Nathan's Possibly Interesting web site
Commonsense design blog
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design
Just posted a new article on my History of Computing site: Biorhythmic calculators. I have three of these wondrous devices, mechanical servants to a debunked theory. They use three different design approaches to achieve the same goal, and their mechanisms are therefore composed of the same functional components implemented in completely different ways. Go take … Read more
I’ve blogged before about headup, Semantinet’s semantic search add-on for Firefox. Well, the creative folks at Semantinet are forever doing new things (one reason I like working there, despite the traffic jams between Jerusalem and Herzliya :-), and the latest is the headup publisher’s widget. This tool uses the same semantic search technology in a … Read more
The other day I noticed a car whose side mirror had recently undergone some major trauma, losing its mirror and outer casing, ignominiously showing its guts. Here: These electrically-operated mirrors are now ubiquitous, but this brought home the complexity of their inner mechanism, with the wiring, motors, pivots and the chassis that everything must screw … Read more
I needed hard copy of a paragraph from a long text document, so I opened it in my trusty old editor (Programmer’s File Editor by Alan Phillips, a powerful freeware editor I use in lieu of the pitifully rudimentary Windows Notepad). I selected the paragraph and opened the Print dialog, recalling that there was an … Read more
Here is a photo from a parking lot. As you see, one parking spot has been mutilated – apparently, as an afterthought – by sticking two poles in it. The intent, clearly, is to keep a clear path to the stairs leading to the sidewalk above. A valid idea, but ill-executed in so many ways… … 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
Tonight I had a dream where I was going through some boring paperwork at some public office and the guy behind me in line asked me if I knew what Twitter is all about. Ever helpful, I took out my Nokia smartphone and showed him how I tweet. I don’t remember what I posted, and … Read more
I called someone in the US and he wasn’t at his desk; the system helpfully informed me that the guy was not available but that I could …please leave a message – or, during business hours, press zero for assistance. It was during business hours. I pressed zero. The system cheerfully told me: Please hold! … Read more
My account on a social networking group froze me out, so I wrote their support an email explaining that I can’t log in, with details of how this came about. I got a wonderful reply indeed: Please follow the following steps: 1. Log in to your account … Wonderful! I replied “You’re joking, right?” and … Read more
A couple of weeks ago we saw a poorly designed twin mains socket. Whoever designed that one wasn’t very bright, but he was a genius compared to the person who mounted the socket strip we see here: I found this setup in an office building. Ignore the shoddy execution of the cable conduit below, but … Read more