Archive for October, 2011

Bike stuntmen, Munich awaits you!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 27, 2011
in Odds and Ends
. 0 Comments

Pedestrian crossing light in MunichI’ve already addressed pedestrian crossing signals in Germany, but here’s a truly surprising one, which I sighted in Munich.

So what does it mean? One can imagine what the intended usage is, but if one were to believe the images literally, this signal tells you when it’s OK to do acrobatic stunts on your bike in the middle of the road, and when it is not…

What a Circus-friendly city Munich must be! 🙂

Plug and Gag, Take 2

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 15, 2011
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

A while ago I took HP to task for their tendency to fill your hard disk with hundreds of Megs of software when all you need is a printer driver. I am happy to report that they’ve improved their ways… sort of.

Back then, I wrote:

It is not good manners to sell someone a printer, and then to blast hundreds of megabytes of software onto their hard disk, without so much as a pretty please.

So now I bought a new HP printer and this time it did say pretty please. It asked me whether I wanted a full installation or a minimal installation. Hooray! Of course I opted for the minimal one… I would report happiness, except that the minimal installation – the bare essentials, according to HP – filled 461 Megabytes of my hard drive. Want to guess what a full install would have required?  🙁

What would they need 461MB for? Well, I haven’t even begun to explore the content of this unwanted bloatware, but I can report that the installation process included animated videos showing how to plug the darn machine into the power socket, and so forth (and these are still on my drive, in case I might forget how that is done…)

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, I guess…