nzeldes 
Recently I replaced my old Mazda 3 with the new model. The two are practically identical – why mess with a good thing? it’s a fine car! – but there are some minor differences, and I’ll be blogging them now and then… they afford us a peek into the design team’s thinking processes. Here is … Read more
As a conscientious techie I do what many car owners don’t: I check the oil and other fluids in our cars once a month, rain or shine. But our latest car, the 2007 Renault Clio, seems determined to foil this good intention. It used to be simple: A fluid would either have a straight dipstick … Read more
“O knob, thou whose perfect roundness doth . . .” Nah. A poet I’m not. Still, I would if I could, because the round knob is a fast disappearing species, a trend well worthy of lament. Throughout the 20th century the round control knob was a mainstay of human interface design for electronic devices. With … Read more
Many times, a small change in a design makes a product a lot better. You know the modern version of the office water cooler: a vertical unit that dispenses cold (and in many models, also hot) water into disposable cups. Well, I’ve just seen one that made my day. The unit in the photo, a … Read more
Our kitchen light fixture started to char its plastic housing, so we went and bought a new China-made one, equipped with two concentric fluorescent lamps like its predecessor. It was only later, after much climbing ladders and drilling holes overhead, that the problem appeared: try as we might, fitting the two lamps seemed impossible to … Read more
Recently I discussed how workers at customer call centers can turn into computer-like zombies. The other day I stood face to face with such a person. I was trying to order two coffees at a fast coffee shop. My wife likes her espresso with a drop of foamed milk on top – “Espresso Macchiato”, meaning … Read more
Until now, we had paper money, and we had plastic – which meant credit cards. Well, now the distinction is blurred: as of April, Israel joined a growing list of countries that have plastic paper money! See the two 20 Shekel banknotes above. The one on the right is the trusty ol’ paper banknote, showing … Read more
I’m getting to like the Lenovo blogs more and more. Consider this sentence, from an early version of an About page they had: Finally, if you need to speak to someone, live, give David Churbuck, Lenovo’s Global VP of Marketing a call, his cell phone is 508 360 6147. This was regrettably removed later from … Read more
My friend Jeff pointed out to me a novel implementation of a coffee-to-go carrying device, in use in a coffeeshop chain in Germany. The assembled device in use is actually less elegant than the usual little tray-with-handle cardboard carriers we’ve had for a long time; in fact you can’t even plop this one down on … Read more
Every commercial piece of software we use comes with an End User License Agreement (EULA), which we all merrily accept without reading. After all, who has time to read a rambling document of barely decipherable legalese that we can’t do anything about anyway? Sometime I do glance through them, and my blood pressure shoots up … Read more
