Archive for the 'Industrial Design' Category

I dropped by a couple of local businesses and ended up with a bag full of used disposable cameras. The cameras are truly disposable; generally tossed or sent back to a company for some amount of recycling. The cameras are chock full of flashy goodness that can be used in quite a number of projects, including high speed photography, of course.

It seems that the disposable camera market is dominated by two manufacturers, Kodak (on left) and Fujifilm (on right). The Quaketronics kit includes a Kodak disposable and, upon disassembly of both, it is abundantly clear why (though apparently coincidental).

Even before cracking the case, there are signs that these are two different beasts. The Fujifilm has a flash switch while the Kodak has a momentary button for charging the flash, thus implying significant differences in the electronics. While opening, the difference in industrial design is immediately obvious. The Kodak’s back is easily popped off by releasing tabs on all four sides. On the other hand, the Fujifilm camera has five or six tiny tabs with an almost-removable-but-not-quite piece over the battery.

Significantly more, including a nice “don’t touch this with your finger” demonstration upon click through…
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Back in the late ’80s, I used Kimber Kable speaker cables. Good stuff. Reasonably priced. Sounded great. No hokey electron snake oil marketing crap.

Looks like times have changed.

Kimber is now offering a USB cable. But not just any USB cable. This USB cable is optimized for audio use with extra fat conductors, nitrogen infused polyethylene signal conductor dielectric (huh?), and gold connectors.

All for the price of 29 pounds for a half meter length of cable.

Sigh. Idiots. Yeah, the rise of digital devices has been tough on premium analog technology companies, but that doesn’t justify going the snake oil route.

Maybe I’m just jealous that these people are likely successfully selling $4 cables for about $60. Nice profit margin.

As previously mentioned, I have a Mr. Coffee Burr Mill Coffee Grinder (BMX3).

It worked well enough when it worked. But now it doesn’t work. It appears that one of the safety switches has failed. The end result is that the grinder won’t turn on even when all doors and receptacles are fully docked, locked, and ready to go.

From the looks of the Amazon review, it appears that this is a common failure.

OK — fine — I’m going to write Mr. Coffee a letter. An honest to God, through the postal mail letter. Ok, off to Mr. Coffee’s web site to find a postal address.

No luck. No address found anywhere on that site.

It appears that Mr. Coffee is a brand of Sunbeam. Sunbeam’s web site leads to the same total lack of physical mailing address. However, Sunbeam was acquired by Jarden in late 2004. Actually, it looks kinda like Jarden is becoming the Beatrice of home appliances. Anyone else remember the “We are beatrice!” tag line on just about every food ad in the mid ’90s or so?

Jarden’s site provide a bunch of 800 numbers as contact info. Or you can click through to the same bloody web form. I don’t want a web form. I want to send a nice formal letter composed on the formal letter stationary provided by Pages.

Ahh.. OK. Tucked away at the bottom of this page are two mailing addresses. I’ll try the first.

(((Mr. Coffee) Sunbeam) Jarden) is not the only company that is taking such an opaque approach to customer service. I can understand the desire to save money by not dealing with physical Mail, but it seems to be at the sacrifice of any kind of relationship between the company and the consumer.

We shall see where this goes…

See the end of the previous post for the source of this. Quick summary: French press coffee contains oils that are potentially linked to increased cholesterol.

The oils are present in french press coffee because they pass through the wire screen in the press’s filter. With a paper drip filter, the oils are left in the paper.

More likely than not, those gold plated metallic reusable filters don’t do any better of a job filtering the oils than a french press. Use therein could potentially contribute to increased cholesterol levels.

So, if you do use paper filters, get the unbleached, all natural, kind and toss them in your compost heap when done. Coffee grounds have lots of nutrients that plants find quite tasty. As an aside, an occasionally cup of coffee tossed on a Ficus tree will do wonders for it.

Has anyone tried shoving a paper filter into a french press? It would be trivially easy to do as the french press’s filter is actually composed of two metal plates that screw onto the plunger to tightly squeeze the screen in between. Adding a paper filter between the screen and the bottom plate would be really easy.

The question is whether forced filtration is going to leave the oils in the paper or if they will be pushed through the paper?

Anyone have any idea how to test for the presence or absence of the oils?

I drink coffee. A lot of coffee. While I certainly drink coffee for the caffeine content and will drink Folger’s drip if I have to (shudder), I like good coffee. Fresh roasted. Grind it myself.

In particular, I prefer french press. Leads to an intensely flavored cup of coffee that really highlights the strengths of the roast and bean used.

As a result, I have a french press and bean grinder both at home and at work. I’m not so anal as to have spent hundreds of dollars on the grinder, nor am I so careless as to use one of those whirling choppers of death to pulverize the beans (those are only good for fine grinding spices).

Which has led me to the discovery of two intensely stupid industrial design mistakes.

The first is with the coffee grinder I use at work. A Braun KMM30. Now, I’m not normally known to be the most tidy of people. Yet, my coffee grinding/brewing area — the top of a filing cabinet — is a complete disaster area of grounds.

Why? Click through for the rest of the rant….

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The kind folks at BoltDepot.com sent me a set of their thread gauges in response to my article about my amazing screw oriented fastener acquisition. Thank you!

The screw guides are quite handy, incorporating diameter and thread pitch measurements into a single piece of flat plastic along with a handy ruler useful for measuring bolt length. The diameter measurements don’t go below 1/4″, so a lot of the fasteners commonly found in pinball machines are off the scale on the small end. However, the thread gauge does go down to 28 TPI (threads per inch)d which is plenty small enough to cover just about all of the screws I run into.

Beyond having an excellent assortment of bolts, screws, and related fasteners, Bolt Depot also has an incredible online library of fastener information. It includes everything from fastener type charts to various standards tables (Like the recommended torque table) to material guides.

The neatest resource is the set of PDFs that, when printed, yield thread and diameter guides. You can find these on the Printable Thread Gauges and Other Tools. They encourage folks to link to and use the various guides!

Nice!

I’m expanding the Design Rants to include crappy software design.

First up? Microsoft Word.

Now, it may come as a surprise that I actually like Word. Or, at least, I did like word way back on my Mac Plus in 1986 or so. And I find Word 2004 to be a tolerable enough word processor once you turn off enough features.

Almost. I still can’t fathom how a piece of software can consume more CPU cycles when hidden then when its windows are simply shoved to the back. That, at least, seems to be mostly fixed. Or maybe it is because I turned off the live word count feature which seems to recount words perpetually, even when the app is hidden.

No. That isn’t what motivated this particular post.
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We have an Aerus Lux 5500 canister vacuum cleaner. It “features” things like a bag full detector, temperature protection, etc…

Unremarkable, but nothing to complain about. Has a fine particle filter on the exhaust port that actually does a decent job of catching mold, fine dust, and other nasties.

It worked well enough until recently. Suddenly, the damned thing decided that the bag was always full. Put a new bag in, it would run for two seconds then shut down with the bag full light lit.

Annoying. But, wait, the fine particulate matter filter is on the exhaust port. That’s dumb. That means that the really small crap has to float through the whole suction device beyond the bag.

Could it be that the “bag full” detector is simply a sensor that measures the difference between the suction before and after the bag? If it is too great, the bag must be full?

Gotta open it up to find out.
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Anyone who has read this weblog for a while knows that I occasionally harp at length about notable industrial design issues that I run into. Often, these turn into rants railing against really pathetically stupiddesign.

I have several more of these brewing up. Obviously bad design seriously irritates the hell out of me and I’m going to share that frustration.

I hope nobody minds. (He says assuming that someone actually reads this thing).

I have created a category that will house nothing but the design rants.

Panasonic makes some coolstuff.

And sometimes they don’t.

I ran across a banner ad on Hack a Day that caught my eye. Why? Because it showed an otherwise unremarkable laptop with a round trackpad.

Huh?

Round trackpad?

It is a Panasonic Toughbook. That particular page has its own bit of design humor. Roll the pointer over the laptop picture and it moves around. Sorta neat. Now, roll slowly to the right to try and click the virtual showroom. I can almost hear the text scream “No! Please! Don’t click me!” as it turns red and shuffles right out from under my mouse pointer.

So, chase down that text and click on it. Then click through to the photo gallery.

Yup. A circular trackpad. Because, you know, you never really need to track diagonally or, like, do some kinda scrolly-wheel simulation along the edges. Overrated, that.

Better yet, the optical drive is accessed through a lid like thing to the right of the trackpad. Well, almost to the right. The lid lifts a chunk of the funky surround around the pad. But, wait! The lid only exposes about 60% of the media. For protection, the whole area is surrounded by little pointy bits to give you some nice tactile feedback as you grind that disc into place. Because, of course, when I’m shoving a hunk o’ Pixar goodness into my laptop at 30,000 feet to keep my kid quiet on that cross country flight, I really want to slide that disc right across plastic pointy bits so my son can enjoy a scratcheriffic custom remix of Monsters, Inc.

For added convenience, the audio jacks are placed just to the left and right of the latch along the front of the computer. Nothing like typing and padding with a nice cushion of coiled up headphone cables to cradling your wrists. If this laptop is anything like just about every other piece of electronic equipment ever made (including some early models of iPods), the audio jack will probably break pretty fast from all the wrist slams thus eliminating the need to have cables in your way.

Battery life and weight is pretty sweet, though. I definitely have batt life envy about now.

And the laptop marketing chick is hot. The Tough Dude looks sorta fireman-esque, and my wife tells me that’s hot. So, bonus points for marketing, but they could have scored more if it had been a fire axe instead of a big wrench.