Nathan's Possibly Interesting web site
Commonsense design blog
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design
Today I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the Computing and Communications museum of the Israel Electric Company. The IEC has been around for almost a century and has kept pace with computing advances since its early days; curator Dlila Shapira did a great job rounding up some lovely vintage pieces from the … Read more
I have a desktop and a docked notebook on the same desk, which I never use concurrently, so I decided to reclaim precious desk surface by keeping only one screen, keyboard and mouse and switching them between the two machines with a KVM switch. An online check discovered the cute KVM-0221 2-Port USB KVM Switch … 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
When I got my Nokia E71 smartphone, I also bought a hands-free device for it: the Sygnet Bluetooth Handsfree Carkit model BTS600. This actually works quite well – it wirelessly identifies the phone on my belt when I get in the car, and until I leave the car all calls are routed to this device. … Read more
I was interviewed recently by the Columbia Journalism Review for an issue they were putting together about Information Overload, and as promised was then mailed the hardcopy magazine in a manila envelope. I was heartened to see the stamp in the photo on the envelope. Obviously this did not apply in my case – The … Read more
Well, many friends asked to stay current on my adventures outside the cubicle farms, and though it’s early days, here is one thing I’ve been up to: I spend one day each week working with a start-up called Semantinet. It is an attribute of start-ups that they both empower and expect every person in their … Read more
“Truth in advertising” sometimes seems an oxymoron, and the cosmetics industry is hardly where you’d expect to find much of it. So hats off to Neutrogena’s Norwegian Formula hand cream, whose statement on the tube that it “instantly relieves dry or chapped hands – just a dab needed” is absolutely correct. They claim it was … Read more
Check the latest addition to the History of Computing exhibition at the Possibly Interesting web site: Michaelis’s concrete calculator (well, actually, Kvasnicka’s version of it).
For the last couple of years I kept saying I’m not buying a DVD recorder until the VCR dies. Well – the VCR died, so I went and bought a DVD recorder. In fact I bought a dual-mode unit that has a VCR and a recording DVD in the same box. I thought I was … Read more
It’s hard to speak ill of Adobe Photoshop. Even its painful price tag is well justified by this application’s incredible power, which I’ve been barely scratching in my many years as a faithful user. Still, there is one inexplicable sin its designers have committed. Tastes vary, which is why Microsoft have included in their Windows … Read more