Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends

We're so glad likefinewine, plutosonium, soylent_tom, yndy and zaitcev could attend, come inside, come inside.

 

(That's right, it's periodic update time again.)

Upcoming road trip

Barring unforeseen circumstances, it appears I will be driving from California to New Hampshire starting on April 5, taking probably four or five days for the trip.  If you mapquest Sunnyvale, CA 94086 to Deerfield, NH 03037, you'll have a pretty good idea of my route.  I'll be passing by or close to locations including:

• Reno, Nevada
• Salt Lake City, Utah
• Cheyenne, Wyoming
• Lincoln, Nebraska
• Des Moines, Iowa
• Chicago, Illinois
• Erie, Pennsylvania
• Buffalo, New York
• Albany, New York
• Concord, New Hampshire

At various points along the way I'm undoubtedly going to be making stops for food, rest and sleep; my knees are bad, and I don't know how long I'll be able to drive each day.  It is MOST unlikely that I'll have any kind of 'net access while on the trip.  So, if anyone I know along my route would like to schedule a micro-RS for lunch, coffee, or a brainstorming session for world domination er, chat about the weather, let me know, and make sure I have a way to contact you off the net.

What's wrong with the iPod?

What's wrong with the iPod?

Here's one opinion, and he makes a lot of good points.  Frankly, I'm with him -- yeah, so Apple even gives away free music on iTunes.com .... so what?  If I've got to install iTunes to be able to get it and can then only play it through iTunes, I don't want it.  I'd rather buy the CD and make my own MP3 that I can play however, wherever and whenever I want, than get the song for free and accept the restrictions that come with it.

Bad human interface design 101

Lest there be any doubt about the matter, the following is how NOT to design the controls for a kitchen timer integrated into a stovetop.

The perpetrator of this abomination markets the stove in question under the brand name Roper.  It's an all-electric stove having a green LED digital clock/timer on the backboard.  The display shows only hours and minutes.  There are four controls for this device; all four are membrane pressure switches.  They are labelled Clock, Timer, and an up and down arrow.

The up and down arrow buttons increase and decrease, respectively, the time displayed.  The switches are quite insensitive and quite slow to act, and require a firm push-and-hold to operate.  For about the first four seconds they are held down, they increase or decrease the time by about one minute every second.  After four seconds, they switch instantly to incrementing or decrementing by ten minutes about every one-sixth of a second.  Given that the average human reaction time is around a third of a second, this almost guarantees overshoots.

There is no start button for the timer.  It starts counting down the moment you finish setting it -- or, actually, what's worse, it doesn't so much start counting down as never actually stop.  It counts along with the clock.  This means, if the timer reads 15, you do not necessarily have 15 minutes set on the timer.  You could be off by anywhere from 1 to 59 seconds.  This means if you want a 3-minute interval from the timer, it could be off by as much as a third.  Should you mistakenly think you have to hit the Timer button again to start the timer, you will erase whatever time interval you have just painstakingly, and painfully, set.

And after all that, what you get from it is a few weak beeps that you probably won't hear unless you're right there next to the stove when the timer goes off.

Where's my nut-kicking boots?  I have a mission to perform for the sake of humanity.  This thing is one of the worst, crappiest, most half-assed pieces of so-called appliance design I've seen in recent years.  Someone needs to feel pain for it.

Smart grass

Synthetic grass, described as like smart Astroturf, could be the latest thing in automatically detecting and repelling intruders.  The new silica-based artificial grass, say researchers, contains not only piezoelectric crystals for power and micro-electromechanical actuators that enable the "grass" blades to detect and change their own orientation to actively oppose an intruder's progress, but tiny gate-logic arrays in the individual blades are networked together through the root complex to enable the entire expanse of grass to "think" and react without human intervention.

The first test installation of the smart grass, at Secure Corp's headquarters in Fairfax, VA, features a hundred-meter wide band of "smart grass" completely enclosing the facility, bordered by inner and outer ring roads, replacing a double wire fence with a pleasant parkway that doesn't even look like a security measure.  Public traffic is permitted on the parkway for a nominal per-vehicle toll.

"We felt this was the best configuration for a good secure perimeter," said Secure Corp founder Iyam A. Hochs.  "Any student of history can show that many of the most successful defences have depended on two-ANDed swards backed up by pikes."