For the third or fourth time in the last week, I’ve caught myself trying to treat my iPod or cell phone as an additional display connected to my Mac. A few times it’s been because I wanted to skip a song on the iPod, so I moused over to the edge of my screen, and was slightly irritated when the cursor didn’t pass over to the iPod’s screen.

Today, it was my cell phone, because I had received a text message and I wanted to read it. Again, I tried mousing off of the edge of my screen to the phone’s, to read the message. I guess I’ve been spoiled by Teleport.

This got me thinking: why can’t this become a reality? How awesome would it be to have every device in your home/office connected? When I get a call on my cell phone, why not pass it though to the Skype headset plugged into my Mac? Or use a keystroke to skip a song on the iPod. I’d love for my cell phone, or even my Vonage phone, to be able to display the caller ID info to me via Growl.

Currently, I have my Xbox 360 connect to my Mac via Connect360, which is great because it allows me to stream music and movies from my Mac in the basement office to the Xbox upstairs. But if these two devices were truly connected, I should be able to view the content I’ve downloaded on the Xbox on my Mac. Or use my Mac as an external storage for game saves.

I would love to see my fridge on the local network. I don’t really care about being able to surf the web from the ice maker, but an email reminder when it’s time to change the water filter, or even an RFID reader and a series of tags on the various bits of food, would be awesome. When it’s time to make a shopping list, I could ping the fridge to know what’s in there, and know exactly how long that carton of milk has been in there. After all, later this year you’ll be able to do this with the toolbox in your truck. Essentially, I’m envisioning my house being one large machine, with each device acting as a smaller part within that larger machine.

I know that I can’t be the first person to think of this, or even try to implement it. And sure, it conjures up images of Skynet, or even that Halloween episode of The Simpsons where the robot house tries to kill Homer and steal Marge away, but I’m sure that we could see it happen without anybody being eaten by the garbage disposal. I like to think that one day this will all happen and be commonplace, but at the same time, I’m afraid that I’ll be too old (or dead) to care.