Check out this humble black marker pen. What about it, you ask? Well, look at the close up: this marker marks most surfaces, is waterproof, practically odorless, safe… and has a cap off time of up to two weeks without drying up. What about it, you ask? Just think of the hi-tech perfection that this … Read more
I never dreamed I’d be blogging a post with the word Eyjafjallajökull in its title… Anyway, this volcano is belching again, and airports are closing again – and one can’t help but wonder at the shoddy maintenance practices of these Icelanders. I mean, it’s not like they don’t know a volcano needs to be properly … Read more
I’ve lamented before the disappearance in our time of the Tinkerer, that fix-everything general technology expert of ages past. I ran into a demonstration of how far he’s gone the other day when shopping online for a new bluetooth hands-free cellphone car kit (my old one conked out, and fixing it would of course have … Read more
I’m sure this happened to you: you call the support number of your bank/phone company/whatever, go patiently through all the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menus, get shunted to an “all agents are currently busy” music, waste long minutes listening, and finally get a human to talk to. You explain your request, and the agent politely … Read more
I sent a friend an email with an attached Zip file. It bounced, with a message from “System Administrator” that read Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients. Subject: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The following recipient(s) could not be reached: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx … 552 5.7.0 review our attachment guidelines. u14sm9443132gvf.20 I figured maybe the … Read more
Working in Adobe Photoshop CS4, and I just bumped into a menu item I needed that is grayed out. This does happen: Photoshop has a huge wealth of commands and capabilities, and many depend on the context – for example there are things you can only do in RGB color mode and not in Indexed … Read more
Driving on today’s highways can be an aggravating (and dangerous) experience, and it doesn’t help that you can only communicate with the other drivers around you by honking your horn – not exactly a medium conducive to feelings of brotherly love. So one day, while wishing I could yell at the driver of the truck … Read more
A few days ago I was at the IEC history of computing museum where they also exhibited their progress in map making – from old blueprints and paper maps to modern CAD and GIS software. They had there an old 1960’s map that caught my eye – a 1:50,000 topographic map by the Israel Survey … Read more
Back to my Sygnet Bluetooth Handsfree Carkit model BTS600. We saw its problem with cloaking the controls and indicator lamps… but on top of that, the people at Sygnet played a trick that is becoming very common in this digital era: they overloaded the controls and the lamps. I use Overloaded in the Object Oriented … Read more
Two of the least pleasant-to-use GUI controls are the scrollable list box and its cousin the drop-down list, especially when they have many items listed. Of course, that’s exactly when they are indispensable… you can’t use radio buttons for 50 choices, so if you need to let the user choose a state of the union, … Read more
