Author: Nathan Zeldes

http://www.nzeldes.com

Vanquishing those pesky Torx screws

May 19, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

We live in an age of throw away technology, and for me, the silver lining of this has always been to take old products apart before trashing them. It’s fun, and it’s instructive to see how computers, home electronics, even the occasional appliance are built inside. And of course, you may bring to light gems like the 10-platter stack from inside a 1980’s PC hard drive, shown below.

Platters from a 1980's hard drive

The problem is, to get at this you need to open the drive up, and these are closed tight with scary “warranty void if removed” stickers (not a problem) and a dozen screws like the one above, right, that never have a normal Phillips head for which a normal person will have a normal screwdriver around! The use of more esoteric screws like this Torx screw makes dismantling delicate electronics a problem. What is needed, of course, is a specialty driver, but who has those?

Precision multi-driver set So, I kept accumulating old hard drives from long gone computers… intending one day to take a power drill to their pesky screws, but never getting around to it… until one day I got fed up and solved the problem once and for all.

I went and bought a whole set of non-standard driver bits – not only Torx, but many other weird shapes, thirty bits in all. Not something I’d use daily, but it’s good to know I will never again be stumped by a stupid screw.

And of course, I took to my pile of old drives and had a field day taking them apart!

Dismantled Hard Drive

Torx screwdriver

Tesseract – an action comic for the ultimate geek

May 14, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Tesseract Comic panel New on my Possibly Interesting site: a weird superhero comic spoof that I drew when I was studying Mathematics in College. It follows closely the style of 60’s Superman comics, but it takes place entirely in the domain of geometrical figures (and no, at that time I hadn’t yet read Abbott’s Flatland). Lost for years, it had surfaced in a drawer of old stuff, and I figured I might as well share it: if you, too, were a comics fan, and a geek to boot, you may enjoy this.

You can get the single episode ever drawn here, and you can read a bit of background here.

More waste of time

May 13, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 3 Comments

Last year I reported on the inefficient design of a teleconference system, as far as respect for the user’s time is concerned.

Today I sat through a really lovely case of this design issue. This system, speaking with a booming, ebullient voice, took me through the following:

System: Welcome to the conference center!

System: Please enter your passcode followed by the pound sign!

[I did]

System: Please hold while your passcode is being verified!

System (1 second later): Your passcode has been accepted!

System: You can press Star-Zero At any time during the conference to receive additional assistance!

System: At the tone please say your name then press the pound key!

[I did]

System: At the tone, you will be placed into the conference as the third participant!

Obviously, it would’ve been enough if after the second line – once I input the correct passcode – the system had connected me. All the rest of this monologue is useless (OK, in some situations, asking me to say my name may be useful too; but none of the rest).

And in fact, when I was placed into the conference, another participant who had just run this gauntlet of useless chatter said “I wanted to yell at the system “Just SHUT UP!”“

Not that the system would have listened… 🙁

A feast of technical illustration

May 9, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

A picture is worth a thousand words – when it is a good picture. There is a huge gap in effectiveness between the best and the worst illustrations you see in technical and scientific publications. The trick is to convey the essence of what’s being shown, whether it is a machine, a building or an anatomical detail of some biological specimen, without drowning it in the irrelevant; and it gets trickier when you’re dealing with cutouts and other means of showing inner details of complex systems. Many illustrators never get the hang of it…

But today I accidentally surfed onto the site of Beau and Alan Daniels, producers of “cutaway, ghosted and phantom view illustrations in various styles including: Blueprint, watercolor, photorealistic, pencil, pen and ink, pastels, and black and white line art”… and they have an extensive portfolio there of incredible illustrations spanning technology, science and biology that is truly a feast to the eyes. I simply had to share it with you!

Take a look and enjoy!

Tiny phone, humongous software

May 4, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

I already praised my Nokia E71 smartphone, that marvel of miniaturized power. Well, today I tried to update Nokia PC Suite, the software that runs on my notebook to allow it to sync with the smartphone.

And as I was clicking through the installation process, something caught my eye in the dialog below:

Nokia PC Suite Installation Dialog

It was the number in parentheses: 290MB. That’s 290 million eights of binary digits.

And in case anyone thought this tool can calculate the answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything, or something equally formidable that might justify a size that not long ago would have sufficed for an entire operating system, the dialog explains: with this tool, you can connect your phone to a PC and access mobile content. I remember a tool I had long ago that did the same sort of thing; it was called LapLink and had fit on a floppy disk.

To be fair to Nokia, they aren’t the only ones pushing bloatware with their hardware; but the irony of a cool, tiny phone coming with a huge piece of support code is hard to ignore.

Car LED signs and the brotherhood of drivers

May 1, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

Driving on today’s highways can be an aggravating (and dangerous) experience, and it doesn’t help that you can only communicate with the other drivers around you by honking your horn – not exactly a medium conducive to feelings of brotherly love.

So one day, while wishing I could yell at the driver of the truck in front of me to please move a bit to the right so I might overtake it safely, it occurred to me that we badly need a means of car-to-car communication. One idea I had was to install a loudspeaker on every car like police cars have – so we could say “the yellow truck, please move to the right!”, or “Green Toyota, your back wheel is wobbling, better check it before it falls off!” or simply “Thanks!” when someone had slowed down to let us merge.

It then occurred to me that this could lead to a real cacophony on the road, so I had a better idea – why not simply add a LED marquee at the back of the car that would allow the driver to broadcast short messages to the car behind – say, “Sorry about that!” or “Keep a safe distance!” or even “You idiot, who taught you to drive?”…

Car LED Sign from Iwoot.com This would be easy to do at the factory, but when I checked it out today I discovered that it exists as a retrofit: the charmingly named web company iwoot.com (the name stands for I Want One Of Those) sells a “LED Car Sign” that fits in the rear window and has an ingeniously simple controller allowing the driver to change the short messages displayed.

Great minds think alike… 🙂

Humanity’s victory over rust!

April 27, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Sometimes we need a reminder to realize the triumphs of Science and Engineering that went into the most common everyday objects. Take our ubiquitous stainless steel cutlery: what was it like when this recent addition to materials science – and our dinner table – suddenly made rust a non-issue?

Early Solingen stainless steel tableware

Check out a somewhat quirky tour of this story of progress in the latest article on my Possibly Interesting web site!

Use consistent terminology, WebEx!

April 22, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

Used to be, at the beginning of every (face to face) meeting ten minutes would be wasted on getting the slide projector going. Today many meetings are virtual, but the same time is still wasted while people try to log into the shared meeting workspace…

A case in point: I’ve just participated in a meeting using WebEx to share documents across the world. Nice. But the meeting started ten minutes late, because it took me that time to wade through the invitation email and figure out what I had to do. Now, I’m not perfect, but I’m an experienced IT engineer… so what was this delay about?

The meeting invite email (which was quite lengthy, and included no less than seven links, of which I only needed two) told me to dial into a tollfree phone number to join the audio part. When I did that I was cheerfully welcomed by a machine that told me to dial my “access code or meeting number followed by the pound sign”. I started to scan the email frantically looking for a meeting number or an access code; none were to be seen. The message contained various long numbers, mostly inside the link URLs, so I tried those in random order. The one that finally worked was the last one I tried (naturally) and it was the number the message referred to as my “Session number“.

So yes, maybe I’m naive, but if they want me to dial a session number, couldn’t the recording say “Please dial your session number“? Or, better yet, “Please dial the session number found near the top of your invitation email”?

The Sweep Hand and the concept of Time

April 17, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

I met a guy who had an old Swiss chronometer watch, a self-winding mechanical one. As I looked at it, admiring the fine workmanship, I suddenly noticed a detail that used to be taken for granted: the thing had a seconds hand that was moving around the face of the watch.

Omega mechanical wristwatch So what, you say?

So, it was moving, not in the swift jerky jumps we’re so used to in today’s superbly accurate Quartz watches. This hand moved at a constant rate, sweeping around the watch, which is why it used to be called a “sweep hand” back then. I remember this from my father’s watch when I was a small child: I would try in vain to discern any movement in the hours and minutes hands, but the sweep hand moved in its slow, stately march, signaling the inexorable continuity of time.

And it occurred to me that the switch from mechanical to electronic analog watches makes the seconds hand mirror the zeitgeist of their respective periods in history. The jumpy quartz-driven hand is such a great fit to the hectic, jerky pace of our modern life, whereas the sweep hand is a better reflection of the more sedate lifestyle of centuries past…

Gotcha, Google translator!

April 14, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

I was checking some French using Google translator, and discovered that – contrary to my French teacher’s insistence back in high school – “La langue Francaise” means “English language”!

Of course one doesn’t expect perfection from machine translation, but this was different than the usual silly mistakes: a translation program ought to know the meaning of the name of a language it translates, after all. So can it be that Google, in its staggering growth to encompass all knowledge, has finally reached true intelligence and reasoned that the above translation is correct on some higehr level – the way Douglas Hofstadter pointed out in his immortal “Godel, Escher, Bach” that “Borscht“, when translated from the Russian, may need to be converted to “Campbell soup” to convey its ubiquity in the respective culture?

Nah… not likely. I actually played a little more – for instance, “La langue Francaise” in Italian, according to Google, means “Lingua inglese“, not “Lingua Italiana“. I suppose by posing such questions to the program one could map where the problem lies in its cognitive functions, like one tries to localize brain damage in a patient by mapping input/output relationships in an interview. So is Google Translator a conscious entity after all, albeit a brain-damaged one? 🙂