Author: Nathan Zeldes

http://www.nzeldes.com

Water ashtrays?

January 8, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

I was waiting for a Cappuccino at a coffee shop and asked the girl making it to also give me a glass of water. An incongruous conversation ensued:

Girl: To drink or to smoke?

Me: Huh?

Girl: To drink or to smoke?

Me (the sensible part of my brain trying to stop the engineer’s part from concocting images of transforming the glass of water into an improvised Hookah): How would I smoke a glass of water?

Girl: Oh, sorry. You don’t smoke, right?

Right. So then the girl obligingly demonstrated, picking up a disposable plastic cup and mimicking a smoker holding it in one hand and flicking ashes into it from an imaginary cigarette in the other.

And so I discovered that following the draconian ban on smoking in public places, and thus the removal of ashtrays from the cafes, smokers figured that a plastic cup with a protective puddle of water in it can serve as an excellent mobile ashtray to use either indoors or (if they get chased out) on the go.

There is no stopping the human spirit!

The demise of Tinkering

January 5, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

The progress of engineering over the years has brought us many triumphs of human ingenuity, but it has left quite a bit of roadkill behind. One species driven to the brink of extinction is the Tinkerer.

The attitude to Tinkering has always been ambivalent. Look at the dictionary definitions:

tinkerer [noun]

1. a traveling mender of metal household utensils.
2. A clumsy repairer or worker; a meddler.
3. a person who enjoys fixing and experimenting with machines and their parts.
4. a person skilled in various minor kinds of mechanical work; jack-of-all-trades.
5. Scot., Irish English.
a. a gypsy.
b. any itinerant worker.
c. a wanderer.
d. a beggar.

What a mix! On the one hand, a person skilled in fixing things; on the other, a beggar, a clumsy worker…

The truth is, this was an extremely useful person in centuries past. This was the ingenious man who made the rounds of the county, a wanderer indeed, and who knew how to fix everything that had broken down since he last came. All the newfangled contraptions that were useful to the villagers but beyond their ability to fix: sewing machines, radios, bicycles, gramophones, tractors… And this tinkerer had manifold skills – a real jack of all trades – but even more so, he could improvise, making replacement parts from whatever was at hand, working around the missing or broken pieces. Take my favorite definition of engineering – The art of making what you want from things you can get – replace “making” with “fixing”, and you have the Tinkerer’s calling. Above all, this is “a person who enjoys fixing and experimenting…” – someone who loves his work, hence deserving our respect.

And now he’s a threatened species, for two reasons having to do with how we design our technology today: first, because we design it to be discarded at the first failure, so no need to fix it; and second, because with the advent of microprocessors, most items cannot be fixed by improvisation. If your car acts up, you need to get it to an authorized garage where they hook it up to a computer that tells them what to do; no way can you take a screwdriver and a shoestring and fix it… and in any case we specialize so much that no one person can fix the electronics in a sewing machine, a DVD player and a car.

Too bad – those tinkerers had a technological flair to their way of life and their vocation that will be missed – or not, once we forget they ever existed. 🙁

New year, new freedom!

January 1, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 3 Comments

First, wishing all readers of this blog a superb new year. May it be far better than the last one, yet worse than the one to follow it.

For my part, this year heralds a new freedom – after 26 years of doing many wonderful and innovative things at Intel, I decided it’s time to do more wonderful things elsewhere. Yesterday was my last day as an Intel employee, and today I started working for myself (the advantage being, me and my new boss are guaranteed to get along splendidly 🙂 )

So, what will I be doing? Helping organizations cope with the challenges posed by today’s intense 24×7 combination of computing, communications, information and a dispersed, overloaded, anytime-anywhere workforce; and improving the software tools involved in all this. Details TBD, but stay tuned… interesting times are ahead.

Meanwhile, and more relevant to the theme of this blog: new job, new tools! Will be blogging my opinion of them as insight materializes (and time permits).

Happy 2009, folks!

Nokia E71: 40 years of progress in handheld devices

December 26, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 10 Comments

I just got me a Nokia E71 smartphone. It looks like a particularly well-constructed gadget, though I reserve judgment until I’ve used it a while – stay tuned!

However, I can already share one observation: the incredible amount of technology crammed into this tiny device. A few years ago we’d marvel at its slimness if it were only a cellphone; but it isn’t only a cellphone. It’s a cellphone, and it’s a PDA, and it’s a GPS, and it’s an MP3 player, and it’s a video player, and it’s a recorder, and it’s a radio, and it’s a web browser, and it has bluetooth, and it has WiFi, and it has Infrared, and…

Nokia E71 smartphone and JRC VHF transceiver

You get the idea: this device has everything under the sun, and it’s still tiny. So for comparison, I present it here next to another 2-way communication device, a VHF transceiver made by the Japan Radio Co., Ltd., sometime in the sixties. I won this at a raffle in the annual meeting of the Israel Amateur Radio Club in the early seventies; and at the time I had to get a special license for it, it was such a big deal. It was also considered very miniaturized, since it used transistors and could be held in the hand – just like the Nokia beside it; however, this JRC was not a PDA, and it wasn’t a GPS, and it wasn’t an MP3 player, and it wasn’t a video player, and it wasn’t a recorder, and it wasn’t a radio, and it wasn’t…

You get the idea: back then it was all they could do to pack a radio transmitter and receiver into this 9 inch long box; today, the sky is the limit. And so, one can safely state, we’ve come a long way… and I can’t help but think that, with all respect to Kubla Khan and his stately pleasure dome, it is Nokia’s engineers who should be credited for giving us a miracle of rare device !

Butter and common sense

December 23, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

These days food products come with lots of information, as mandated by our well meaning consumer protection laws. Information, however, does not always enlighten us.

I was looking to try a butter spread that doesn’t harden into a brick in the fridge. There are many such products on the supermarket shelves, each proclaiming its virtues – “Naturally soft!”, “Easy to spread!”, and so forth. What they fail to explain is what about the product makes it resistant to hardening. Is it a mechanical texture? A chemical additive? A food chemist would probably figure it out from the ingredient list, but not us regular mortals.

Lurpak spreadable butter So I want to give kudos to Arla foods, the Danish maker of Lurpak butter. Their spreadable product bears the following inscription: “Made with specially selected butter, blended with just enough natural rape seed oil to make it easy to spread directly from the fridge“.

This may be less quantitative than the usual ingredient list, but it makes a great deal more sense: you can immediately grasp what was done to the butter, to what extent (what a clear image, “Just enough”!), and that no “unnatural” acts were involved.

And indeed, it does spread well directly from the fridge.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

December 19, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

Had this strange deja vu at an IBM HRL seminar… I met there the CTO of PopTok, a start-up with a product that allows you to use short video clips from your favorite movies, TV shows, and music videos in your online conversations on Facebook or IM chats. So, if you wanted to express anger, you could use a short clip of King Kong throwing a tantrum; and so on. The clips provided come from well known movies that have become a part of our popular culture.

So, this immediately reminded me of the Star Trek TNG episode Darmok, one of the more memorable ones in the series IMHO. There, Captain Jean-Luc Picard has to establish communications with a humanoid alien that seems to speak in riddles, until Picard realizes that the alien’s nation can speak only through allusions to its shared folklore and mythology; so, if they want to denote the establishment of friendship after a struggle, they say “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”, referring to two ancient heroes that underwent such a process at that place; and so on. It’s a weird (and rather dubious, perhaps) linguistic practice – but then, as we used to reassure the kids when they were very young, it’s only a story… and it’s a good one.

Anyhow, expressing oneself by sending representative clips from universally known movie folklore instead of straight text seemed very similar to that alien practice…

Multi-device remote controls

December 15, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 2 Comments

Used to be, a TV set had a remote control (used to be, farther back, it didn’t; but that’s prehistory). These days, however, everything has a remote control; indeed, I can’t wait for someone to create a tiny remote control for the larger remote control itself! 🙂

Three Remote Control units The proliferation of these gadgets has created a real problem, and home electronics makers are responding by creating R/C units that can control more than one item; most typically, a TV set and the DVD, PVR or VCR feeding it.

Which is all very well, but how do you make one control work on many devices without confusing the user? There are different ways, and they vary in their usability a great deal. Let me illustrate with three units from my home: the remotes for (left to right) our LG recording DVD, our old Sony VCR, and the HOT cable company’s PVR. The first two can also control our Sony TV; the red one controls the cable box, the TV and a DVD or VCR. And each goes about the choice of function in a different manner, seen in the close-up photo.

Remote Control close ups

The R/C on the left simply has a section at the right dedicated to controlling the TV, with its own On/Off switch and channel and volume controls. This results in some redundancy with the controls of the DVD (which also has power and channel controls) but it completely eliminates any possibility of confusion.

The VCR controller in the middle incorporates a disappearing species – a mechanical slide switch at the top that determines what device is being controlled. The buttons on this unit change their role depending on the position of the switch, and have color coded dots to indicate whether they apply to the TV. Having to slide the switch is a bit more of a hassle than with the black R/C but at least you get definite visual feedback of which position you’re in.

The red unit works like this: you have to press the button (in the second row) corresponding to the device you wish to control; then, until you press another of these buttons, the unit controls that device. This is for sure the cheapest to produce; it’s all in the electronics. The price you pay is that there is no visual feedback at all; if you forget what you pressed, you will find yourself changing channel or cycling the power on the wrong equipment. There is also no labeling of which buttons work with which device.

All of these units do their job, but to my mind their user friendliness goes down from left to right. Not surprisingly, so does the cost to produce them…

Where have all the cradles gone?

December 12, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 2 Comments

In the early years, when portable electronic devices were considered wonderful miracles of technology, they used to come equipped with cradles. These would at a minimum charge them – the case with the “dumb” cellular phones of the day – and later also provide cabled connectivity to a computer, as in the early Palm Pilots. The cradles were meticulously designed to be functional as well as good looking; I remember a cellphone I had that had a two-slot cradle – one for the phone, the other for charging a spare battery. And it was indeed utterly convenient to plop or push the device into the cradle before bedtime and forget it until the next morning.

So where have all these cradles gone? These days, even the smartest devices charge through one cable and connect through another; connecting a cable is no major problem, but it is still less comfortable than dropping a device into a slot, and it leaves the device flopping about on one’s desk with much less dignity than the cradle afforded. Some manufacturers do make cradles as accessories, or you can get them from third party manufacturers, but they are much less common today.

Palm PDA in a Cradle and HTC smartphone with a charger's cable

Of course, a cradle is less portable; when I had my Palm V I had to buy a separate “travel kit” that replaced the cradle with a cable and plug arrangement. But when I would return home from a trip I’d be greeted by the more permanent arrangement, hooked up to my notebook’s docking station.

I was never certain whether the cradles of yesteryear were eliminated to reduce manufacturing costs, or because users preferred the flimsier cable system. What is your view on this choice?

The ideal fly repellent solution

December 8, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 2 Comments

There are many solutions that claim to repel flying insects; some even work.

For instance, there are chemicals – stuff you put on your skin, stuff you burn like incense – at least this makes sense: we can see how some smelly material may offend the insect’s finer sensibilities. Then there are hi-tech solutions, like the electronic gadgets that supposedly emit a hypersonic sound that mosquitoes can’t stand. We once tried this out – my son sneaked up on a mosquito standing on a wall and turned the gizmo on right next to the critter’s ear (or whatever they have). The insect didn’t even deign to move an antenna; maybe it was deaf (or maybe we were sold the electronic equivalent of snake oil).

Water bag used to repel flies But the most amazing device is one I snapped in a restaurant today: a nylon bag filled with water, hanging from the rafters (I’ve also seen them hanging from tree branches occasionally). And this traditional system is in use not only in Israel – as I discovered in Google, the same method is used in the US, Mexico and elsewhere: so it’s really globally known.

I asked the waiter why a water bag will drive flies away, and he said with great certainty that the fly sees its own enlarged reflection in the water and it scares it away. I heard this explanation before; presumably the fly thinks it just met a bigger, meaner fly, and decides that retreat would be prudent.

I have no idea whether anyone confirmed this theory (any input on this is welcome), but whether the explanation is correct or not, you have to admit this is one solution that is perfectly acceptable from all angles: environmentally friendly, harmless to humans, humane even to the flies, and as cheap as it gets.

A gentler car horn?

December 5, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 3 Comments

Car horns are designed to be earsplitting; if the driver in the next lane starts to swerve into your path, you want to be able to alert him with a blast he won’t mistake. For such safety related uses, the high volume and jarring tone are justified.

However, people also use the horn for another purpose – to draw another person’s attention. The driver in front is dozing off when the light changes to green? Honk! You want to ask directions from an absent minded pedestrian on the sidewalk? Honk, honk!

The problem is, we only have one horn, which – as noted already – is designed to be loud. Yet for waking the sleepy driver at the light you don’t need a loud blast; a gentle beep would be quite enough, and reduce the noise pollution on our city streets. And we don’t have a gentle beep in the car!

So, what can we do about this? Many drivers ignore the matter and just use the loud horn. Others, the more considerate ones, try to hit the horn button fleetingly, cutting the blasts short. But it would be most useful to everyone if auto makers were to simply equip their cars with two horns – a loud one for emergency use (activated from the steering wheel as today) and a more quiet one, that would be triggered by a smaller control, for drawing attention without annoying the general population. In fact, this could be designed to emit a pleasant tone or tune that would create goodwill rather than antagonism and road rage at the receiving end…