foofoo55

I highly recommend The Design of Everyday Things to everyone I know who is designing any kind of user interface, whether machinery, houses, or software.

I believe that until there is some effective, easy, and universally-accepted metric of UI quality, there will be little to differentiate good designers from poor. ("Our UI meets UIQC Class 1 Standards", or in a specification, "All user screens must score level 96 or better on the UIQC test", or some such thing.)

Because for some, children are a wealth far greater than money. Survival with 6 kids not that hard with a different lifestyle, lots of re-use of stuff, sharing, and valuing the important things in life (hint: not karate lessons).

Everyone is different. Some love plans, others hate them. Some like to make something and keep it on display, others like to make it then play with it, while others just want to make stuff. Some of my kids have used sites like this [1] for years while others ignore them.

[1] http://www.brickshelf.com/

Windfinder's Superforecast has a 12km resolution:

http://www.windfinder.com/help#superforecast

And if you live in the PNW, mariners (boats, not baseball) here find that the "superforecast" from windfinder.com is consistently far more accurate that the government forecasts, especially for wind on the water. The only big change to the government forecasts seems to have been putting some lipstick on their web pages, while the models don't seem to have changed in years.

Anaerobic bacteria thrive inside landfills and compost [1], just not so much at the surface. The awful stink (and methane) from dug up trash or wet compost is from anaerobic bacteria.

[1] http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/fundamentals/biology_anaer...

As with his Chernobyl interest, I believe he's focusing on how a nuclear disaster causes seemingly permanent loss of human habitat. This includes emotional upheaval, lost personal identity, and lost way of life, as well as the loss of future places of dwelling. In that focus, I believe he does a good job.

Depends what you mean by successful. Most industrial Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) can be programmed with a visual language, typically function block diagrams. The blocks are then functions and the lines represent a data value and not necessarily the direction of program flow. Once you want to get beyond basic flow control and into things like loops or state machines, then one would typically make a custom block or entire program using structure text, or some variant of C, etc.

A customer with a fancy new $2M machine couldn't easily diagnose problems in the field because the LCD on the machine would only show fault numbers or classes of faults. So they paid me to make an additional display which tied into the machine and showed detailed plain-English status and error messages. Very tedious work, and only slightly difficult to ensure false messages are not posted. I always wonder if the original programmers get lazy at implementing such details ("the user can always read the manual") or they run out of time due to shipping deadlines. Would a company like JD really keep things cryptic on purpose?

I write control software for low-volume off-highway machinery, and I have never seen sensor serial numbers used in this manner. Calibration yes, serial numbers no. And lack of calibration just puts things off a bit, but doesn't prevent operation. I suppose if they use CAN communications for their sensors instead of analog then a sensor might need the address set up and possibly the calibration values loaded, but off-the-shelf replacement parts are usually factory-set to the correct address & internal calibration. And I can see how the manufacturer could disable the machine until certain latched fault codes are cleared by a factory tech.

I would love to see an analysis of modern machine downtime versus equivalent machines from 10 and 20 years ago.

Just imagine if the likes of JD puts all tractor operating parameters in a cloud system, and requires not just Internet access but a login to operate the machine. Not unlike a certain startup from a couple years ago that sold hardware (was it home security?) that required constant cloud access to operate.

I have friends with skid-steers who beg me to replace the keyless electronic start & monitoring console with a simple electro-mechanical key and analog gauges.

How does the DMCA stop a tractor owner from replacing a faulty sensor, engine part, or a drive belt? The article implies that the DMCA stops the farmer from fixing even mechanical components.

I much prefer QR Codes as there is nothing to buy and their embedded data makes them standalone. Meshtags seem more like a graphical version of bitly or tinyurl.

For the love of the human race and all of us still using Windows, I really hope a faster version of Irfanview gets released as a result of this.

FM antenna != cellular antenna

Totally. Sit and eat with your kids. Make food with them, clean up with them. Make them seriously good times. Teach them good food habits, good life skills (chill out from the rat race and sit down for a decent meal), and improve both their and your own social skills. I doubt that particular meal substitute stuff is truly complete, and I do believe that variety is a good thing. Eating good food is good for the soul, as it can be one of the different types of beauty we can have on our lives.

They would only need a 2.7 gallon (USG) bucket to bring up 4 tons per day.

But please check my estimate: A cubic yard of sand can weigh approx 3000 lbs, so that's 2/3 of a cubic yard per ton. 27 cubic feet per cubic yard, so 18 per ton, which is 135 USG. 4 tons (from your question) is then 540 gallons, and at 200 dives per day that is 2.7 gallons per dive.

I'd bet they do more like 8 tons per day per diver.

On a Blackberry Z10 it's just two touches: the first touch gets the main settings menu from the top (I think the same as any Android), then hitting the Hotspot icon. I use this all the time to feed the Internet to my laptop and even a couple pieces of remote machinery. I'd expect to do this to update such a car as well. And I'm really old in HN years.

How can carriers know when the phone is acting as a hotspot, and why are those bytes more expensive?

The main point is that manufacturing, especially high-volume, consumer, apple-quality products, is very hard and requires serious expertise. Such startups should bring in such mechanical & production engineering expertise, because the hardware becomes as important as the software & electronics.

The irony is that many software startup wizards brush off mechanical design the same way that naive managers treat software development. "It's just a [box/case/app/website], how hard can it be?"

Being a controls engineer, these assumptions of thermostatic perfection drive me crazy. The things only measure air temperature, not that of the seats, dashboard, wheel, etc. When these objects are cold a person will feel colder than if they were the same as the air temperature. See also thermal conduction and thermal radiation. Also, that thermostat is located where? At the driver's fingertips? Their rear end? Not likely.

So cranking the air temperature setting beyond the desired air temperature for a while will indeed get the cabin more comfortable quicker.

I fail to see how Onity should be expected to replace circuit boards in 4 million locks that take a deliberate effort to bypass. Mechanical locks can be picked with similar or less effort. Hotel customers should never leave valuables in the rooms, and when in the room should use the additional mechanical locks inside the door. The articles' author is unrealistic.

Another view of incineration:

- it's environmentally open-loop. Life on earth is fundamentally closed-loop. Energy extraction is a one-way street. (I find entropy depressing.)

- it discourages the 3 waste r's (reduction, re-use, and recycling).

- the net energy recovery is always a small fraction of the energy that went into making the stuff, and less than the savings of the alternate 3-r's.

- organic materials should be aerobically composted, which prevents methane generation and truly closes the biological loop, or at the very least put through anaerobic digestion to recover some hydrocarbon fuel prior to composting whatever remains.