"Big Dog"

Joe tipped me off on this video about military robots, especially the one called Big Dog, which is a four-legged critter designed to carry heavy gear over uneven terrain. Like Joe said, it's very reminiscent of the Desert Walkers in Star Wars, but it's real, and quite cool.

War-mongering is an insane waste of brains, money, work, and lives, but at least some technological progress trickles from it into more productive areas later.

Space exploration graphically

Below is a small bit of a huge graphic which shows a colorful diagram of 50 years' worth of space exploration.
Did you know that there has been forty-three missions to Venus! Wow. That's far.


(Wow, and it's on a fast server too! that 900kb+ image loads virtually instantly for me.)

I am using this as wallpaper on my big screens. It's kind of funny, because all the labelled objects in the picture makes it a real challenge to see where the frig my icons are! :-)

Last drop

Interesting how many steps there still can be done in design progress.
Sure, this is not world-rocking stuff, but many people want that last drop. And also, not all shampoo (and such) bottles are very practical to use.

iPad/Neo video demo

I have made a little video demonstration of how the Alphasmart Neo can be used as keyboard for the iPad.
Or using the iPad as screen for the Neo, if you prefer!
I had set the text very large (36 point) so it would be seen on the video. In normal text size, a *lot* of text will fit on the screen, of course.

iPad with Neo as keyboard from Eolake Stobblehouse.

I have upgraded to Vimeo Plus, so you can see it larger on vimeo.com, see links above.

(By the way, I think Vimeo has smart ways of convincing you to upgrade to paid membership... less waiting time, bigger videos, etc etc.)

The beautiful people

Update: Miserere said:

A comment on the hypertanned couple: They've been photographed on the day of competition, she as a Figure competitor, and he in bodybuilding. It is customary for contestants to apply several layers of tanning products (many designed especially for these types of uses) because they pose on stages with very heavy lighting; if they are not hypertanned their muscles will appear flat and shapeless, their figure washed out, "overexposed" in photographic terms :-)

Even dark-skinned competitors of African descent use tanning products, so imagine the need for pasty Caucasians!

One fine morning on an airplane

[Thanks to Ian]

A man and a woman were sitting beside each other in the first class section of an airplane.

The woman sneezed, took out a tissue, gently wiped her nose, then visibly shuddered for ten to fifteen seconds.

The man went back to his reading. A few minutes later, the woman sneezed again, took a tissue, wiped her nose, then shuddered violently once more.

Assuming that the woman might have a cold, the man was still curious about the shuddering. A few more minutes passed when the woman sneezed yet again, and her body shook more than ever.

Unable to restrain his curiosity, the man turned to the woman and said, "I couldn't help but notice that you've sneezed three times and then shudder violently. Are you ok?"

"I am sorry if I disturbed you, I have a very rare medical condition; whenever I sneeze I have an orgasm."

The man, more than a bit embarrassed, was still curious. " I have never heard of that condition before" he said. "Are you taking anything for it?"

The woman nodded, "Yes. Pepper."

Screenshots on iPhone/iPad

Bron gave me an excellent tip on how to make screenshots on the iPhone/iPad.




... You can see what I mean about photos of a screen looking bad (see previous post)! These are tons better.

iPad interface gotcha (updated)

This is another example, in a different app (GoodReader), of an interface flaw (in my opinion) in the otherwise excellent iPad interface. It seems to be system-wide rather than app-specific.
The flaw is that when you see the pop-up menu...

[Update: the photos are not representative of the iPad's screen quality. Of course the lines are straight in real life, and the tones/sharpness much better!]

... You can't see anything hinting that the window can scroll and contains more options. For space reasons or maybe aesthetics reasons, the very thin grey line which appears when you actually are scrolling, disappears when you're not doing it.

You can see here that there are actually more options below when one scrolls:



What I'm doing here could be seen as useless complaining or "bitching", but I just find interfaces interesting both in their good and bad aspects. And also, if nobody at all mentions these things, it's less likely that flaws get fixed.
And heck, I might even help some iPad owners to look for extra options in their apps which they might otherwise never have found. (I only found out about this thing two weeks after I very angrily and erroneously had reported that Pages For iPad did not have options for changing font type and size.)

Update:
Philocalist said:
Being not at all Apple - orientated, something immediately catches my eye here, though it could just be a quirk of your image capture (or, indeed, my eyes!)
In the top image particularly, the pop-up window that you show appears to be badly skewed / out of true, i.e not perpendicular ... which would irritate the life out of me if it is indeed part of the (lack of) design in the app ... just looks like a sloppy end result.

God, no, this is just because I did not hold the camera exactly parrallel to the screen surface, and because it's taken with a zoom.
Additionally, as you may know, photographing any electronic screen often results in moiré errors and generally oddly reduced quality of the image. The screen looks much better in real life than these photos. You can be sure that visually the interface as well as the screen on the iPad is very good. Outstanding, in fact.

Update:

Anon said:

I agree that this is not intuitive, and it naturally works the same way on the iphone. Space is definitely one of the reasons they've chosen to do it this way.

But I think they may have felt that a traditional scroll bar would be confusing in a touch interface. Clearly you just use your finger to scroll, and if there was a scroll bar, people might get confused and think that you can't just drag anywhere with your finger to scroll, but that you have to go to the scroll bar, because that is so ingrained in our heads.

I suspect that they couldn't find a visual cue that overcame this "you have to touch here" syndrome. For me, I've just gotten in the habit of wiggling my finger a little if I think there is a chance there is more info than fits on the screen...

Eolake said...
That's a good point, thanks.

(Hmmm, maybe the thin line indicating how much of the menu is visible could stay on the screen even when you're not scrolling. Maybe most people would not take that as the only area you can scroll. Not sure.)

Jumbo Shipping

[Thanks to Tommy]

Commercial video for a specialized shipping company. If you ever need a 900-ton thingamabob shipped, these are your guys. (The first half of the video is less interesting.)

No arm, no legs, no worries

Thanks to TTl for recommending this video.

The Brittas empire

An outstanding sitcom, don't-miss.
Seems to be only out in the UK:

The Brittas Empire: Complete BBC Series 1-7 Box Set [DVD]

The Brittas empire

An outstanding sitcom, don't-miss.
Seems to be only out in the UK:

The Brittas Empire: Complete BBC Series 1-7 Box Set [1991] [DVD]