Quotulatiousness

July 12, 2010

Streamlined trains

Filed under: History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Cory Doctorow links to some photos and posters from the golden age of streamlined trains, saying “by contrast, today’s trains seem to be designed to say, ‘The future will not arrive, but if it does, it will be more of the same.'”:

The gorgeous streamlined steam and diesel locomotives from the 1920s-1930s scream “steampunk” and “dieselpunk” to anyone who can appreciate it, and also provide an ample field for research for train historians and collectors. This was the era of The Mighty Streamlined Machine, and it plainly shows even in black-and-white photographs that remained.

Although the images represent a wide variety of streamliners, they missed one of the most famous:

LNER 4468 “Mallard” (Image from Scarborough Railway Society)

July 6, 2010

The anti-ergonomic design of scanners

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

Having recently inherited Elizabeth’s printer/scanner because it stopped being willing to play nice with her computer, I found that if anything, James Lileks is being over-charitable to scanner ergonomic design teams:

I just fear dealing with the Canon scanner interface, although it can’t be worse than HP. Yes, yes, I know, buy VueScan. But I had just gotten used to the HP interface on the new scanner. It was designed, as usual, by engineers with no taste who presume Great-gramma is trying to scan something so she can send it by the inter-mails to someone, and needs to be shown in the most obvious way possible that she is old and stupid and should not use computers. Hence it has two icons: one says DOCUMENTS, with a little badge that says “300,” and another says IMAGES, with a badge reading “200.” I assume that means dpi, but who knows? You can make custom profiles, but it never remembers them. There’s no button that actually says SCAN, which would be helpful. It’s as if the GUI team is a bunch of malicious bastiches who came up with the most non-intuitive interface ever, then said “Okay, now let’s add one more step between deciding to scan and actually achieving a scan. Johnson, you’re good at this. What would you recommend?”

“Well, just off the top of my head, I’d say have the default setting for saving put it into some proprietary image-collection program buried deep in the User’s library, so it can’t be found no matter how hard they look.”

“Excellent! Make it so.”

February 25, 2010

Design mistakes in consumer electronics

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

Benj Edwards looks at the long list of consumer electronic devices with design problems (most of which could have been avoided):

You saved and you saved until you could finally buy that shiny new $1000 gadget that promised you everything under the stars. When it came time to plug it in, you found your joy being subsumed by abject horror. Your stomach plunged deep into your gut and you (yes, mortal non-designer you) recognized a fundamental flaw in your flashy gizmo so obvious that it made you want to pick up the device and smash it over the designer’s head.

Even the best designers make mistakes . . . but this article isn’t about them. We’re about to, ahem, celebrate the worst consumer electronics designers through the lens of their faulty creations. Since I’m far from an all-knowing technology god, I’ve limited our survey to fifteen design problems that have not only bugged me through the years, but that are widespread enough to have bugged many of you too. These problems aren’t limited to current technology, but they all fall into the nebulous realm known as “consumer electronics.” You know: TVs, telephones, VCRs, DVD players, MP3 players, and more.

October 20, 2009

QotD: Craftsmanship

Filed under: Architecture, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:10

I’m not sure if the word "condo" is from the Latin translation "poor workmanship", or from the French "to work without pride".

John Schubarth, letter to Canadian Home Workshop, March 2000

October 15, 2009

Ralph Lauren moves decisively to quash negative press . . .

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

. . . by allegedly firing the model whose Photoshopped-to-stick-insect proportions drew the criticism in the first place:

The model featured in the Ralph Lauren Photoshop stick insect outrage — in which she was Photoshopped to within an inch of her life — claims she was sacked by the company for being “too fat”.

Filippa Hamilton suffered such an extreme digital makeover in an ad for the fashion company that BoingBoing was prompted to gasp: “Dude, her head’s bigger than her pelvis.”

Ralph Lauren quickly threw DMCA takedown notices at BoingBoing and PhotoshopDisasters for exposing the folly, but subsequently decided to apologise.

October 12, 2009

Object to skeletal fashion models? You’re a “fat mummy”

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:14

Karl Lagerfeld puts you into your place, fatty:

Karl Lagerfeld, the eccentric German fashion tsar, has waded into the debate about size-zero models by saying that people want to look at “skinny models” and classing those who complain as “fat mummies”.

Lagerfeld, 71, was reacting to the magazine Brigitte‘s announcement last week that it will in future use “ordinary, realistic” women rather than professional models in its photo shoots. He said the decision by Germany’s most popular women’s magazine was “absurd” and driven by overweight women who did not like to be reminded of their weight issues.

“These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly,” said Lagerfeld in an interview with the magazine Focus. The designer, who lost a lot of weight himself when he went on a strict low-carbohydrate diet several years ago, added that the world of fashion was all to do “with dreams and illusions, and no one wants to see round women”

The complaint about ultra-thin models has a lot of merit: the model is chosen to be as close to a clothes-hanger as possible, to improve the sales of the item at retail. It’s easier to persuade buyers to buy things that look like they do on the runway when they’re in the store.

The fact that the majority of women in western cultures don’t come close to fitting that sort of clothing is largely ignored. The designers tend to prefer clothes that do not provide room for typical womens’ hips, breasts and curves. One sometimes wonders if the clothing is supposed to be equally attractive on bone-thin fashion models or young teenage boys . . .

lauren_model_photoshopped

Image from BoingBoing. Extreme photoshopping in the original ad.

October 11, 2009

You tell ’em, Your Highness!

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:28

I’m not a reflexive royalist, but I’m very much in agreement with Prince Philip on this issue:

The Duke of Edinburgh has launched a scathing attack on the design of television remotes and controls.

The famously outspoken Duke, 88, criticised designers yesterday for making handsets small and complicated and for hiding controls on television sets.

His words gave an intriguing insight into life at Buckingham Palace.

He said: ‘To work out how to operate a TV set you practically have to make love to the thing. And why can’t you have a handset that people who are not 10 years old can actually read.

I’m not much of a TV watcher, so the few times I want to watch something on TV, there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll need to get technical assistance from Elizabeth or Victor. If the DVD player was the last component being used, the cable box may need to be rebooted. Usually, after rebooting, it’ll then need to be reconfigured to work with the TV set. Sometimes, the re-configuration needs to be done 2-3 times before it “sticks”. Even then, sometimes the TV doesn’t get a signal from the cable box, so the cable box has to be unplugged (so it loses its IP address from the cable provider) and then plugged in again (to get a new IP address). Then, if we’re lucky, it’ll connect properly and I can start to find the proper channel . . . it shouldn’t take 5-10 minutes of fiddling to turn on the bloody television!

And that’s ignoring the fact that none of the remotes does everything, so we use the cable box remote for most things, but the TV remote for widescreen/regular format and the DVD remote for pause/eject.

H/T to Elizabeth for the original link.

Update, February 2010: Apparently a lot of our issues were caused by the DVD player. We replaced it with a Blu-Ray player over Christmas, and we no longer have anything like the same sort of hassle. Still too many different remotes, but everything now works.

August 5, 2009

Print me a gear

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:07

3D printing was really cool when it was just wax or plastic. This moves it to the next level:

The future of fabrication is here: Shapeways announces stainless steel printing

Sure you’re not going to make a Hatori Hanzo sword — yet — but Shapeways, a 3D fabrication service, has just announced stainless steel printing, allowing you to make steel objects as easily as you would made resin or plastic prototypes. That’s right: something that took our ancient ancestors generations to perfect is now available to anyone with a CAD/CAM program and some Red Bull.

All-purpose material replication is still a long way down the road, but it’s closer . . . it is cool to be living in the future.

H/T to Virginia Postrel.

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