Category: Odds and Ends

Off-topic and unclassifiable stuff of interest

The delight of postage stamps

October 2, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 5 Comments

Just got a letter from the UK, and it had this colorful stamp on it.

Postage Stamp

For an instant, I felt that special twinge of joy that an interesting stamp elicits; only after a moment did I remember that (a) I no longer collect stamps, not since I was a kid I don’t, and (b) none of my friends does, nor do they have kids that do that I might give the stamp to.

This is a shame, really, because postage stamps have a built-in ability to delight. They are often beautiful, they come from wondrous distant lands, they have a story to tell in their miniature image, and they are eminently collectible. In this way, every letter that you or your circle of friends and relatives received had the potential to surprise you with a “bonus”, a tiny capsule of serendipity where the stamps it bore could be boring or fascinating, depending on the luck of the draw.

All this may soon be over. I don’t know whether stamp collecting is on the decline (I suspect serious adult collectors do exist, but children may be more into video games these days). But the stamps themselves may soon be obsolete. People send less personal letters since the advent of email, and I’ve just read that the UK is planning postage stickers you can buy online and print out, and these have a bar code, not a picture (they also took out the queen’s ever-youthful profile we see in the stamp above, causing much consternation).

But meanwhile stamps still exist, and I know of one guy who makes full use of their joy-creating potential. He is a fellow History-of-Computing collector, and an eBay seller of slide rules; when I buy one from him it invariably arrives in an envelope covered with a mosaic of small-denomination stamps, each one different, all beautiful.

Postage stamps on envelopes

The riot of color is so cheerful that I collect these envelopes. What a nice way to delight one’s customers!

Couch potatoes vs. Movie theaters

September 25, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

One sign of the times is that movie halls are closing one by one around us, victims to the surge in electronic alternatives. We know this from direct observation – they really are closing – but I had an unexpected demonstration of this fact in a TV ad.

The ad was by the Hot cable company we subscribe to, and was aimed to convince us to use their Video on Demand service. It showed how difficult it supposedly is to get a movie without their VOD: it graphically showed how you need to go down 20 stairs to the street, walk a mile to the Videomat, check if it has a movie you want. No? Walk another mile to the video store, get the movie, walk back… you get the idea.

Nice ad, but what amused me is that 20 years ago they would’ve said “Go down 20 stairs, get in the car, ride downtown, and enter the movie theater”. These days, that just isn’t seen as a viable alternative! You’re expected to either slump on the couch in front of a cable movie, or rent a video and slump in front of that… and these guys want to deprive you of even the little exercise you’d get walking to the video store 🙁

Chained skeleton

September 15, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Was filling up the car at a gas station when I noticed a bicycle chained to a signpost at the corner. Well, part of a bicycle…

Chained Bike Skeleton

As you see, this bike has been there for a long time (enough to develop serious rust), and in the meantime it lost wheels, seat, handlebars and more. Only a bare skeleton remained, as if the bike had been dropped into a river of mechanical Piranhas.

So what? So it suddenly reminded me of the image of a human skeleton chained to a wall, a literary device used all too often in the pulp horror fiction of my childhood, in more recent action movies, and even in some respectable literature. The poor bike had lost all its removable organs, but the predators that did this never bothered to unchain it from the signpost…

Bless old style artisan shops…

August 28, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 2 Comments

We needed a standing lamp for the living room, and went shopping. We started with some of the larger lighting stores around town, and found a great many lamps, mostly imported from China. Like most manufactured goods today they were inexpensive and looked like they would do the job – for a while. The workmanship was usually shoddy and of course there was nobody to tell that I prefer the on/off switch to be just at this height, and I need a longer electric cord, and would love it if the lampshade were just a bit wider…

After a while we were beginning to consider compromising, but decided to first try Karl Marx. This is a small old style shop in downtown Jerusalem; it has been there forever, and I never entered it, though it did attract my occasional amused glance because of the coincidence of its founder’s name.

Karl Marx lighting shop, Jerusalem

The shop occupied a tiny room crammed so tight with lamps and lampshades that one could barely stand in it (the photo doesn’t begin to convey this). And there we found a lamp we liked, which we could get with any shade we wished, because they’re made to order by the owners; in fact, we were guided courteously through all the possibilities and ordered one decorated to our specification with a frieze in a color and style to match our living room rug. And of course they promised to construct it with the switch where I wanted it, the cord the needed length, and so forth. The quality and workmanship, too, were perfect.

This is one of those old fashioned Mom and Pop businesses that represent the skill and dedication of a lifetime (or more), and produce goods handmade to a standard no longer seen in the mass-produced disposable products that flood the large chains. I should be sad discussing it, because these wonderful shops are fast disappearing; but I’m too delighted in the excellent lamp Messrs. Marx made for us!

A noble piece of hardware!

August 10, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Engrish is all around us; here is a recent sighting that made my day.

Noble Keyboard by Teac

This is from the box of a Teac Media Systems slim multimedia keyboard, model TK-5108. One can’t help but wonder whether this item is noble by birth, being descended from a long line of aristocratic peripherals, or is its praise the result of some outstanding feat demonstrating strong nobility of character. 🙂

A solution to the energy crisis?

August 3, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

A few days ago I saw this interesting setup on the wall in a medical center.

Obviously, this is the solution to the world’s energy needs. No more greenhouse emissions, no need for nuclear power plants, no oil shortages… just a clean, compact, self-contained electrical version of the classic Perpetuum Mobile.

Power Strip in a loop

The sign, in case you’re rusty on your Hebrew, says “Please don’t press the switch. “. An most reasonable request – interrupting the flow of free electricity would certainly not do…

Where Computing meets Pseudoscience

July 17, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Just posted a new article on my History of Computing site: Biorhythmic calculators.

I have three of these wondrous devices, mechanical servants to a debunked theory. They use three different design approaches to achieve the same goal, and their mechanisms are therefore composed of the same functional components implemented in completely different ways.

Go take a look!

Here, try the headup publisher’s widget!

July 16, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

I’ve blogged before about headup, Semantinet’s semantic search add-on for Firefox. Well, the creative folks at Semantinet are forever doing new things (one reason I like working there, despite the traffic jams between Jerusalem and Herzliya :-), and the latest is the headup publisher’s widget.

This tool uses the same semantic search technology in a much lighter package. It is intended for bloggers and news sites, who can use it to integrate the ability to bring in additional information about entities it recognizes – places, people, companies, books, bands, and the like – into their pages without any need for the user to install anything. The tool simply adds slight dotted-blue underlines under words it recognizes, and if you mouse over these and click the icon that appears you get a compact pop-up that brings you basic summary information, photos, videos and news items about the entity you clicked – whether it be Paris, Barack Obama, IBM, Haifa, or Roberta Flack.

So – since this tool is so easy to integrate in a blog (one line of code, that’s all!) I went ahead and put it into this post. Check it out, and give us feedback in the comments: is this useful to you as a reader? How can it be improved? Your comments are welcome – and can influence the course of this new product’s evolution!

Tweeting in a dream

June 19, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Tonight I had a dream where I was going through some boring paperwork at some public office and the guy behind me in line asked me if I knew what Twitter is all about. Ever helpful, I took out my Nokia smartphone and showed him how I tweet. I don’t remember what I posted, and my Gravity client only displays outgoing tweets from the real world, so we’ll never know.

A few months ago I blogged about how blogging had crossed over into my dreams, and now Twitter followed suit.

We’re making progress here! 🙂

Tweet tweet, I’m on Twitter! (Oh, frabjous day!)

May 24, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Yes – after a long time saying I draw my line at “real” blogging, I’ve taken the plunge and set up on Twitter.

Twitter Bird And guess what? It looks like it’s gonna be a good move in many ways. The “what can you possibly say in 140 characters” objection I’ve already taken care of when I became active on Facebook; The tools available, for the PC and for my mobile device, look excellent; many of my friends are already up there; and the interlinking of tweets, blog posts, facebook updates and even full length articles on my web site looks natural and promising.

We’ll see where this goes; will post updates here when I have some more insight. Until then, you can follow me (I’m nzeldes, not surprisingly).

Tweet!