Everyone knows that the QWERTY keyboard layout sucks, because it carries a legacy from the early typewriter days; still, we’re all locked into its use and live in oblivion of what we’re missing. But we have another legacy from mechanical typewriters that is hard to forget because it bites us daily. i REFER TO THE … Read more
A gem I saw in a museum recently: this is a large cuneiform-inscribed cylinder, maybe 3-4 inches thick, which describes the building activities of king Nebuchadnezzar (better known in the bible for his opposite exploit when he destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC). Anyway, in one of those moments of associative memory, it struck me how … Read more
I recently bought this box of vitamins, and noticed it had a life size outline of the pills’ actual size. This makes sense, since the box is “safety sealed for your protection”, so people can’t see what’s inside before they buy. This reminded me (wonders of associative memory!) of something rather different, yet following the … Read more
When we toured Scotland we visited an ancient building with a curious design feature: it had a staircase that ran in a counterclockwise spiral, opposite to the standard design. We were told that there are a number of such buildings in Scotland, all built by the same family. Apparently the Kerr family tended to have … 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
A riddle: what’s rectangular and flat, can fit in your pocket, and can calculate six-variable functions? No, not a pocket calculator; I forgot to mention – it has no electronic components whatsoever. Here, check it out in the latest addition to the HOC collection on my Possibly Interesting web site.
Dominic Tramontana has posted an interesting analysis of how the Reload glyph varies between browsers; take a look! Dominic asked me to post a screen shot I have of NCSA Mosaic, the first graphic web browser developed in 1993 by Marc Andreessen. The grab I dug up is of a Novell web page, from early … Read more
Reuse is good, right? And the notion conjures in most of us an image of linking code modules. Which is why I was astounded to run into the following case, while touring the beautiful island of Sicily. Here you see your intrepid tourist in front of the Duomo (cathedral) of Siracusa, the city where Archimedes … Read more
We humans have this obsession with designing new products, even though many of them die out after a while (some, mercifully, after a very short while!) However, every so often a design is found that is simply so good and sensible that it stays around for a long, long time. So, here’s an example I … Read more
