The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design

The demise of Tinkering, Take 2

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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

Newark airport signage… one more time!

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We saw that Newark Liberty International airport has some serious problems keeping its electronic signs straight… here, and here. Well, here’s a third and (for now) last installment. This is the baggage claim area at the Continental domestic terminal where I landed coming in from San Francisco. See the nice colorful sign identifying this baggage … Read more

Grand Prize for Engrish

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We’ve discussed Engrish before… it’s always hilarious, but this one beats them all. Read it through! This is from a very nice flannel shirt imported by Azouri Clothing Ltd, and manufactured in China. The amazing part is that in addition to mangling the spelling and grammar, as in “You can’t using bleash”, which is fairly … Read more

Shrinking print magazines

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I discussed the growing obesity of our paperbacks before… and now, a look at our print magazines, with show the exact opposite trend. This trend is visible in many magazines (Fast Company is a good example), but I illustrate it with an old favorite, Scientific American. Here are three issues from my shelves. See the … Read more

More silliness at Newark

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We saw how the electronic boards at Newark Liberty airport made the ridiculous omission of adjusting for the Daylight Savings move. Evidently this is not an exception: something is very wrong with that airport’s electronic signage. These guys have an “Airtrain”, an internal elevated light rail system for moving between terminals. The train has two … Read more

Mr. Babbage’s marvelous engine

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In the US, where I just gave a lecture at a conference on Information Load and Overload, and of course I found the time to visit the wonderful Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This is always a delight, but this time they surpassed themselves: they demonstrated the newly built Difference Engine #2 in action! … Read more

A time lapse at Newark

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Had to take a flight out of Newark airport on the morning after the move from daylight saving to winter time. The preceding evening I took good care to set my alarm clock and wristwatch back the required hour, and took off to the airport in the morning. And when I got there, I was … Read more

Headup wordpress plugin – add semantic browsing to your blog!

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I’ve mentioned the headup publisher widget before. This nifty add-in identifies entities (places, people, companies, books, etc) mentioned in a site it’s installed on, marks them up with a dotted underline, and when you mouse over them a small pop-up comes up with information, news, photos and videos about that place/person/whatever. That was then. Now … Read more

We aren’t all noobs!

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One gripe I have with the help systems in many consumer software applications: they’re written with the assumption that we users are all clueless newbies. Take the Microsoft Office tools: they have many advanced and powerful capabilities; it is both interesting and useful to know what exactly they do. But the Help system only gives … Read more