Yesterday after work I was running on Oriental Parade, and I thinking about all the iThings my wife and I have.

I've got a black iPod Nano 2Gb 1G, Daniela has a green iPod Nano 4Gb 2G, and we also have an old 20Gb iPod (4G), the wedding gift from my brother, with a custom engraving with the wedding date (22/01/2005). So we have 3 iPod.

But an iPod is sad if it is left alone, so I have a lot of other iThing around my home:

• Lanyard Headphones for my Nano, so it hangs on my neck and wires don't get tangled
• iHome alarm clock, so I can wake up listening to my favorite playlist, and I can also snooze it
• Radio frequency remote control, so I can control my iPod from anywhere in the house
• Voice recorder: Daniela uses it to record the yoga courses to listen again when she goes to work
• iDog I won as 4th prize for last December Community Credit competition
• green armband, later replaced by the Nike+ armband
• and of course the Nike+ sensor and receiver (more on this in another post next week)

But the accessory I like the most, and that shows the level of extensibility of the iPod is the car radio adapter for my Audi A3. With that adapter, the radio treats the iPod as a 6 disc CD changer (5 playlists + the "all songs in the iPod in alphabetic order")

As soon as you plug the adapter cable in the dock connector of the iPod, it shows the Audi logo on the screen, and when listening to the music you can read the songs being played.

The click wheels is disabled, but you can navigate through the playlist and through the songs with the "next/prev CD" and "next/prev song" in the radio.

The iPod firmware has been designed so that any accessory could draw on the display, change the way the click wheel works (or disable it), write files on the memory (both audio and text) and, of course, navigate through the songs and change the volume. An accessory connected to the dock can do everything it wants to do .

Too bad there are not public API or command specs to program your own iPod. Would have been a nice way to throw away some spare time.

You may have noticed that this post has a lot of images linked using the Lightbox library that will ship with next version of Subtext. Also this is a test for a WLW plugin I'm writing: more on this in a future post.

PS: This is an enhanced version of the post I wrote a few days ago on my Italian blog: "Sono forse un iUomo?".