Category: Odds and Ends

Off-topic and unclassifiable stuff of interest

Square is beautiful!…

September 26, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Sometimes you find elegant design in the places you least expect it.

We stayed in the Dan Carmel in Haifa, and the small supplies in the bathroom came in color-coordinated little boxes: shower cap, cotton pads, the usual stuff. Still, they failed to go all the way: they had tall bottles for the shampoo and a round box for the shoeshine sponge:

Hotel Dan Supplies

Which reminded me of a much better attempt at such standardized packaging that I saw in the Hotel Silken in Zaragoza, Spain:

Hotel Silken Supplies

They had ALL the supplies fit in square packages, made of either cardboard Square Eggs at the Silken Hotel in Zaragoza or plastic, and these all fit like a puzzle into a rectangular cardboard tray. Even the shampoo bottles were square and fit the scheme perfectly. It was a delightful design, injecting elegance into this utterly mundane collection of supplies, so I share it here.

These guys had such a thing going for the rectangular form factor, that even the sunny-side-up eggs they served for breakfast were square!

Can you guess what this device does?

September 17, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

They say that form follows function. So – take a look at the form of this strange device, which stands about a meter tall. Can you guess its function?

Smell Display Device at teh Potsdam Biosphere

No, it isn’t a trashcan with dreadlocks.

I saw this thing in the Biosphere at Potsdam. This pleasant museum is smaller and less ambitious (should I say, less pretentious?) than the one in Arizona, and serves very well to exhibit different ecosystems to the visiting public.

The item you see here is a display device for displaying smells. You sniff the end of a tube to get a whiff of the plant shown on the round image below it.

Did you guess?…

Watch the beauty!

September 10, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

These days, every product and service come with scary warnings intended to cover the maker’s back side in case you harm yourself. Electrical appliances warn you not to drop them in water (Duh!), restaurant menus tell you you can die by eating their food (not here, thank God, but in the US they do), coffee cups tell you their content is hot, an so on ad nauseam.

But the strangest, and strangely endearing, manifestation of this must be the sign we saw at the entrance to the Baha’i gardens on the slopes of Mt. Carmel in Haifa. Here is the sign:

Bahai Gardens sign

What they tells us is that the beauty of the gardens is such that we might be distracted into not watching our step and falling down one of the hundreds of steps that take you downhill!

And I must hand it to them… they aren’t exaggerating. These gardens are mind bogglingly serene and beautiful, though the risk is probably from trying to snap photos instead of looking where one is walking. The photo below shows only a small portion of the gardens, with the shrine of the Bab, a prophet of the Baha’i religion, in the background, and the port of Haifa even farther out.

The Bahai Gardens in Haifa

This small photo can hardly do justice to what we saw there, but may give you a hint. The real thing is simply breathtaking!

The real thing, in cross-section

August 29, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Hedgehog skeleton Learning what makes things tick is a major pleasure for a techie… read my opinionated view on how one should teach the structure and function of objects, whether natural or technological, in the latest article on my Possibly Interesting web site.

Tools 4: The right tool for the job

August 27, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 3 Comments

A major cause of accidents and frustration is trying to use the wrong tool for the job.

Professionals usually know, and have available, the right tool. Amateurs and beginners may be blissfully unaware of it. When I was just starting into homebrew electronics in my teens, I actually used to drill holes in metal with a hammer and nail! I soon discovered the hand drill, but for the larger holes required for mounting tube sockets, panel meters, and such I had to drill a circle of small holes, then use a file to painstakingly smooth out the jagged contour this left. This is definitely the wrong tool…

I became aware of the right tools after maybe a year of slaving over those holes. First came a chassis hole punch, where you’d drill a hole as thick as your finger, and use it for the screw that connects the punch’s two parts across the metal; tighten the screw and the punch eats the metal like butter. Making the finger-thick hole was still a matter of drilling and filing, until I discovered the Reamer, a sharp tool that widens the initial hole in seconds.

Chassis punch set

Lastly, I found the de-burrer – a tool for removing the sharp metal burrs that might remain around your hole. My trusty metal files got a well deserved rest, and I could focus my time on designing better electronic circuits… and enjoying their realization in hardware much more.

Reamer and deburrer

Whatever work you do, if it’s hard and frustrating, if you’re not enjoying it, you may be using the wrong tool for the job.

Babylonian memory technology

August 25, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

A gem I saw in a museum recently: this is a large cuneiform-inscribed cylinder, maybe 3-4 inches thick, which describes the building activities of king Nebuchadnezzar (better known in the bible for his opposite exploit when he destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC).

Babylonian Cuneiform Cylinder

Anyway, in one of those moments of associative memory, it struck me how similar this looked to the contact-studded drum memory devices of the ABC, or Atanasoff-Berry Computer, one of the earliest electronic computers (1941), pictured below at the left. One is also reminded of the magnetic drums that served computers for memory in the 1950s, like the one to its right.

Computer Memory Drums

The idea of using a drum for computer storage makes good sense in terms of allowing it to be scanned easily by rotating it; but the Babylonians probably used this form because it allows you to cram much text (and many construction exploits, if you’re a busy king like Nebuchadnezzar, he of the hanging gardens of Babylon) into a relatively compact object.

Also worth noting: The king’s memory cylinder is still readable after more than 26 centuries; so, can you read your 5-1/4 inch floppies any longer?

Engrish on a camera LCD screen protector

August 22, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 4 Comments

I bought a screen protector for the LCD display on the back of my Nikon D40, and I just have to share the wonderful text on the back of the package, which reads:

Engrish

I’ve already expressed my incredulity at this sort of stuff; this one is just for your reading enjoyment.

Incidentally, the product itself is excellent, LCD panel guard for Nikon D40 far better than the cling-on film type protector I tried before it, which simply fell off one day (in other words, did not have preservation status such as new product). This one is rigid and attaches to the camera at its raised edge. And of course, it always keeps 100% transparency because become UV coating processing work!

Where old projectors go to die

August 20, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

overhead projectors I was visiting a hospital, and passed by a seminar room where my eye caught the items in the photo, sitting on a custom stand in the corner.

Remember these? Used to be, they were so ubiquitous that they were instantly recognizable: an overhead foil projector and a circular magazine slide projector.

These days, no one uses them anymore… it’s been years since I even saw one of these. It’s PowerPoint everywhere. In fact this seminar room had a new LCD projector fixed to the ceiling. But these academic institutions are conservative: they throw nothing out. These useless devices may well linger there for years. And so, we are afforded a peek into a not all that distant past..

Great service for a CardScan!

August 1, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 3 Comments

The day I left New York to fly back to Israel I bought, on an impulse, a CardScan business card scanner at Best Buy. I’d received all these cards from colleagues at the IORG conference, and the thought of typing all the details into my computer was depressing…

Anyway, I got home, installed the software, and the scanner wouldn’t work right. Yikes! I mean, I build electronic gear, so I know this can happen… but I was thousands of miles from the nearest Best Buy. I’d just transported a paperweight halfway across the planet!

So I called CardScan’s tech support number, and a nice gentleman there took me patiently through some troubleshooting and concluded that the hardware was at fault. The guy told me he’d get someone in touch about a replacement and I went to sleep. Next day I get an email from a Mr. John Phillips in Canada, who is with OptiProc, a CardScan reseller. He told me to send him a scan of my receipt, my address, a description of the fault, and so on; and he’ll ship me a replacement as soon as I did. Not after considering my reply, mind you; nor after I send back the unit. Immediately when he gets my address. And he did; in fact he FedEx’d the new unit, for added speed. Only when this tested OK – which it did – was I to post the old unit back to Canada.

Good customer support is a key part of the user experience, and this is as good as it gets – so, kudos to CardScan, to OptiProc, and to John!

CardScab business Card scanner

The scanner, by the way, turned out to be a cute little gadget – you place a card in its input end and seconds later it’s scanned, OCR’d and parsed into your contacts database. A truly useful device if you venture often outside your cubicle and actually meet other people!

Tools 3: How to test a tool?

July 25, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

Another thing worth knowing is how to test a tool before you buy it. Claw Hammer testing

Different tools have very different methods… for example, I was saved from losing a lot of money because I knew how to test a Curta mechanical calculator before buying it (basically you start with all zeros, subtract a 1, then add it back. The readout should be all nines then all zeros again. This tests much of the inside gearing in two seconds).

Testing a hand tool can be even simpler. When I started into DIY I had this manual that had a section on hammers, including the paragraph shown at right. I used this test to select a claw hammer, ending up with a Stanley Hercules that has served me well through countless projects, and as you can see below it passes the test well. And if you think this is not very important, I can tell you that this hammer can drive nails right into anything without slipping or bending them, as a low quality tool often would; you supply the momentum, the hammer takes care of convincing the nail it had better go straight in. A real pleasure to use!

Stanley Hercules claw hammer