Derek Punsalan examines the interface choices available in a selection of washing machines, or as he puts it, not going into orbit, just looking for clean clothes. We’re a long way removed from the relative simplicity of the old machines, although one of their added features involved losing an arm. Innovation isn’t just about incremental improvements and greater safety, it means more features, more buttons and more blinky lights.
The article reminded me of an exam question in a human-computer interaction course that I took years ago. We were asked to describe the best user interfaces that we had encountered. I chose to describe the space-heater in my room, it was great. The machine had one button, one switch and a few LEDs. You pressed the button to turn it on. The LEDs indicated the current temperature, and you pressed the button again to cycle through them. The switch on the base allowed the heater to rotate. After moving to an exceedingly hot top-floor apartment, I no longer needed the heater. So, I lent it to a friend’s housemate, who decided to dry clothes on the wee thing. It blew up. Although she was lacking in the brain department, the girl still has all of her limbs.
I’m still a fan of minimal hardware interfaces, with Apple handhelds being the obvious example. Another one of my favourites are the basic CrockPot models — one switch with three settings (off, high, low). Although, they’ve tried to muck things up with all manner of digital crap. But that’s progress.
Sledgehammer and whore, a great story from a screenwriter named Josh, which details an unusual break-in at his office and how it could be pitched as a show.
Sanjoy Mahajan’s book, Street-fighting Mathematics, is about the art of educated guessing and opportunistic problem solving.
In problem solving, as in street fighting, rules are for fools: do whatever works—don’t just stand there! This engaging book is an antidote to the rigor mortis brought on by too much mathematical rigor, teaching us how to guess answers without needing a proof or an exact calculation.
The book is available in traditional dead-tree format and also for download under a Creative Commons license.
A reporter asked Steve Jobs, “How many man-years did it take to write Quick Draw?” Steve asked Bill, who said, “Well, I worked on it on and off for four years.” Steve then told the reporter, “Twenty-four man-years”. Obviously Steve figured, with ample justification, that one Atkinson year was the equivalent of six ordinary programmer years.
The main source is written in Pascal, and is quite beautiful to read — you can tell that he took pride in it. The rest of the code is written in assembler language for the 68000 processor.
In 1913, Wolfgang Riepl, chief editor and a Nuremburg daily, made this statement in his dissertation concerning ancient modes of news communications.
New, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms.
The old doesn’t necessarily die out. In some instances, the old methods are absorbed or recycled into a new form. In others cases, those methods are refined and distilled down to their essence.
Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.
The article skewers the online practice of writing headlines for machines, rather than readers. A good headline will likely garner just as much attention after being picked up by a human, and subsequently blogged, liked, retweeted and carrier-pigeoned, as it would from being a top search query.
Talking Carl is an iPhone app that will record some audio and play it back at a higher pitch. This is what happens when you place two of them beside each other.
There’s something about this video that had me doing a deep belly laugh. It’s probably the slight pause before it becomes unintelligible. It reminds me of watching Gir from Invader Zim
For example, students in the graphic design course asked me to give them lessons in color, insisting they knew nothing about it. This really surprised me. My immediate answer was, “But you should teach me! You’re surrounded by color and use it in such powerful ways in every aspect of daily life. I admire you for it!” Their response was to laugh and say, “But Teacher! That’s not design! We need to use design colors.” From talking to my students and people in the cultural sector, I got the impression that design was this distant, quite artificial, field they had to adapt to.
Enough fat to fill nine double-decker buses is being removed from sewers under London’s Leicester Square. A team of “flushers” equipped with full breathing apparatus has been drafted in with shovels to dig out an estimated 1,000 tonnes of putrid fat.
Pleasant.
Update: Just in-case you wanted to see some video footage of the fat removal.
In any case, says the science history professor, “this is the first occasion I’ve ever discovered where someone discovered something and immediately decided to blow it up.”
It was one of those scientific theories that had “good idea” written all over it.
You can still buy a giant box of LEGO with 1600 bricks. That’s for those people that moan about the number of paint-by-numbers sets, branded kits and general non-creativeness of LEGO compared to when they were growing up. I’d also recommend the x-large grey baseplate — it was one of my favorites.
An interesting set of advertising posters from the 1950s recently uncovered at the Notting Hill Gate tube station in London. The passageway had been sealed off when the lifts were replaced with escalators.
Typekit and Google have teamed up to create the open-source WebFont Loader. The software can make use of Typekit’s extensive library, Google’s new collection of webfonts or it can be self-hosted.
The Big Bang wasn’t an explosion of stuff like atoms or molecules, it was an explosion of a place and instance, it was the creation of when and where. Before the Big Bang there was simply nothing, there was no ‘where’ nor was there a ‘when’. It doesn’t even make sense to say ‘before the Big Bang’.
A bewildering tangle of options. To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. The site has gone from walled garden to glass box on a busy street corner.
This recent image of typesetters, from Shorpy, reminded me of a photo that I took at the National Print Museum in Dublin awhile back. It was of a boy’s indenture agreement to serve as an apprentice compositor in a Letterpress shop. Highlights of seven years service include: no fornicating, gambling or frequenting of ale-houses. I’ve transcribed the document and made the text available.
John Goerzen has archived Gopherspace (all 40gb) and made it available as a 15gb compressed torrent. Gopher was around in the 1990s before the World Wide Web, it was similar, but not hyperlinked. I remember using Gopher in high-school, it was the first time I ever came across the CIA World Factbook.
Michael Ruhlman writes that with all of the prepackaged food and simple recipes in a box that are available, people start to believe that they’re too stupid to cook. He goes on to outline the world’s most difficult roasted chicken recipe, which I’ve reproduced.
Turn your oven on high (450 if you have ventilation, 425 if not). Coat a 3 or 4 pound chicken with coarse kosher salt so that you have an appealing crust of salt (a tablespoon or so). Put the chicken in a pan, stick a lemon or some onion or any fruit or vegetable you have on hand into the cavity. Put the chicken in the oven. Go away for an hour. Watch some TV, play with the kids, read, have a cocktail, have sex. When an hour has passed, take the chicken out of the oven and put it on the stove top or on a trivet for 15 more minutes. Finito.
After you’ve finished with the chicken, you can throw the carcass in a pot (with a touch of vinegar to make the meat fall of the bone), add some carrots, celery, onion and salt, simmer it, and you’re left with stock. Then make some delicious soup.
For sushi at home, skip the fish. Sushi really isn’t that hard to make, as long as you don’t mind the odd fail piece. Chicken teriyaki and breaded prawns are also good to throw into the mix.
His blog — some entries are nostalgic, reflective, but always positive — now gets about 40,000 visits a day, more than 11 million hits in total. His email box is regularly packed with readers’ messages, spilling out their woes and thanking him for lifting their spirits.
Neil was one of my editors at Golden Words years ago. He’s incredibly funny and well-deserving of the attention that the site has garnered. I hope the book sells really well, I’ll be picking up a copy when it makes it to this side of the pond, or next time I’m back in Canada. Congratulations Neil!
Eightface is a weblog by Dave Kellam, a designer, developer and educator, currently
residing in England. The site serves as his perennial soapbox and clearinghouse for random information.
