, preferably in the cloud for scaling purposes, and give people a ticket.  Ask for an email and send offers out in batches, with link to another site.  Throttle email and servers to have a steady load.  It costs more but each and one of these tens of thousands of failed requests is a potential customer.

When you start the oven it goes into a warm-up phase.  When the right temperature is reached a light turns off.  It means I have to watch that light once in a while to see if the oven is warm enough.

Why not let there be a small chime when the temperature is reached.

Not an electronic beep because there are already so many irritating sounds around us.  Just a nice little chime please.

I have a google calendar. My spouse has a microsoft live one. I can’t get them to synchronise.

I have found no way to synchronise the two calendars.

I have for a long time thought about a site helping people share cars when commuting. One day it struck me that every man sitting in his 1500kg steel cage sits there because he wants to. It’s his time to be alone and feel free and powerful. Alas, a site for helping him get company in the car would not be visited very much.

But… there are people with long commutes. I am thinking of 2 hours or more. For such a long commute more energy can be spent on finding company, shared fuel money, ebooks and whatever is wanted for long trips.
A web site for them might be helpful.