Category: Odds and Ends

Off-topic and unclassifiable stuff of interest

Water ashtrays?

January 8, 2009 / / 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:

HookahGirl: 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!

New year, new freedom!

January 1, 2009 / / 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!

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

December 19, 2008 / / 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…

The ideal fly repellent solution

December 8, 2008 / / 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 fliesBut 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 / / 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…

Ergonomic keyboard or Snake oil?

November 19, 2008 / / 5 Comments

Was at Office Depot and noticed a keyboard on sale that was touted as the Anti-RSI keyboard from A4Tech. Anti-RSI position on A shaped keyboard from A4Tech

This, according to their web site, has an innovative “Natural A shape” layout that allows you to type ergonomically with your wrists held in their natural position, rather than bent at a strained angle. The site shows this convincing-looking diagram:

So I examine the keyboard, and it’s the exact same layout as on a normal one, but the keys are diamond-shaped so the lines between their edges have that “A” shape.

Anti-RSI Keyboard from A4Tech

Which is nice, except that when I type I hit the tops of the keys, not their edges, who for all I care can have any shape at all. In fact, I hold my wrists at the correct angle when using any keyboard, and would do the same on this one.

So… either I’m missing something, or this is nothing but hype.

Any insight, anyone?

World Usability Day 2008

November 13, 2008 / / 1 Comment

Today, Nov. 13, is World Usability Day, sponsored by the Usability Professionals’ Association.

World Usability Day

This has been running since 2005; each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 225 events are organized in over 40 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.

This year the theme is Transportation, with various practitioners and organizations addressing the impact of transport methods and practices on people and on the environment we live in. And while browsing some of this, I found this interesting research report from the UX Alliance on Parking Meters around the world, with a focus on their ease (or not) of operation. Turns out that “… no two parking meters … are completely the same and that the complexity of operating the parking meters varies considerably. There is a world of difference between the auto-detecting parking meter in Tokyo and the complex and error-prone parking ticket dispenser in Amsterdam.” The report, with numerous photos,  is quite interesting and insightful about proper design (or otherwise) – recommended reading!

Cappuccino for two

October 18, 2008 / / 4 Comments

One of the small pleasures of life is sharing a fine Cappuccino on a weekend morning at home. The only difficulty is, you need a way to produce one, and we don’t have a professional machine at home like they have in a proper coffee shop. We do have the means to make strong espresso – one half of the Cappuccino story – but what of the milk? We had a battery-operated propeller thingy that was supposed to beat milk into a froth, but it left much to be desired.

Enter Tupperware. This innovative manufacturer of kitchen plasticware came up with a gizmo for making foamed milk – the “Magic milk cappuccino maker” – that shines in its ingenious simplicity. It consists of a small plastic jug with a lid that allows through a round metal mesh – a strainer – on a rod. Here’s how this works:

First you fill the bottom third of the jug with milk, put on the lid and microwave for 2 minutes to get the milk hot.

Tupperware Magic Milk Cappuccino Maker

Next you put in the strainer, close the lid, and pump the rod up and down rapidly a few times. The mesh moves through the milk and foams it up in no time – very effectively.

Tupperware Magic Milk Cappuccino Maker

Meanwhile you produce the espresso in your Brikka, put it in the cups and shovel in foam and hot milk from the Tupperware jug. The entire process takes under 5 minutes, most of it waiting for the machinetta to boil. And here we are:

Homemade Cappuccino

Lovely, lovely Cappuccinos… none of the artwork a barista may make in the foam, but just as pleasant to consume.

In case you didn’t know…

October 10, 2008 / / 0 Comments

And now, a nice sighting from Pil and Galia.

They report buying a coffee press made by Bodum, a leading maker of these ingenious devices. And on the bottom of the box came this enlightening revelation: “Boiling water and children should be kept apart”

Bodum coffee press warning notice

At first I actually thought this was said in jest, a sophisticated attempt to remind people of the danger without sounding too officious; but the other versions made it clear I was giving Bodum an unwarranted benefit of the doubt. The French warning is the silliest: it says that “Boiling water can be dangerous for children”. Which raises two immediate replies (beyond the obvious “Well, Duh!“):

  1. Can be?
  2. Why only children? What about adults?

Oh well, at least the coffee is good.

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