Visiting my parents place, and the power went out in the middle of the night. And I started thinking about what devices do and do not work. And I had an idea: The Emergency Podcast Network.

The idea being a localized (say. by zipcode) podcast that contains emergency info. It could include police/fire, utilities like power/water/gas/telephone/cable, evactuation info, etc.

For devices that can show text the info would be included as text files. Other devices could do the “text as filenames in playlist” trick. Devices that can show images could include maps.

You could do a map trick, and figure out the zipcodes a trip will take you through, and download all the approriate info.

Since it would be a huge number of localized podcast, the audio info could be generated with speech synths or phone menu style prerecorded snippets.

It might actually make a podcast that would be useful.

I want a website thats similar in concept to the Pocket Ref books (and other similar to-the-point all content/no filler references).

Then of course, it should be freely available (for the most part, the information falls into “facts”, and most of what doesn’t could probably be found in public domain works).

And searchable. Then the killer app would be to bundle it up into an app for a Palm or Pocket PC.

Just in case you ever need to calculate the velocity of air in pipe. Or know the approximate tensile strength of a grade 8 1/2 bolt. Or the type of household voltage in Iceland. Or the area of a regular octagon. Or the triple point of water. Or the density of carbon steel.

Seems like it could fall under Wikipedia since at least some of that info is already there.