One example of quality design which I gleaned from reading Don Norman's "The Design Of Everyday Things" is the metal plate I've frequently seen on doors which are meant to be pushed.
The only affordance of such a plate is its push-ability, and the fact that someone actively installed a metal plate (instead of just relying on the door's natural flatness), as well as its location at the point of maximum leverage (all the way to the right of the door, in the door's vertical center), is a clear signifier for such push-ability.
Not only that, but it does its job without offering any other confusing affordances (such as a vertical handle which is also technically pushable, but which many would interpret as being meant to be pulled).
Whenever I need a relatable, succinct example of affordances and signifiers for my engineering comrades, I turn to this one. Anyone interested in design is doing themselves a dis-service by not reading Don Norman's classic.
Here in the UK a lot of bathrooms in pubs and other places have push to get in, and handles to get out. Never understood that, I'd like to push to get out once I've washed my hands!
Those doors are often on corridors. You don’t want them unexpectedly opening at speed into passing non-bathroom traffic. Conversely, people approaching the door from the inside will be further away as they have their hand out in readiness to pull, will expect the door to open — it’s generally lower risk.
Inside the bathroom itself, the doors on individual stalls usually open inwards. One pragmatic advantage of this approach is that if the door opens while you are seated, you can push it closed without getting up. Or requiring help from someone else outside. This also drives the use of push-in-pull-out handles.
One major disadvantage of this approach is that if you are coming in with a bulky bag, or more (hauling carry-on luggage in an airport for instance), you have sharply limited space within to maneuver you and your stuff to a position where you can lift your skirts and do what you came here to do. Every time I go to a public bathroom with stall doors that open outward I am delighted.
In the US this is a fire code issue. Doors need to swing inward to avoid people getting trapped inside from outside obstructions.
edit: I seem to be misinformed about firecode. I may also be over extrapolating from what I know about bedroom doors as well. The general idea of obstruction is more valid there. It seems the more common reason bathrooms would not be allowed to swing outward is obstructing the minimum width of hallways.
Huh. In Finland, fire code requires that external doors swing outward. It's intended to make it faster to exit the building since you can just walk forward, and to prevent people getting trapped indoors if a panicked crowd tries to push out through the door.
I believe the post above was only meant to be applied to interior doors. The explanation I've gotten in the past is interior doors open in so they don't block people outside the room, typically in a hallway, from being able to move towards the exit; Exterior doors open out so that the crowd of people rushing towards the exit can leave and you don't have a mass of panicked people stopping those at the front from having room to open the exterior doors.
FYI the international building code has a deceptive name. It's essentially the US building code.
> it is the International Building Code ... used in multiple locations worldwide, including the 15 countries of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM), Jamaica, and Georgia. Furthermore, the IBC has served as the basis for legislative building codes in Mexico, Abu Dhabi, and Haiti, among other places.
Whist those in the USA use euphemisms such has 'bathroom' (mate, where is the bath?) or 'restroom' (I don't need a rest, I need a shit), here it is perfectly acceptable to ask the butler in Buckingham palace where the toilet is, or the bog for that matter. :-)
I ran into a door today that had a handle on the push side. Not even a crossbar - an aluminum folded-over handle, one on each of the double doors. It is, unmistakably, a pull handle, and it had "PUSH" written above it and even underlined, and still it gave me pause.
When I worked for squarespace, their beautiful new offices had glass conference room doors that swung one way, the other way, or slid on a track, depending on the room configuration.
However every one of those doors had the same handle on both sides, giving you no clue as to which scenario this door was providing. You saw people pull/push the wrong way all the time, and then look up/to the side to see the hinges and where the door stop was. I eventually mentally dubbed that quiet look upwards before you touched a door the, “squarespace peek”.
After a while I’d heard that the original plans had the typical plate and handle for push/pull and the ceo felt like it messed with the design of the doors.
It reminded me of my experience at a Japanese Onsen (hot spring) last week. While entering the Onsen, the sliding door is automated and slides to open on it’s own. While exiting, the automated sliding doesn’t work. It has handles with no indication of pull or push or slide. The design of handles suggest most probably pull. I kept trying to pull/push with no movement. Finally, realized I am supposed to use those handles to slide the door left and right. That was one funky design, imo.
Another tricky thing is figuring out how to flush the public toilets. The user interface is non standard on every toilet. The most surprising way I've encountered was to step on a button on the floor. (Remember to never press the big green button)
One of my greatest fears :p I saw someone do that one time actually, and the door that the button opened was really slow moving and irreversible until it had completed opening fully. This was on a train, with all of the passenger seats facing the door in question. The guy that did it had to quickly pull his pants up and then stand there awkwardly while the door finished opening so that he could close it again.
That design is everywhere in Japan, and can be quite embarrassing for tourists.
First time I went to Japan I walked up to my hotel late at night. I went to the door. There was no handle or obvious way to open it. I stood there like an idiot for a minute or two. I walked back out to the street to make sure I'm at the right building. I walked back to the door and finally got it. The trick... you have to wave your hand directly in front of the door an inch or two. Places in Japan often do not put the motion sensor ahead of the door, but straight down. You start feeling like a Jedi at times, waving doors open.
Usually, the doors have a strip or label indicating press/touch/wave here but typically in Japanese or hand wave/ double chevron symbols. As a visiting foreigner, we typically are not used to seeing such signage. Over the years living here, I have started to recognize tell tale signs of automated doors in Japan.
One possible saving grace for this design is that mechanical sliding doors/panels are "traditional" in Japan - ie: tradional architecture makes use of sliding doors - often without clear "handles".
There used to be a coffee shop opposite my office that had a pull handle on the push side of the double doors. The right hand side doors were also often locked. I once sat at the nearest table to the doors and watched a dozen people pull then push on the right door, then pull and finally push on the left door, and often end up visibly aggravated by the time they got in and joined the morning queue!
The next day my debugging instinct kicked in, I bought some PUSH stickers and did some covert guerrilla ergonomic stickering. Problem solved and it made me smile every time I went past that cafe!
To this day, I can't understand the thought process behind opening only one half of the door and locking the other one. I used to go around unlatching the offending doors, but got tired of it.
I see so many glass doors designed like that. The doors usually have a sticker that says “PUSH” on the push side, however the sticker is invariably printed with a transparent background so you can read it from the pull side. I don’t notice when I am reading something backwards/mirrored, so I am always pushing on the pull side…… Arrrrrrgh!
The part of my brain that deciphers the mirrored text is so proud of its stupid little achievement that it shouts down the result from the easy version so that the part that tells my hands what to do only gets the mirrored instruction. Every single time.
I can think of one door in a place I frequent for lunch like this which I have repeatedly ran into. Now, 80% of the times I start thinking about it about 20 feet away as I’m approaching it. My internal dialogue goes something like “Ignore how it looks, it’s a push door.” The other 20% of the times I still fumble the opening. It’s the most unintuitive thing I’ve experienced in a while.
I use a similar example when explaining when to document code and when to write it so it is easy to understand. When coding, if you find yourself saying “I need to document this”, you should ask first if it is easily understandable by someone with no knowledge of the code and possibly rewrite it first. Only once you have exhausted how it is written should you document it.
Everyone always nods at this but often do something else in practice, so as an example I use the real-world example of glass doors that only open one way but have identical pull handles on both sides. Users always walk up and loudly and embarrassingly push/pull incorrectly. But instead of fixing the root problem, the people who put them in think, “I know, I will document them!” and put those plaques on each side that says “Push/Pull”. And true to nature, no one reads the signs and still loudly bangs the door the wrong way only then to look at the “documentation”.
Perhaps ironically, the opposite door design (one where it’s not clear whether to push or pull) is thusly called a Norman Door [1]. The term is sometimes applied more generically beyond doors.
I’m guessing the vox office featured door has that bar because a flat metal plate wouldn’t seem right applied to glass? Going without the plate the glass would get dirty.
I like the affordability too, but it also does not take into account edge cases.
Our office door has this metal plate, it pushes outside (I believe it is that way for fire safety reasons). If there is strong wind on the outside, the door has the habit of whipping around after pushing it a bit, leading to shattered glass once every year or so.
Closing the door in strong wind also means grabbing it on the edge and pulling it, the wind kind of reverses on the last couple inches, I have no idea how that did not lead to broken fingers yet (you do it once, then you never try to close it again).
I guess it's a failing to consider all use cases of the door, and the metal plate thing should only be used indoors.
I spent about a year living in Chicago (also very windy and cold) and many office buildings use revolving doors for their exterior-facing entrances/exits. I suspect for the exact reason you mention. I can imagine what a PITA it would be to close a traditional door while battling icy-cold wind gusts.
That is a great book! There is so much discussion around doors, and rightfully so! I can never walk through an unusual door again without thinking about it since reading that chapter.
I'm currently in a country where I can't read the language and memorizing push vs pull feels so unnecessary when you could just design a door with obvious operation mechanics
While this is true I often wonder why so many of those doors don't just open towards both sides. They exist and I think it's the best compromise because it's just not possible to use it the wrong way.
The plate also makes it easier to clean as without it peoples handprints will be in a wider area. For wood doors its even better as wood can be time consuming to clean well.
I always avoid touching that metal door plate, I've gotten 'stainless steel cleaner and polish' on my hands too many times for me to consider using it again.
Now that you mention it, I do the same unknowingly. I always go for the wood above the plate, just because unconsciously I think it's cleaner than the metal plate.
They're traditionally made of brass, which is naturally anti-microbial (the copper, specifically). Not clinically secure, of course, but far better than nothing.
You can push them with a covered elbow as well, of course.
BitTorrent is amazing. It just works. Anyone anywhere can create a torrent of their files, dump the magnet link somewhere, and everyone else can reliably retrieve it. It is self-reinforcing; the more people using a torrent, the better the robustness, redundancy and download speeds. You can often get better speeds from downloading something via torrent than from a web server. It's an open protocol that is relatively easy to implement, it has a diversity of lightweight clients for all OSes and is fairly resistant to censorship. To me it's pretty much perfect tech that solves a real problem. I hope Bram Cohen got rich off of it somehow.
Wish browsers had built in support for it. Imagine if by default most downloads were through BitTorrent, and your browser would then seed the file for 1.5x the download size and time.
The Opera browser did for a short while. If I recall correctly, it was taken out since sysadmins at schools, workplaces, etc would ban the browser. Of course that behavior unfortunately ensured that bittorrent would remain a protocol mostly for piracy.
Support in the browser would require the browser to stay on the whole time, along with the computer. Bittorrent clients are better run on small less power hungry boards (RPi, etc.) or on hardware that is meant to be running 24/7 anyway. For example, I run the Transmission daemon on my XigmaNAS home file server. The NAS is headless, but I can control the daemon through its remote GUI, so as soon as I click on a torrent or magnet link on the browser, it calls the local Transmission GUI which sends the info to the client on the NAS which starts the download freeing the browser and the PC of any further work.
It would absolutely not require that, it only requires that someone's browser is open when you're trying to download, which is likely since most people have their browsers open a lot.
It doesn't require the browser to be always on, unless you want to download something (which is the same as a normal download). Do you mean it's better for the health of the swarm for a particular file? Otherwise I'm not sure I get your point.
> Do you mean it's better for the health of the swarm for a particular file?
That is one of the main points. Some files are shared by thousands users and can be downloaded in seconds, but others are much harder to find, so that I like to keep the client on to help other people getting it quickly. I usually am annoyed when a file with a single seed reaches like 97% then it dies until the following day because the seeder had to turn off the PC, so I try to avoid this, especially since it costs me nothing as broadband is flat and the client runs on a machine that is always on.
BitTorrent itself doesn't provide any privacy, which is critical for something like a web browser. If anyone in the world can query what you've downloaded, it can escalate into real issues.
A major browser supporting torrents would be a disaster for public torrent culture. Since everyone closes their browsers, people would seed substantially less. I have a theory that a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally.
EDIT: closes their browser is a bad way to phrase it. The problem is that the fact that they are seeding would be more in their face instead of hidden away in a notification icon on hover.
I wonder if intellectually "property" groups thought of this playing out.
This would cripple home internet connections, where the upstream is usually a tiny fraction of the downstream bandwidth. Most of the stuff people download is created/hosted by big companies. Let them pay for bandwidth instead of individual home users (looking at you, Blizzard and other game companies who like to use torrents to distribute patches).
I'll give you some technobabble: traffic shaping, ack-priorization, quality of service, traffic class.
All things which your home gateway should have in one form, or another, where you designate torrenting a priority which doesn't interfere with the rest of your activities. And adapting dynamically. No need to think about how to slice available bandwith into pieces beforehand.
Nice in theory, but as far as I've seen, most home routers and devices don't utilize those, and most users don't know how to configure them, and the up/down ratio is so vast (like mine is 1000/20, a 50x difference) that it's hard to saturate the down without first maxing the up in a torrent. The exception to that is it you happen to get some phat-piped seeds who are willing to send to you super fast even if you're uploading at a trickle. But in that case, plain old HTTP would've worked better anyway.
At the end of the day the bottleneck isn't at the protocol level, but the asymmetry of home cable connections. Torrents are great when you have symmetric fiber, but very few homes do right now.
But you also need to find the file first. And sites to search for files are unreliable, often get banned. I remember long before bit torrent there were protocols like napster, edonkey, imesh etc that included search function and were superior to bit torrent in this aspect. Unfortunately, bad design won.
No. He's describing a distributor's options. You are describing a consumer's problem. Specifically pirate comsumers.
He doesn't need to find his own file; he needs to distribute it. Publishing is a separate issue. With napster, you only had one publishing option: napster.com. With torrents, you have many. As he said, "just dump the magnet link somewhere".
> Unfortunately, bad design won.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Napster and bittorent are different tools that solve different problems.
He's describing general issues involved in distributing something.
You're describing specific issues involved in stealing.
Saying "bad design won" is like saying hammers are a bad design compaired to hypodermic needles because you can't use a hammer to inject yourself with heroin.
This is cool, but unfortunately the best content is on private trackers (you also need them to reduce the risk of abuse reports to your provider).
Not sure if the need to use private trackers can be fixed by the protocol, though. But, maybe adding a bit more of anonymity would be enough? i2p torrents provide that, but sacrifice speed. Clearly it's a spectrum and we need more "points" in the middle of it.
I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 20 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.
It depends on how niche your tastes are, or how specific you are about quality. Getting Blu-Ray REMUX files for smaller, forgotten movies on public trackers is nigh impossible in my experience. Meanwhile, private trackers gives the community incentive to seed these large torrents with tiny swarms.
It is probably a matter of what kind of content you're after. I do retro game preservation and private trackers are often the only option for certain sets and certainly the most up to date ones.
I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 17 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.
Honest question: how much of the torrent content is corrupted in some way? I dabbled with file sharing back when Kazaa was a thing and I infected my computer to the point I had to reinstall the operating system and I "learned my lesson." But maybe I overlearned the lesson, and it can be used reliably?
Kazaaa has nothing to do with torrents, but what do you mean by corrupted?
Torrenting can cause a fragmenting issue, but defragging clears that up. And like anywhere else, random executables sometimes contain malware but there's nothing inherent in torrents that makes that more likely.
I meant “file sharing” more generally not “torrents” specifically (I edited my previous comment). I don’t know what exactly happened to my computer but I suspect malware. While not inherent to torrents, it does seem inherent in sharing of random executables. Have the trust issues improved? What are some good use cases of torrents?
So while Kazaa and the like eventually got the ability to actually download from multiple sources, and be able to see that a particular source is popular, as I recall from the early 2000 days, back then it was pure point to point. That is, if you chose to download something, you also were implicitly choosing what source to download it from. So even if five people had the file "Foo", you chose which one to download, and there was no way to know that 4 had the same file "Foo", and 1 person had something else, with no way to know which was what you wanted.
Torrents avoid many of those issues; you can see how many seeds a file has (though Kazaa and the like later added that). And you had to have gotten the magnet link from somewhere, which would have its own evaluatable trust. It's the difference between downloading file called "Foo" from random internet user's computer, and going to a website, that you know, and downloading a file called "Foo" that you also know has been downloaded, and retained, by X number of users.
It's mostly like the rest of the web, though another commenter is right that seeds demonstrate a small amount of trust. If I'm on some random public warez site, my executable is likely to be malware. If I'm on something like the Internet Archive, Debian's site, or /r/datahoarder, their torrents are likely just a more efficient way to share data.
I don’t think torrents are any different in that aspect from the rest of the web.
Just as you would download and run an executable from a trusted source, you can download a torrent of an executable (from that trusted source) and run it.
E.g. many Linux distributions offer torrent links next to regular downloads; if you trust that website, you can download either file.
> . I don’t know what exactly happened to my computer but I suspect malware.
Yes, that's very plausible.
> Have the trust issues improved?
If you're retrieving executable code, the source giving you the magnet link is usually given some implicit trust. A good practice is to distribute a hash or better still a signature of the file(s). Though I would expect BitTorrent is designed to protect the shared contents' extents via hashes too.
If the content is some multimedia, then ideally it could be untrusted. Your favorite OS probably has much more robust libraries handling the multimedia content than it did a decade ago. But ultimately if the content distributed is infringing then it probably comes from a less trustworthy source. In which case you should have a different posture when handling these untrusted files than the generally untrusted interwebs content.
Does the BitTorrent protocol have an announcement / stored metadata of "recently highest percentage of file seen"?
This seems like one of the biggest problems with more decentralized torrents (i.e. ones not backed by a community / core seeder), but also most a UX issue and seemingly trivially solvable.
No, but clients do advertise how much of the torrent they have, so you can glance at your peer list and if you have 2 peers stuck at 10%... there's a good chance that you won't get more than 10%.
I don't know if it started the no-bloatware awareness, that was a remnant of the 90s, where programs were non-bloated by default (with Winamp being the most non-bloated program to ever have been created).
One benefit of ipfs is that you can use cloud flare as a gateway, which is pretty cool. Don't know of anything similar for torrents (from a reputable company).
Speaking from my own experience, I've had a harder time getting data from here to there via ipfs. It's been a year or two since I last tried, but as I recall my troubles were the following:
* Transfers never starting, or not being able to exceed kbps.
* Large amounts of data makes client performance worse.
* Adding data to the store doubles the disk space used unless you take extra steps to mitigate that.
Meanwhile, I can point mktorrent at a folder, load it in my clients, and have it saturate my link within seconds/a couple minutes.
I'm keeping a close eye on IPFS and the Dat Project to take over here (and my use of Syncthing), but I'm hoping some refinement can happen first.
BitTorrent is 20 years old, IPFS only 6. So, might just come down to familiarity. Definitively many more people, even outside tech crowd, have heard of BitTorrent whereas IPFS is still mostly unknown.
Fast, snappy, responsive. No banners or cookie prompts, doesn't ask my to sign up for a newsletter or an account to continue and see more selection, it doesn't load in megabytes of JavaScript to show me products.
Plus, responsive as all heck, and there isn't any bullshit prompts like "click here to see our selected offerings" or "check out our value products here"
Like, from. The short url, I'm already looking at the products.
I think it works because it is like the best parts of a part catalog without being too cute or clever. There are issues with searching sometimes if you want to browse to the part you have in your mind but cannot think of the name of, but usually it works. And yes, it is expensive to buy everything from McMaster, but that isn't what they are for. They also can be quite good about identifying the actual product/source if you ask.
Drilling down into different categories is better than any other site I’ve used. And like Costco, they curate pretty well and just have one supplier for each part, although the supplier may change. If you need a type of gear or screw, there is one option only, no need to compare various brands.
It was just as good 15 years ago too! And it’s probably not true not but it used to be the least possible friction to order things. Even if you weren’t logged in, if ordering from a company premise it would just confirm the address and let you order and send you a bill later.
> Even if you weren’t logged in, if ordering from a company premise it would just confirm the address and let you order and send you a bill later.
This feature RIGHT HERE is probably what lends to McMaster’s retention. No futzing around with account numbers, customer IDs, etc. Nope. Just a real accounting department talking to your company’s accounting department. Onboarding 20 new engineers today? No problem, just tell them to make an account with the company email and fill out the billing info with accounts payable and the finance guys will take care of all the rest.
McMaster honestly is such a gem of a company. Quadruply so if you so happen to live within the same-day delivery distance of one of their regional centers. Then McMaster turns into a super power.
Only downside is that McMaster fails some more rigorous sniff tests on part traceability/quality/reliability for certain kinds of engineering orgs but honestly so much manufacturing is held together by the glue of McMaster.
And if in the odd case they ever fail to deliver, there’s always Grainger!
yes, despite peoples complaints that it’s not mobile-first and pretty, it feels extremely futuristic to find a part number, download an stl, and 3D print to check for fit. never had a problem with ordering from them.
Love mcmaster.com. I spend plenty of time just browsing.
Might benefit from an image search feature.
Am noob DIYer. I often only have a vague sense of what I'm looking for. Usually by analogy. So I'll spend a lot of time both foraging as well as using any search term I can think of.
eg Most recently, I'm looking for "banker's clips", my SO's term for really long money clip looking things. Like sewing hemming clips, but wider, and with a finished edge (non sharp). Great for securing paper to backing boards. So artists can carry around their work.
But the app is excellent, FWIW. No ads, more functional than the website on mobile. The website makes use of desktop screen resolution layouts and has mouse-appropriate links, checkboxes, and comboboxes for an appropriately dense layout instead of big touch targets.
Also the banner is easily dismissed, and doesn't come back when you revisit the site.
FYI: Just noticed that McMaster-Carr now seems to ship internationally - at least to some European addresses I tested. They didn't, for the longest time.
I love this site so much. I was amazed the first time I ordered when the parts showed up the next morning. Now I just deal with the shipping cost because it saves me so much time navigating websites to order from them. I wish there was a version for small computer bits, like generic HDMI cables or USB-SATA dongles.
I didn’t manage to hit the small cross I the window that asked if I wanted to download the app, so I was redirected to the App Store, which was extra useless since the app isn’t available in my market. The text is too small to read and it’s not possible to zoom in.
That “ugliness” is beautiful because imo McMaster’s interface facilitates turning unknown unknowns into known knowns.
Having all the options and important specs laid out on one giant page lets you discover blind spots in your thinking. Need an tube adapter for a fluid systems? Open up that page and as your scrolling through, discover that you forgot to think about the pitch of threading when you find the size and psi rating adapter you were looking for comes in several thread pitch options. Not sure which? Open up the handy explainer at the top of the page that explains to you the different options available and what they mean.
McMaster is primarily a B2B tool whose goal is to facilitate their users finding what they need, buying it, and building in a manner that is fast, convenient, and informative.
McMaster is a masterclass in UX and understanding what is really important to their business model, and resisting the urge to switch to trendy, sleek designs simply because it looks prettier.
I know what responsive means. I went from maximized window to narrower than many websites can handle and it adapts flawlessly. No idea how anyone could call this not responsive.
McMaster-Carr has the best shopping website I've ever seen. The UI is beautifully intuitive; even if I don't know exactly what I need, odds are I can easily find something that will work and they can have it at my doorstep in under 24 hours, no matter how obscure. Even if I don't plan on buying anything, it can be helpful to click through the site just to see what is available. Because most categories of parts have surprisingly well written descriptions and breakdowns, the sire can actually be a good engineering resource.
I've bought from them many times before and have yet to be disappointed with what I got. It is definitely expensive compared to other suppliers or Amazon, etc. But you pay for the convenience.
I hear they aren't very good outside the US though, which is a shame.
This has actually created a huge bias in my company. People try to solve problems with parts from McMaster because it’s so easy to search, but we often overlook other company’s (e.g. Cole-Palmer) products (which may be much better suited for our applications) because it’s a pain to find them on their websites.
> I hear they aren't very good outside the US though, which is a shame.
I hope that this comment won't be interpreted harshly, but their familiarity with mainly American measurements really handicaps them elsewhere. It's not really their fault, but counterintuitively from where I am it's still miles better than other (domestic or international) suppliers for smaller quantities.
I was more referring to issues with shipping and ordering outside of the US. But you are entirely right about them focusing on American measurements, their selection of metric parts is much weaker and more expensive than their customary (main?) Sizes of parts. I do wonder if they are or will be working on improving that any time soon.
I assume they meant that they default to making things that come in imperial-unit sizes (e.g., quarter-inch nuts instead of 6mm ones or whatever). It's not really practical to mix and match.
McM is just a warehousing and distribution company; they don't make any of the things they sell. They define products by specs rather than manufacturer (is few brand names are used in the catalog/site), which makes it much easier to stock parts of every nearly every flavor (imperial, metric, dozens of odd pipe threading standards, thousands of ASME/ANSI/DIN/other-standards-body-standards).
I'd love it if they added a price filter option! If I want a clear plastic tube I don't always know whether I'll get a cheaper price with acrylic, UV-resistant acrylic, static dissipative acrylic, ultra-strength polycarbonate, high-temperature polycarbonate, etc... It can take a lot of clicking to find the cheapest option!
Unfortunately I don't see them creating a price filter as they are mainly geared at businesses vs. hobbyists or consumers, where "get it here fast" is more important than saving a few dollars. That being said, I find adding all of the prospective parts to the cart works well for me when I want to compare prices
Often, the only reason you wouldn't choose, say, stainless steel over regular steel, or UV-resistant polycarbonate over ordinary polycarbonate, is because of the expectation that one is cheaper. So price can't be so unimportant. And one version always is cheaper, sometimes by a factor of five or ten times. But sometimes there are surprises and the stainless version is cheaper for other reasons. Maybe the non-stainless bars of that particular size are only available with super tight tolerances, for example.
So why force the customer to know and guess which material grade they want as a proxy for price, when you can directly let them find the selection that meets their needs at the lowest price?
As a business user, I’d like the price filter too. For instance, I might be okay with any material for a valve in a prototyping application as long as it’s the right size, I just need to find the cheapest one (with one day shipping of course!)
I’ve yet to work in a business that doesn’t care about the price of something. This is particularly true when we are evaluating parts that might be used in production at scale.
For what it's worth, I work in industrial controls. More or less all of the machines we design are one-offs so engineering and labor time dominates the cost of projects vs. materials.
Additionally, unplanned downtime is extremely expensive. If a machine breaks down and a replacement part isn't on the shelf, getting that part fast is much more important than saving a few dollars. Same goes for if we end up with a bunch of guys waiting around for a part to get installed.
McMaster-Carr's website is great for finding items, but it's really irritating if you're just ordering one or two things and want to know what it'll actually cost. Unless it's changed in the last few years, they won't let you know the grand total until AFTER you place your order. Maybe it helps them simplify order fulfillment, but it's really annoying.
GearWrench ratcheting wrenches. They're compact and fit in places that sockets never will. The ratcheting mechanism is very fine, with low backlash, which matters a lot in those tight places. They feel great, and they're a delight to use.
Wirewrap tools. They're mechanically simple, easy to learn, and let you create neat, dense hobby prototypes faster and easier than soldering.
Wago Lever Nuts. These let you join a wide range of wires, from 24 to 12 AWG, stranded or solid. They're quick: strip, insert and flip. They're verifiable: you can check that it's done right just by looking at it. They're reliable: the spring pressure ensures they never come loose, even with vibration and heat over many years. I'm never going back to twist-on wire nuts.
Ruby. The seamless blend of OO, functional, and imperative programming is beautiful. It can be dense without being obscure. irb and pry make it easy to explore code and data. The syntax is mostly conventional and easy to learn. The standard libraries are well designed, and have consistent interfaces. The documentation is concise and easy to scan. I won't say its "The Best", but of the dynamic, interpreted languages I know, Ruby is the most fun to use, and it starts with the clean, well-considered design right at its core.
Pliers wrench are also excellent and a far better alternative to adjustable wrenches. The parallel jaws and pressure added from squeezing prevents rounding of nuts.
There are also hex bit ratcheting wrenches (go by a variety of names). They key is they take a standard bit, and are only the depth of the bit + a few millimeters. Lifesavers on doorknobs.
If you really needed the clearance, you could probably grind part of the hex end of a bit down too.
For quality hex wrenches Bondhus is a good brand. Having a quality set makes working on motorcycles, putting furniture together, etc. much easier: https://intl.bondhus.com/pages/hex-end
These are great but you need to strip a specific length of insulation of off the wire - within a certain range, that is.
That's not that difficult but I wonder if there is an adjustable stripping tool that can be fixed to a certain length to get repeatable strips over and over ?
I use manual strippers because I only do small jobs. I compare the length against the template on the side of the lever nut and it's easy to keep it in tolerance.
If you want to do a lot of connections, I recommend using an automatic stripper.
Google flights is fantastic. Don't know if it is "the best-designed thing I've ever used", but it is on top of my mind as I just used it yesterday. Google doesn't get enough credit for the things that they did do well - including Search and Maps.
Another is Macbooks - the pre-2015 ones at least. I haven't used the latest M1 ones, which I hear great things about. The Aluminum body, the flawless screen, magsafe, great sound - there is so many things I love about Macbook hardware. Such a beautiful marriage of form and function.
I must disagree with you on maps. Google maps is a fantastic geographic aware search.
It is a horrific map. On any given screen there is an 80% chance that the major road I'm interested in is not labeled. Finding the name of a relevant cross street is a nightmare.
I feel like it used to be better. Way better. I think the map aspect has been dropped entirely as a real feature now that they supply directions (search) primarily instead.
I have OSM and Google maps installed. If I'm trying to navigate to a specific town or street, I'll use OSM because it's "just a map" that isn't trying to sell me shit. But if I'm looking for a business (restaurant, shop etc) I'll always use Google Maps because they're trying to sell me shit, and because OSM is absolutely pitiful in this regard.
I have tried to help out here by adding business in my area but the process of slow. Not sure who is in charge of approvals. Google, on the other hand, almost defaults businesses to being on the map even when they don't want to be. (My wife ruins a small business that doesn't have a bricks and mortar store - it's just online. Since it's registered to our home address, she absolutely didn't want it in Google Maps, but it took a good bit of clicking to get it off the map. Hence, they're reliable A.F. for finding businesses, even if they don't want to be found
> I have tried to help out here by adding business in my area but the process of slow. Not sure who is in charge of approvals.
There are no approvals at all. After you submit your changeset, it's in the primary public database. Some relatively short time after that, the affected tiles are rerendered and the change is visible on the main map layer (Mapnik) on openstreetmap.org. But if you use an application (e.g. OsmAnd) or some third-party map rendering (e.g. by Mapbox), the changes might take quite some time to get there.
I agree with this 100%. And there needs to be something in the design to allow you to zoom the text size. It's comical to witness myself trying to read too small text and reflexively zooming only to have the same sized font.
Even worse, it seems almost random which zoom levels have text. Often, especially for train line and station names, zooming in makes the text disappear!
Agreed. As my eyesight has gotten worse, I rely more and more on being able to do a quick pinch-to-zoom to read small type. Ironically, this pushes me away from native apps and onto the mobile browser!
If the alternatives include "Google Maps from about 6 years ago", then yes, yes I have.
I don't really fault Google that much for their design decisions here, as Maps have really morphed into "Local Search", which makes sense for most use cases, but I agree with the GP, if you are just, for example, wanting to look at a map of a new area (i.e. not where you live), I think Maps is worse than it was some years ago.
I just got an M1 Macbook Air this week to replace my 2014 Macbook Pro. Performance is cool (lots has already been documented about that), but the battery life is on another level. Charged it on 4 days ago and after about 7 hours of use, it's still at 48% at the time of writing this post. Ditto to what you said about "a beautiful marriage of form and function".
Typing from M1 MBA I picked this weekend. I don't think I enjoyed any device since 2012 MBA so much. Love keyboard, unlock by watch, portability, and unparalleled battery life. Screen is a compromise (coming from 2019 MBP 16") but I am okay with that.
It's great that exists (I have long legs), but an extension for...legroom? Why is something that important treated as esoteric and not a native search feature or setting?
I have multiple close family members who are still using the old Magsafe Macbook Airs. I ask them every year if they want to upgrade to a newer model, and they decline, they just love the laptop. I replaced the battery in each one to the OWC upgraded battery kit.
One incredibly irritating thing about Google Flights is it ignores and overrides my currency settings every time. And often my language settings too.
At least on Safari.
No combination of being logged into Google and selecting the currency in the sidebar will result in the currency, rather than the local currency, being set for next visit.
That means every single use of Google flights involves going to the sidebar to set currency, either first or more likely upon searching.
One time I was in a foreign country but looking for hotels on Google Maps for a future weekend getaway in my home country. Despite being logged in and Google having my home address, and with each account needing a country to comply with differing data protection laws, it was still showing me prices for hotels in my home country in the foreign country's currency. Helpful? Not!
Recently bought transatlantic flights through Google Flights and it gave better results than all the traditional players in the space (skyscanner, kayak, etc). It's not just something to pad out search results, they put some effort into it.
Also, for every single flight they have the mass of carbon emissions displayed right next to it? Seeing that huge figure (1 ton!) definitely made me more hesitant to fly. Could this be... an altruistic design decision? From Google?
New MacBooks seem to be good again, especially the model with MagSafe. However, non-replaceable SSDs is a big deal for me. I know that a MacBook can have a long life span, but I'm not sure how long its SSD will work with any issues.
Still using my ~10 year old MacbookPro pretty much every day. The little plastic feet have fallen off and I'm on my second power adapter (and that is looking a bit ropey), otherwise it still works great.
ZFS. Complete research companies unknowingly depend on the utmost reliability and flexibility ZFS has to offer. Started right with the first version included in FreeBSD in production use and never failed once while being the central storage connected to multiple HPC clusters with millions upon millions of rather small but also some vary large files. While offering five nines of uptime we even had to ability to send efficient binary forever incremental differential snapshots to remote DR locations. Meanwhile we saw many large crashed sites at companies which had downtimes of weeks using lustre. ZFS even got hated by management because it's not giving them fancy relationships with the normies using HP/Dell. So the last ten years are probably the best ZFS got here because some instructed architect is looking for commercial replacement but nothing better seems available.
This. I replaced a couple of NetApp and Isilon arrays at a smallish HPC cluster with 1.2 PB of research data. Ended up saving a few million Danish Kroner every friggin year, and got so much better reliability than the commercial offerings. ZFS (by extension, FreeBSD) truly is an engineering marvel in our world.
The documentation is shit though, I spent a full hour digging through forum answers trying to increase my swap space. All this bpool zpool crap.
And then my system /boot got full of some snapshot (wtf I never asked for this), apt-get failed to live up to its promise of magic, got more hell about a 20% preservation rule (again wtf).
Was cutting and pasting some zpool zsysctl zc -a -f -foo -bar and then some sudo zfs destroy bpool npool zpool/blah/autosys@ubuntu_h2h3rc4h stuff. I cut and pasted a bunch of stuff off the forums I didn't understand until apt-get worked again.
I didn't understand a word of it, and there was zero documentation in the obvious places.
Solaris used to come with a user manual, it was easily the best thing about the buying experience because it was so detailed and obviously written for engineers.
If you can find one of those manuals on the internet you will be set for life on understanding ZFS and dtrace.
There’s also a C, C++ and ASM manual that is bundled too, but you can skip those.
If you can’t find any, I’ll send you mine.
I know it sounds like I’m asking you to RTFM- but the experience of reading these manuals is really a joy.
Well, it's an ROI judgement call at the end of the day. ZFS explicitly takes on significantly more irreducible complexity than ext4 so that it can cohesively tie together the features it offers into a complete system that is consistent for users to work with and for developers to maintain while introducing as few bugs as possible.
This reminds me that I wrote a little a while back about the occasionally nontrivial challenge of absorbing complex structures (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25760518) when learning new concepts. I would personally absolutely love to be able to ingest complex ideas while not having to deal with the heightened semantic overhead, but I think that might be the human-learning equivalent of the P=NP problem. (The only solution seems to be finding neat elegant ways to represent things that happen to take advantage of subconscious shortcuts intrinsic to how we reason about the world, but there sadly seems to be no research being done on how to find and exploit those paths.)
ZFS itself seems to suffer from a bit of an above-average "newbies on soapboxes" problem sadly - a bit like the Rust community's "memory safety" crowd that don't completely understand what's going on, except in ZFS' case there are more than a few people who only know just enough to be dangerous, and are excellent at articulating themselves, loudly.
The collective consensus about ZFS is thus mostly comprised of many small pieces of arguably technically correct anecdata that miss just enough nuance that the overall perspective is shifted from reality by a nontrivial amount. My current favorite observable example of this is this downvoted (grey) comment by one of the ZFS developers clarifying that the system truly doesn't need a lot of RAM to run: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11898292
Completely independently of this vocal-minority problem, ZFS' licensing situation inhibits the cohesive direction and leadership that would produce a fundamentally cohesive, holistic platform integration effort along with supporting documentation. There are hobbyists figuring things out as they go along on the one side, and commercial vendors providing SLA'd documentation as part of their enterprise support on the other, with a giant hole in the middle that in this case would probably be filled with a kernelspace documentation effort (which would be absolutely rock solid and excellent).
So if you can ignore all the vocal minorities and read between enough of the lines of the documentation you can find (is this valid for my OpenZFS version? is this FreeBSD-kernel specific? was this written by someone who knows what they're talking about? etc), you should be fine. You just have to accept the status quo and the tug of war that sadly tagged along with the excellent codebase.
Regarding the specific use case you described, I would point out a few details:
- AFAIK, ZFS pools (aka-but-not-exactly a partition) can't easily be resized; you generally have to recreate them
- When I was setting up my own ZFS configuration I repeatedly found warnings (without looking for them) in multiple setup guides and GitHub issue comments that swap on ZFS can cause deadlocks - hopefully you were using standard Linux swap partitions
- You aren't required to use the defaults of "bpool" and "rpool" (I chose my own pool and dataset names)
- Automatic snapshots on /boot sounds like a misconfiguration error (I never configured snapshots)
- Naturally I can only say that blindly copypasting commands that directly edit your filesystem is an excellent way to say goodbye to your data, with extra steps
My own experience was with configuring ZFS from scratch on Debian (following https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Deb..., but mostly ignoring the Now We Setup 23489573647823 Separate Datasets Because We Can bits - I just have /debian (/), /data and /boot).
It sounds like you were fighting Ubuntu's autoconfigured setup, without understanding what defaults it picked or what things it did for you at install time. This is not at all ideal from a system-comprehension perspective.
So, it might be fair to shift some (maybe more than some) of the blame to Ubuntu for your negative experience, and not just associate ZFS on its own with that negativity.
I can highly recommend setting up Debian on a physical machine (that always helps me greatly, I find VMs too... intangible) and yelling at it until a) you understand everything you've done and b) ZFS works. In that order. Getting it working without needing to completely reinstall (ie breaking something, then fixing the breakage, without needing to wipe and starting again) would also be an excellent goal... perhaps on the 2nd or 3rd reinstall :P
I've also found it extremely useful to create a ~4GB or so partition at the end of my disk to store a "recovery" system; what I'll do is debootstrap Debian onto the recovery partition, boot that, install ZFS support, configure pools and datasets, debootstrap Debian onto the new dataset, get that working (might take a couple goes - I always miss a step, like configuring GRUB, or remembering to run `passwd`, or edit /etc/fstab, etc), and then I have a 4GB ext4 partition that knows how to mount ZFS if I need it.
This strategy actually came in handy bigtime a couple months back when I broke GRUB boot (unrelated issue) and was able to fallback-boot into the recovery partition to get everything working again: the recovery partition was able to mount / as needed so I could chroot into my main system and reinstall GRUB correctly.
This appears to be specific to RAIDZ though, which I think I'm not using. I'm just using mirrors at the moment.
I'm incidentally currently working through the logistics for a potential upgrade and am seriously torn about whether to switch over to RAIDZ2 or stick with a couple of independent mirror pools. The "all disks thrash on rebuild after failure" property of RAIDZ2 has me scrambling for the sequential simplicity of mirrors, but... giant contiguous datasets... hmmmmmm...
I recently borrowed a Fiskars x25 for the first time, after reading about them for many years. They really are better.
Splits better than my maul and weighs less. I was surprised to find that the latter was more important. If it takes less energy to cycle, you can split the same log more times without it feeling like a burden to do so.
The next time I need to split more than a trifling amount of wood, my first step will be to acquire a new splitting axe -- the overall time to completion will be faster.
Someone I know designed a wood-splitting axe where the central part of the blade has a high center-of-mass and freely pivots in order to kick apart the pieces once the axe hits the wood. It’s an ingenious design based on simple physics, and works quite well. There’s no purchasing info at the link below; it’s a small company whose main focus is on machines for metal roofing, so I suppose it requires a phone call or email to them to find out more.
I love Rotring pens and pencils - I used a Rapid Pro mechanical pencil throughout college. Nowadays I use a Rotring 600 or 800 with Ohto ballpoint refills. The knurled grip is great, the the overall weight of the pencil is much better than your average plastic pen.
I really like my Pentel Graphgear 1000s. The retractable tip means it doesn't stab you if you want to carry it in a pocket and at least somewhat reduces the probability of it being ruined by a drop.
So happy to see the Fiskars mentioned. Grew up with farmers in the midwest US but love my fancy little splitter hitter from across the pond.
I find a subtle lift on the handle right at the end of the stroke, almost like a whipping action, seems to help a little. It may be in my head, but it seems to stick less.
Use the full length of the handle, the horn at the end provides a positive grip and you get more speed.
On large rounds don’t start in the very center, bisect the round but start near near the far rim so the crack is only supported on one side and has a better chance to propagate through the length of the round. Work your way back towards you and repeat if needed.
Always focus on where your strike lands. Most smaller logs will be one hitters but aim precisely anyway. On larger rounds stitch strikes together in one continuous line across the face. Don’t get sloppy, if you’re more than an 1/8” off left or right hit it again. Repeat across until she gives. Precision beats percussion.
Set your rounds on top of the biggest round you can find when splitting. This flattens the contact (tip #1) and the large round below provides some inertial resistance. Splitting directly on the ground provides more bounce, reducing effectiveness, and the bit gets dulled by contact with dirt and rocks.
Keep the cover, its durable, provides a great hanging handle. The blade doesn’t need to be razor sharp like you would want with a cutting axe, but it should be sharp and clean.
> Set your rounds on top of the biggest round you can find when splitting.
That's fine advice for someone who wants to burn a campfire for a night. I heat with wood in remote Canada and I estimate I split somewhere between 600 and 800 bucks for a season's supply of firewood. If I had to lift each one of those into the air and balance it (if possible, and it's often not possible) on another piece of wood I'd never get enough split to warm me the whole winter while my back recovers.
I just tip the buck up on the ground and use a dull maul because I don't have time to baby the edge of an axe. Mostly these days I just use a hydraulic splitter because I'm old and grumpy especially when I'm as behind in getting my wood in as I always seem to be.
You'll get no argument from me about using a hydraulic splitter. Around my property there are a few species (I don't know which) that are quicker to split by hand. Anything that I have to sit there and smack on gets the ram. I burn 3-4 cords per year but mostly to keep from going broke on propane.
>especially when I'm as behind in getting my wood in as I always seem to be.
I'm convinced anybody that isn't behind on getting firewood for the season has too much time on their hands. xD
I also use a manual hydraulic splitter as I never developed axe skills when young. It works fine for most sections of trunk and gives a nice upper-body workout. If I load it with two sections of trunk the rearmost one significantly reduces the distance I need to move the ram before the section at the front makes contact with the splitter.
> start near near the far rim so the crack is only supported on one side
I have no professional background, so maybe I'm totally wrong, but I would advise against that, because if you aim a bit too far or the wood gives too easily, most of the impact will be against the haft instead of the head, and the haft can break this way.
I usually start at the near side and then work towards the far side, which is only dangerous if you don't have a wide base (another log maybe) under the piece you're currently splitting, because if you miss the near side, the axe is flying towards your feet.
Good to call this out because it’s something people should think about.
> because if you miss the near side, the axe is flying towards your feet.
Had a close call here once and have gone the other way ever since. I’ve missed long and broken old wooden handle splitters this way, but the Fiskars are incredibly tough and just sting the shit out of your hands if you miss.
I like to set the tire on a large round, place a few smaller pieces inside the tire (so they don’t go flying out) and then chop them all before clearing and refilling. Also works with a single medium piece inside the tire. Large pieces you can quarter first, I don’t have much trouble there with pieces flying around.
I split about three cords a year, all by hand. It's mostly hemlock and alder. The biggest rounds are 24-30" in diameter.
I thought I'd need a heavy maul for the large rounds, but I use the axe for everything. On the larger rounds, start at the edges and work your way around. One nice thing about working in from the edges is that the edge pieces with bark are thin and have lots of split surface area, and all the inside pieces have no bark. So everything dries faster. I don't have any trouble missing strikes with this method.
The knottiest pieces for me tend to be spruce rounds from mid-trunk. I use the axe to get as much off as I can, and then either stack the larger knotty pieces in one area and burn them whenever they've dried enough, or use the chainsaw to cut through them one more time.
Perhaps explain why it is better? A personal opinion is not as useful as an insightful explanation.
> was useless
You haven’t said what was wrong with it. Also I think your wording is awfully close to breaking site guidelines: "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Disclaimer: not a mod, I’m just a hippy that wants us all to get on well together!
Unless you want to make a fort at night, I really would not bring an axe along. Finding firewood for a campfire is usually not a problem.
But a too heavy bike is.
I did it bike camping a lot and my advice is, only bring what you absolutely need. Without extra burden, everything is much more enjoyable and you will have more energy to reach the nice spots.
I do a lot of slow bike camping in Japan where the campsite will often provide firewood, but it's too large for the small solo stove I have. I've tried a saw, but what I really want is thinner wood split from the larger pieces, not lateral cuts. The axes being talked about are only about 470g, which doesn't bother me too much shoved in a pannier.
X11 or X7 would probably be a bit lighter and more durable. I know its ‘plastic’ but I’ve beat the shit out of mine for 15 years and it hasn’t loosened up at all. Wood handles get finicky in the elements. The Fiskar plastic handles are hollow, too, you might be able to pack a flint kit up in there for energency use.
Something like an Eastwing is goong to be a better chopper, but these will split better. Both are useful.
To bike camp bring a small foldable saw, so instead of spending 1+ hour splitting wood after a long riding day you can spend that time enjoying camping
I have a carpenter axe which is very compact and somewhat lightweight, but gave it up because I never had to use it
I have no one thing (these are the things that pop into my mind, all within their own category/niche);
* My Hilleberg Akto single person hiking tent scores very highly. It is designed for lightness, durability and simplicity when setting up. It can better be set up/torn down by one person in a storm than most other tents I've owned.
* My Leatherman multitool has been with me for years in some fairly bad conditions. It just keeps working and sometimes in ways that I hadn't imagine it could be used.
* My Aeropress portable coffee maker is in my mind amazingly designed and portable for making a decent cup of coffee anywhere in the world.
* SSH is simply amazing. I think it can be overly too easy to forget what it gives us the ability to do.
* SQLite. It is amazingly designed in pretty much any way you can look at it (requirements, speed, size, resource use etc).
* My Kindle (and other such devices) is an amazing piece of tech. I carry around my whole library in only a few hundred grams, and its power usage levels are so low that I need only charge it for an hour or so each month.
* The Kotlin programming language. Such a breath of fresh air after having been stuck with Java (pre 9) on Android for so long.
* Android's new UI design toolkit Jetpack Compose is a seismic shift in native Android development where everything looks and feels like it has had some serious thought put in behind it.
These are obviously subjective, and I have no longing to get into discussions on the merrits of the software I mention here. There are plenty of places that has been done before.
The kindle hardware is excellent, but the kindle software is one of the worst pieces of garbage ever. Just filled from top to bottom with utterly deranged behaviors.
The thing that drives me crazy is that when you select word to translate, it includes commas and points. Then, dictionary can't translate!!!
This is such a basic issue and still exists for years. Ppl from Amazon, I pray to you to fix this
Agreed. But in its defense, the software on my Kindle has remained the same level of bad for the last 8 years. Compared to my Android devices that have slowed down significantly.
I carried a cheaper Wingman religiously for five years. I bought it on a whim during a sale at a hardware store thinking I would keep it in the car for emergencies. It quickly became a pocket staple. Over the five years that thing fixed my car on the side of the road, was used at my job every 30 minutes, hammered loose nails, fell off a roof, cut my dinner. You name it.
Another thing to mention is how well the tools that comprise the leatherman itself are integrated into the package. Depending on the loadout/model you choose, you can have an array of quick-access functionality without any fumbling. The hinge mechanism for the exterior tools I have used were always taut and locked strongly, and had very smooth deployment action. I could have my knife tip scraping at something faster than I could pull a phone out of my pocket.
I lost that Wingman but it was quickly replaced by a Wave+. Should you have an eye for tinkering, fixing or tweaking things a leatherman will elevate you at least a few percentage points towards having super powers. I was astounded at how many situations can be handled more effectively if you have a bit of mechanical advantage. And a knife.
I don't know what you'd consider light but the Akto packs to around 1.3-1.5 kg.
Given that I've been in it during weather reaching up to 35 on the Beaufort scale (~20m/s) with severe rain I feel it packs a fantastic punch for its weight.
I'm sure there are some niche ultra light space age material tents out there.
But that would be like saying a Tesla isn't a good car because it can't reach space.
Can you give an argument why we should adhere to your personal standard of a tent being light only if its under 1kg? Is it supported somewhere else? What if someone comes and claims that a tent is light only if its less than 500g?
I never said you have to adhere to my standard. Light is subjective of course. There is no such thing as a light weight standard for tents and if there was it still wouldn't be objective. I base my opinion on what is available in the solo tent market where I look at a combination of price, durability, where it will be used and how many days the hike is. There are not that many tents under 500g so it's a bit too restrictive in my opinion, but someone else could claim that and that would be fine.
I guess we are looking at different use cases for these tents.
I hike inside and around the arctic circle, sometimes during winter time.
That my shelter, that can take the beating that this kind of climate can dish out, weighs only around 1/30th of my total equipment weight makes it an incredible deal.
Yeah I could have framed my original response better.
I have hiked above the arctic circle but not during winter time. Then I would look towards what you are using. ;) You do seem to hike a little heavier than me, but that could be a seasonal thing. When I go for a 10 day summer trip my pack is around 19-23kg, enough stuff to deal with weather around 0C and rain storms.
What setup do you use for new Android apps? I dabbled in building an Android app months ago and sort of gave up because I couldn't decide on the best "framework".
I do native (Java/Kotlin) and Flutter development, for 10 and 2 years respectively. Just this year moving into the Jetpack Compose territory, and enjoying it immensly.
Regarding the question about what you should choose, well that really depends on the problem space and the end goal you have in mind.
If the application is generic, will not really leverage platform specific capabilities and will be made for both Android & iOS I'd say go for Flutter. Here I mean that specific sensors and OS capabilities will not be used, as well as sharing of code for different platforms such as TV, car and wearables.
If the application is ever going to be Android only, I'd say go for the native UI toolchain, which would be Jetpack Compose. The ramp up from 0 to 100 is quick given how much good material is out there to get started (for instance go to and use the Android/Kotlin community slack channels). This route would require you to use Kotlin.
Skip looking into the old view system. Any relevant information from that space will come in time, and the rest wont be relevant anymore.
If you want to create a code base that can be leveraged with web, then go for some of the JS frameworks.
If you do have some piece of framework in mind you want to learn, then use that.
It all depends. Just keep Voltaire's words in mind:
Thank you. Follow up question if you have time. For these native Android apps, I'm interested in building apps that have good backward compatibility and thus low maintenance costs. Is backward compatibility easy to achieve with Android apps? If not, what tips can you provide?
Again that depends on how far back you are thinking to be backwards compatible.
Every year the number of users on older apis reduces, and these older users then either jump forward almost to the front (new phones, many low cost versions available today) or at least somewhat to the front (buy newer used or refurbished devices).
As Google has done quite a bit of work to try to solve some of the issues with core OS updates on third party decices (Project Treble for instance), over time the fracturing is getting better (for instance the latest API releases are bringing with them changes to how 3rd party OEMs can bundle their own Linux kernel modules so that the process is simpler and so could extend the possible software update cycles).
But there will always be some fracturing in some respects.
With that out of the way, I have not made apps with lower API requirements than 21 in the last 4 years and starting on one now I set the limit to 23.
This does not bring with it as many headaches as say when I was supporting API 15 onwards.
Google has put a lot of effort into creating tools that take care of much of the biggest headaches (for instance WorkerManager for background task execution and scheduling).
It also really depends on what parts of the platform you are going to use. If you do netwark calls, local data caching and display only then you wont have any problems that need handling.
There is sadly still this lingering sense in the dev community that Android developers need to deal with massive amounts of fragmentation. I would say it is no way as bad as it used to be, and only ever becomes apparent at the edges.
Just follow the guides that Google supplies. They are excellent and take care of explaining each possible pitfall and nuance you might need to take care of.
I recently wrote my first Android (and iOS) app, and decided on React Native. I just wanted to make something quickly, cross platform, and easy to understand -- React Native fit the bill.
No affiliation, but Expo made it very easy and FAST to get up and running for testing and building. Highly recommend it.
The Kinesis Advantage keyboard [1]. The height of the keys in each column are different because, well, the length of each of our fingers is different. It’s so naturally comfortable that it goes unnoticed and one’s fingers just fall into the right position. Placing one’s fingers offset left or right is so obviously uncomfortable that it’s basically impossible to have off-by-one typos. There is a lot of subtly well-designed ergonomics to this keyboard (though also some not great bits—looking at you, function row).
I use a custom keyboard with a similar columnar stagger. In addition it's small enough that I can reach every key without moving my hands, which means my accuracy is noticeably better. There's no chance I'm ever going back voluntarily. Typing all kinds of symbols all day just doesn't get more comfortable.
This is why I'm always so annoyed by all the "qwerty vs. dvorak" arguments. It's pretty much the least problematic part of conventional keyboard design.
Could not agree more. Especially for programmers I would argue that the alphabetical character layout matters so much less than where one reaches special characters and the modifiers.
Having used a DIY columnar staggered keyboard for about a year a laptop keyboard feels like using a device that is not designed for humans.
I bought the PCB(Signum 3) and soldered on 42 keys and the controller board. It's got no case but with rubber pads on the bottom it's pretty quiet and thin.
I'm planning to build a custom 3d printed one with a comparable layout but fewer keys. Mostly to try some ideas and features.
It was very good about 5 years ago, and is still quite comfortable.
However I would say that today this has largely been superseded by a myriad of better choices. For the adventurous type there's e.g. Dactyl Manuform. If one does not care so much for the keywell there's Lily 58, Iris or Kyria. For built-in tenting there's ZSA Moonlander, Redox etc.
All of these have better customizability, repairability and portability than a Kinesis Advantage.
Want to try diffent key switches? Use hot-swap sockets.
Want wireless? Drop in a nice!nano microcontroller.
Want to create a crazy custom key layout or macros? You can do anything you want in QMK and flash it to the microcontrollers.
I own a Kinesis Advantage 2, a Lily, and a Corne, and tried a Dactyl Manuform. IMO the Kinesis still wins hands down. I’ve tried dozens of keyboards but the Kinesis is the one I will always go back to.
Why? To be blunt, I don’t care at all about fancy keyswitches, or wirelessness, or portability. I’m simply looking for the most comfortable input device possible.
If non-ergonomic rubber dome keyboards feel like plastic chairs, all of the other keyboards you mentioned feel like fancy wooden chairs. Some of them might be incredibly well-crafted and contour to your body! But the Kinesis feels like a top-of-the-line high-tech massage chair. I’ve tried dozens and dozens of ergonomic keyboards —- and even made one, by designing a PCB and printing it out —- but at the end of the day, the Kinesis is the keyboard I will ALWAYS reach for.
I put all the modifiers on the thumbs. so meta and mac option need to be mapped, and I put a control key on each thumb, space, backspace and newline. so all chords are 1 or 2 thumbs plus a normal key.
I guess that leaves 3 on the thumbs unused ... I should look at that
This may be a normie response - but Apple Airpods Pro are one of the best products I've used. After years of using several bluetooth headsets that get finicky (with connections that is), having a set that just connects and works every single time is refreshing. They really changed my behavior - I went from not liking phone conversations at all (getting agitated after a few minutes)to comfortably having long phone calls. I would replace mine immediately if they were lost / broken.
I agree, unfortunately however I've recently developed worsening tinnitus that I've attributed to them. There appear to be several others who have a similar experience[0].
I've stopped using them in favor of my over-ear VModas the past couple weeks and my tinnitus is significantly better. I rarely listen to music loud and the volume only seldom goes over 50% so I'm having a hard time attributing it to excess listening volume.
This is something I've been concerned about for quite some time with nose-cancelling in-ears.
Being an avid user of my AirPodsPro for commutes, working out and just taking calls in general, I figured that the constant noise cancellation, and tight seal in the ear canal, might cause tinnitus.
I haven't experienced any symptoms yet but I fear that prolonged use will further highten the chances of such a diagnosis. I'm sorry to hear that you might be experiencing tinnitus from AirPodsPro use, but I can't say that it haven't cross my mind, that it would lead to that.
I’m curious, did the amount of time you used go up significantly with the airpod pros? I enjoy mine so much I use them for multiple hours every day, which is quite a shift in usage compared to the other awful earbuds I would use before.
Yes, most definitely hence why I also began to wonder, if the increased usage time may come with caveats.
This is just a thought, but I pondered that the noice-cancelling is further worsening ear health. I'd argue that AirPodsPro NC causes this because it feeds additional sound in (ie. cancelling) which takes an extra toll on your hearing. Again, just a thought. I have no science to back this up.
Interesting. I returned my airpod pros because I kept losing them and/or their case, and had anxiety until I found them. And I knew it was only a matter of time before I didn't find them again. Also, the audio quality on the other end of my calls was actively bad. I've reverted to wired earbuds with a mic in the cable, and am (very) grateful I was stubborn about keeping the 3.5mm headphone jack on whatever phone I'm using. (Perhaps my experience would have been better with an iPhone, but there is no way I'm buying an iPhone, for lots of reasons.)
Since the latest iOS minor version (some time in the last month or so), certain models of AirPods are integrated in the Find My network, meaning if you lose them, other (participating) iPhones in the area (~1b worldwide) will report their location as they go past. Meaning they should be much harder to lose.
Yes! They're so easy to misplace. I lost my first pair of Airpods Pro, so I picked up a Catalyst Case [0] for them that I can clip onto my belt loop or messenger bag. Much more peace of mind. Haven't come close to losing them since.
I bought Airpods soon after they came out, and got a pair of Airpods Pro just a couple of years ago as a gift for my girlfriend.
I just switched back to a pair of $50 IEMs (Tin T2 Pros) with a replaceable MMCX cable and foam tips. Fortunately I use a phone that has a jack.
The removal of the headphone jack is an absolute crime. Everyone I know struggles with Bluetooth regularly, but even the Apple models with special pairing chips don’t ALWAYS behave. Meanwhile, I do have to deal with a cable on these IEMs… but honestly, after 2+ years of suffering with Bluetooth, I’m more than happy with that tradeoff.
By the way, the headphones I have now are absolutely fantastic. Especially with the foam tips, noise cancellation is just about as good as my Airpod Pros, and I can either wear them like normal headphones, or hooked above the ear, to keep them more secure (mostly while running).
They’re also built out of solid aluminum like absolute tanks.
If anybody is skeptical about Bluetooth headphones, please seek out phones with the jack and try out something like these IEMs. I think you’ll be very happy.
I agree with this. I remember buying mine in a busy part of SF. I opened them on the street and my iPhone instantly recognized them and paired. I didn’t even need to open the Bluetooth settings menu. Then, as soon as I put them on, the street I was on, which was so busy and chaotic just prior, became dead silent. I hadn’t experienced magic like that in a long while.
I am really looking forward to trying them out. So far I have $40 NoName true-wireless headphones [1] and Sennheiser over-ear ANC headpones (MB660). I really like those $40 headphones, but sadly they last for 4-5 hours only and I reach that limit a few times per week. But since the true wireless headphones feel very different to the over-ear headphones, I decided to buy another pair and wanted to try out some high quality ANC in-ear headphones.
Given the factor 5 price difference and the fact that I am quite happy with my current headphones, I am very interested how the Apple AirPods Pro will perform.
I hear the latency is high, which is a challenge for all wireless earphones. So good for music and calls, but not for videos, games, singing. Do I understand correctly? :-)
“It depends”, it’s not high latency enough to notice on calls, music is obviously fine- but it’s not going to be able to keep up with a graded DAC+Mic in a professional setting (like a recording studio).
I haven’t tried it for video editing, though I suspect it might cause your scrobbing to stutter because macos will “pause” media playback until the headphones have been instructed to play, so you don’t have desync issues.
But that’s not what it competes against.
There’s no noticeable latency when using the phone/iPad, Mac as a normal consumer, calls, music, video conferencing.
The basic AirPods are the lowest latency Bluetooth headphones I have tried. In A2DP mode the latency is somewhere around 30ms that is almost good enough for playing an instrument through them but certainly good enough for games or phone calls. The theoretical minimum for AAC is around 21ms. For calls the problem is that somehow Apple didn't invent a proprietary extension so you're stuck with HFP sound quality.
Replying to myself since I can't edit the post above: I can't reproduce the low number any more. With current iOS I get 197ms which is not worse than competition but not that good either.
My numbers are from measuring round trip latency through headphones and phone's built in mic and then basically guessing which part is input and which part output latency (they're both small). 200ms is certainly in line with most Bluetooth headphones. I'm not sure what the guy is doing differently from the app I'm working on, but for us AirPods are clearly the lowest latency choice.
EDIT: Ignore what I wrote below and see the update. I'm getting similar latency numbers.
Generally, the guy is getting so massive latencies that I suspect he's doing something wrong. The app I'm working on has MIDI to wired audio latency around 10ms when audio buffer size is dropped to 128 samples, so 70ms sounds really excessive. Touchscreen is both slow and the timing is all over the place (try playing drums in GarageBand to see) so it might explain some of it.
Ok, I'll take back what I wrote above. I tried the measurement again and got 197ms round trip for the same 2nd gen AirPods and iPad Mini4 running current iOS. It's not the worst, but certainly not better than most of Bluetooth headphones. I'm not sure why I got the low number before and whether it was a measurement error or changed in a software update.
From what I am reading, the best of the Bluetooth headphones are claiming say 120 ms, and some have as high as 300 ms.
I just hope manufacturers keep making wired ones with active noise cancellation (ANC). Already it seems ANC is seen less often for wired ones than for the wireless ones.
My guess is that since ANC already needs DSP and small headphone amp, it doesn't cost much to add a Bluetooth receiver. Removing the cable input socket and ADC could even recover some of the cost. On the other hand, it seems that there's limited market for wired headphones right now.
> I went from not liking phone conversations at all (getting agitated after a few minutes)to comfortably having long phone calls
I love my Airpods. One of my favorite products of all time. But I've found them to be totally useless on calls. I'm on my third pair -- that's another thing: they wear out if you use them a lot -- and I've had 3 different phones in the meantime and nobody can ever hear me when I talk on them. I've tested it myself and they make the speaker sound very quiet and far away. It must not affect everyone, because I see people using them for phone calls, but I've never been able to make that function work.
I can’t bring myself to spend this much money on a device that has worse mic audio than my free airpods. And it’s the same for all wireless buds, the mic is just in the wrong position.
As a customer, I don’t care what a firmware is or if it’s the best software or if it runs in Azure or iCloud. To me, it just works. I don’t care how. The fact that it works way better than competitor products I tried over the years is enough to say it’s well defined.
The topic of discussion isn't product performance, it's design. If a certain car model has a high top speed, this may be suggestive evidence that the engine is well designed, but the top speed itself is not considered an example good design. So it would be fine if we had something to say about the design of the Apple software that produced the reliable Bluetooth connection, but just the fact that something doesn't break isn't good design.
> If a certain car model has a high top speed, this may be suggestive evidence that the engine is well designed, but the top speed itself is not considered an example good design.
I don’t think this is a useful analogy. Top speed is a randomly picked metric, which presumably most car buyers don’t care for.
Once you get into the exotic super car car segment, then one could say that a super car that only tops out at 60mph or is 0-60 in 8 seconds is poorly designed… and more so if they care about performance over other measures (reliability, crash safety, fuel efficiency, comfort, etc).
A design document has both functional and non functional requirements.
> but just the fact that something doesn't break isn't good design.
If your non functional requirements optimize for reliability and consistency, and that’s exactly what your implementation does while making reasonable trade offs, that’s the exact hallmark of not just a good but great design.
> I don’t think this is a useful analogy. Top speed is a randomly picked metric, which presumably most car buyers don’t care for.
My comment applies to any metric that is an unalloyed good, not just top speed. Saying "AWS has high up-time" or "This car rarely needs repairs" or "I never spill coffee with this cup" are suggestive that something has been designed well, but they are not themselves substantive comments about the design. For that you'd have to say how they achieved those things. It's the difference between a goal and the method.
> that’s the exact hallmark of not just a good but great design.
Talking about trade-offs between goals would be substantive discussion of design. That one metric got high marks without saying anything about how is not.
I don't think this digression into semantics has reached diminishing returns.
Firmware and software that influences user experience is absolutely valid for a design discussion.
Prioritizing ease of connection was a design decision, and not one that’s inevitable (see a dozen other duly wireless earbuds that don’t do it as well).
I agree that if the prioritization decision was made as a trade-off then this could be a question of design, but something would need to be said about that. Saying "I like the design of my car because it goes fast" doesn't really make sense unless you bring up what was changed (e.g., the aerodynamics, or the missing backseats, or whatever).
Speed is part of the user experience, and good user experience is the goal of, and usually relies on, good design. But the result -- speed -- is not itself design. Otherwise there would be no distinction between good products and good design.
Even with the 3 different tip sizes? The old EarPods/AirPods worked alright in my ears but never great. The Pros have been fantastic for me personally.
Not the OP, but I have the same issue. Tried the 3 original tip sizes as well as 3rd party foam tips - no use, they either hurt after a short while or don't seal properly, causing ANC to barely work at all and the headphones to fall out when jogging or doing exercise. Guess my ears are not shaped for the Pros, or any in-ear earbuds for that matter - it has always been the same story with any brand I tried over the years.
However, the 1st/2nd gen "base" AirPods are a perfect fit for me, so I just ordered a new pair to replace my 3 years old 1st gen with almost completely failed batteries. Would've used something like Podswap, but unfortunately no such service is available in my country that I could find.
If they are the original version consider getting them tested at the store to see if they are covered by the recall. Free replacement with the new model (apparently with improved adhesives).
As an espresso snob, I'm going to go with a Breville Double Boiler machine. Many espresso machine snobs used to crap on Breville as being "consumer grade", but they really succeeded with their Double Boiler machines, especially their more recent models that make it easy to descale the boiler at home.
The BDB includes features that can cost literally 5X as much on Italian machines (stainless steel boilers, a preheating tube that pulls brew water through the steam boiler first, an electrically heated grouphead, etc.) but it still has fantastic temperature stability.
I owned a Breville Dual Boiler for a few years, was always happy with the coffee it produced, and I thought it was very good value for the price... until it failed in a manner that caused it to constantly trip a GFCI. I brought it back to the shop where I bought it (who service all varieties of espresso machines), and they told me that Breville won't sell them parts for repair. I then contacted Breville, and they wanted me to ship it back to them for maintenance, at a cost of several hundred dollars. So I wound up with one of those much-more-expensive Italian machines, which has now seen daily use for a few years and not needed anything more than a replacement group head gasket (which cost $10 and any idiot can replace one at home).
Don't disagree, and I realize this isn't the solution for most people, but home-barista.com has some excellent forums on how to make the most common repairs yourself.
For a tripped GFCI, dollars-to-donuts you had a leaky o-ring on your boiler, which was letting steam into the innards of your machine. The replacement parts can be acquired very cheaply and there are great YouTube videos on how to do the repairs.
With the BDB there are a couple of primary failures after a couple years (failed o-rings, pump or solenoid that needs replacement, new grouphead gasket), which have fortunately been well-documented in online forums and YouTube.
I used my fathers Rancillio Silvia for 10ish years after he used it for about that long. It’s still good but I have upgraded. It had a US$70 service after about 15k coffees and was still fine at 20k. It’s got a little surface rust on the drip tray. Fantastic machine.
This pales compared to some machines though - I was recently reading about someone has a ‘60s Faema e61 that has made nearly 5 million coffees.
Lance Hedrick (latte art champion YouTuber guy) raves about the BDB and would be my top choice if I don’t already have another model.
In addition to being great and having features of more expensive machines it can be trivially modded for flow profiling. You can now do what decent/slayer/lever owners do and pressure profile. Ok maybe it doesn’t quite compare to those but they are a multiple of the price, and now you can do the coffee shots, turbo shots, blooming shots and all that fun stuff.
If mine breaks down and I’m not in the mood to spend $5k on a machine id get the dual boiler.
100% agree, we bought ours a couple of years ago along with a separate grinder and it’s absolutely amazing. We bought the espresso machine for half price which was a steal (approx $950AUD instead of $1800). Literally never buy takeaway coffee anymore, most of the time if we do end up buying coffee out its far inferior to the coffee we make at home with fresh locally roasted beans. Definitely has paid for itself, make 1-2 coffees a day since December 2019 with no issues, and it’s very to clean.
The Nanopresso gets a crema which is remarkable for a fairly cheap, portable device. I have one at home and one at work. They are good enough that they keep me away from cafes.
Both the Aeropress and the Nanopresso are so well designed.
I have a Secura french press, and while it works well, I seem to have to use so much coffee to make a reasonably strong brew. I've been sticking to some no-name steel version of a Bialetti moka pot for a few years now.
I used a beautiful wooden Japanese grinder, Hario, because I loved its simplicity. But, same as you, it takes forever. And sadly, I didn't even know it was taking longer than usual as I didn't have a baseline. Try one of these linked below. You can knock out 30g in about 20 to 30 seconds.
I almost listed this as mine. The design is still really good for the cost. Ease of use / cleaning / disposing of grounds is a smart design. I accept that the seal will wear, I actually think not over-engineering the seal and making it triple the price adds to the design.
I don't really understand why you'd do that though, do you not rinse the press after every use? Just stow it with the pieces separated unless it's in "travel mode" no?
Well, the beauty of aeropress is that you don't have to rinse the inside of the cilinder every time. It cleans itself. Most of the time I just clean the rubber. Also, storing them separated takes more space in the cupboard.
Do you know if you can get a real one on Aliexpress? I’ve looked at replacements but wouldn’t want to get a fake that will leech at high temps. I’m not in the US.
The main part is that you unscrew the filter piece, so you can just push out the puck of coffee then rinse / dry through the tube. This makes them much easier to clean and dry than a french press where you have to send a jet of water through the bottom in case you had a bit too much coffee, then need an implement to actually reach the bottom of the device. Also makes it easier to throw the grounds into a dedicated (or semi-dedicated e.g. organics, composting) bin without the additional rinsing water.
The second draw is that it's paper-filtered by default, there are metal filters but the paper filters mean way cleaner cups (less residue going through). This also provides a wider and more flexible grind-range.
The third draw is that you filter directly into your mug, or bottle (if the mouth is wide enough), and can e.g. filter onto ice cubes for iced coffee, so less option for miss-pouring and mess.
The fourth draw is it's all plastic so it travels really well, and because the plunger is hollow you can stow things into the plunger (e.g. many hand grinder will fit), so it also makes for a nice travel / hiking device.
Seconded. I've been nomading for much of the past 6 years and having an AeroPress + Hario hand grinder means I can always make good coffee. It's compact, easy to clean, and as long as you're using good beans, somewhat difficult to brew a bad cup.
They appear functionally similar, but the coffee made is very different. A standard french press requires a coarse grind and you can only adjust extraction by changing the steep time. The Aeropress pushes coffee through a paper filter with an airtight seal. You can vary both grind size and steep time. Not only that, but you can vary extraction across the brew by very slowly pushing the coffee through the filter. (This is a very important feature of pressurized brewing methods such as espresso.)
These controls allow you not only to better tune for different beans, but to successfully make different styles of brew for a single type of coffee. (For instance, you can adjust those variables to successfully make a shorter, more espresso-like brew or a taller, more pour-over like one from the same coffee beans.)
I loved the SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip players I owned during past years. They needed to be reflashed with the RockBox firmware (but tbh pretty much every portable player firmware is inferior to RockBox) however hardware wise they were fantastic: light, well shaped, buttons in the right places, very readable display despite the small size, audio was excellent, FM reception too, battery lasted hours and hours. I brought them on the beach and kept them running for hours while sunbathing or walking like 1 meter above sea level, and they worked for years. I had to ditch them eventually when the headphone jack began to fail, but that happened when the battery had already became old and other buttons unreliable, so repair which was often destructive was out of question. Unfortunately SanDisk cut corners in later models (less RAM, smaller CPU etc.) and RockBox became harder or impossible to install, so I got a much cheaper Agptek player, which can't run RockBox as well but costs a fraction, and that's it.
I bought a bunch of Sansa Clip+ when they were being discontinued because they were dirt cheap and with Rockbox and a huge sdcard, they "rocked". My last one died about a year ago :(
I didn't go for the Agptek because they can't run RockBox, and I got bitten very badly by the awful ui on a Shanling player. So I bought a teensy Jelly Pro and hacked it into my favourite ever mp3 player.
Apparently, the SOC used in sansas was EOLed, and the newer ones use a cheaper and much less capable chip common in chinese music players. Attempting a rockbox port was deemed wasted effort. There doesn't seem to exist an off-the-shelf SOC comparable to the original.
The more expensive audiophile-orientated players use more power-hungry mips SOCs running linux, and the product is then designed to justify the expense and bulky battery.
The Technics SL-1200 turntable. The fact that the design has not changed except for minor tweaks since the product was released speaks for itself. I used it both as a DJ many years ago and now kept one of the turntables just for listening. The quality of the turntable is palpable not only in its physical weight but in the utter simplicity of the design. The dotted edges of the rotating plate are both aesthetically pleasing while also informative communicating rotation speed. Every detail every little part of the unit is functional design of the highest quality while also visually appealing. In my view one of the greatest achievements in modern electronics and industrial design.
Waiting list for the SL-1200 or SL-1210's in the 90's were well over a year and you couldnt even get B stock (ie returns resold) from Panasonic Technics either.
I will add another one to the list, their SU-A range of amps with the R-core transformer.
When they first came out, I was invited to a blind listening session with Technics somewhere in London and they had some of the SU-A amps up against considerably more expensive amps and you were shocked at the quality, you could point to where the different instruments were being played left and right, you could tell whether they were at the front, middle or back of the sound stage, it was an awesome experience and the low price meant they showed up some serious big names in the hifi world. Magazines were harsh to them imo.
Its just a shame they couldn't replicate the quality in their surround sound amp's but I suspect that is more to do with the encoding used then and now. But the return in audiophile quality is not proportional to expenditure above a certain price, its more exponential.
YouTube's video player (almost the entire rest of the site is beyond crap, don't get me wrong! I'm just talking about the watching experience) (assuming you have an ad-blocker, which you obviously should). Plenty of other video players have some of these features, but YouTube has almost everything.
- click to pause
- double-click to fullscreen
- customisable captions
- speed controls
- sensible keyboard shortcuts for practically everything (press ? to see them all)
- theatre mode
- picture-in-picture
- loop (on the right-click menu)
- dark theme
- all settings are saved and synced across multiple tabs (with the irritating exception of video speed, but that can be fixed with a browser extension)
- hover to preview
- drag to seek
- video chapters
- clear and subtle indication of video buffering
- auto-resume when you come back to a video after navigating away
- easy and obvious translation of all controls to live-streams and "premieres"
- pretty animations and obvious cursor changes that make it really obvious what you're doing (looking at you, Twitch)
- you can scroll in fullscreen
- "instant" page navigation that never gets out of sync with itself
- 4K support
- HDR support (not very good, but still)
- 60+FPS support
- 360° support
- all of Google's CDN resources behind it so it never lags
- excellent video quality detection that never picks an unnecessarily low-quality option when my computer could handle better, nor a too-high one that my connection can't manage
1. Click (pause) and double click (full screen) interfere with each other. I don't really want pause to have more of a delay than it already has, but that's the only way to allow a non-pause double click.
2. I'd prefer if spacebar paused unconditionally. When focus is on other controls, it activates those instead, which I understand for a11y, but it's a bit annoying when other players do grab every space for pause.
3. I think < and > used to nudge by a single frame (when paused) but no longer do?
Oh, yeah it does still work. Not sure why it was acting up for me the other day.
N.B.: You refer to the keystrokes correctly, while I refer to them using their modified characters (on EN-US keyboards, anyway) despite the modifier not actually being used, which I assume is why these keys were chosen.
- Auto pops open the mini player when you navigate away from the page
- Autoplay being agressively enabled by default.
All of these make it like an nightmare ex-spouse situation where all you want to do is have it stop draining your bandwidth to play videos but it won't let you go.
The most aggravating drag-to-seek in the solar system, bar none. Even xvideos is better.
The playback speed options are mega stupid. I want to speed up or down on fine increments around "normal speed", about the mean. I don't want 2x. WTF is that exactly? Let me listen to my audiobook on chipmunk voice speed? I need to be able to listen to The Talking Heads Puzzling Evidence at exactly 1.06 x normal speed. If I try to dance at 1.25x or 2.0x, I'll need hip replacement surgery or put my back out or both.
> assuming you have an ad-blocker, which you obviously should
Stating the the obvious, but these features were developed by real people and revenue pays these developers, pays for the infrastructure, and pays the content creators. As an alternative for those who have the means, you can also sign up for a subscription to remove ads. I’ve gotten more value out of my youtube subscription than most other streaming services I pay for.
Huh. I have to begrudgingly agree that you're right. I have a few nitpicks and quibbles, but you're mostly right.
My counter-arguments which are mostly commentary:
- Speed doesn't go up to 3x+ (internal users can go up to 20x speed, see the source code)
- Focus issues mean left/right/up/down/home/end might change the volume, playback position or page scroll, and there is no indication of what will happen; I typically middle-click the video to focus it before using the keyboard, or sometimes try hitting 'k' twice to see if the video reacts
- There's no way to say "my connection is being stupid, please buffer this to the end"
- The speed detection often gets confused on my (objectively terrible) ADSL2+ and drops me down to 360p or 240p; I'm often manually switching back to 720p (the max my connection can reasonably sustain)
Everything else in your list though... I have to admit that yeah, those features do work :)
Position restoration would probably be my favorite.
LG Tone Flex HBS-XL7. The best earbuds with the worst name. I really like this form factor. I often forget that I'm wearing them and this particular model is the most comfortable of the ones I've used over the years.
Kindle Paperwhite. I have the older model. I've heard the nooks are good too. The simpler the better. Nothing to break or distract. Don't use the backlight and the battery lasts ages. I know a lot of people are partial to physical books but I've read hundreds more books than I might have otherwise read since I started using my kindle. It's probably my favorite thing I own.
+1 on Crock Pot. It's so easy to create something tasty with it.
If I had to reduce my kitchen to as little items as possible, this would be my first pick.
Garmin Fenix 5s Sapphire: notifications from my phone with custom replies, 6 day battery life, buttons. No touch screen (operate it "blind" and in the wet), waterproof, scratchproof. You do need to pay extra for the sapphire screen.
Swiss Army knife (they're sooo well made)
Under armour underwear: no seams, last ages, extremely comfortable.
Darn tough socks: extremely comfortable, last forever, never smell.
Altra Lone Peak trainers: foot shaped, light, comfortable, quick-dry. Right now every pair of shoes I own are Altra (but I'm trying out Topo Athletic phantom 2 next)
Gore-Tex. And Neoprene.
Docker. People like to hate a winner, and they've gone the paid route, and they did just take already-available kernel features and wrap them up... But man, they did it well and they revolutionised software development and deployment.
> Docker. People like to hate a winner, and they've gone the paid route, and they did just take already-available kernel features and wrap them up... But man, they did it well and they revolutionised software development and deployment.
They made design decisions that prevent simple things like "installing a .deb package from the host filesystem without keeping the package in an image layer", then fixed some of these with that weird buildkit thing that you need to enable in the settings.
It's very useful for sure, but I wouldn't call its CLI interface well-design.
Nothing is perfect and it definitely presented problems, but what other technology made cgroups that easy back then? Your choice was: VMs. And they were a pain to build and haul around.
I don’t find it satisfying: I can copy files from one stage to another, but I can’t install a .deb (or any other package for that matter).
Copying a list of paths will break if the package changes, and it can’t easily do anything done by pre-install and post-install scripts (like changing a file, registering a GPG key, etc.)
The official excuse from Docker is that “multi-stage builds cover that use”, but that’s not true if you need to install local packages. I think the buildkit feature that lets you mount folder in the build container is a hidden admission that this is wrong, but it’s annoying that the build process will then only work on machines where a non-standard option is set.
I think I understand your use case, although I don't follow the part about mounting a host dir in the build (how it would help).
I do not really consider this limitation a design flaw of Dockerfiles; this is more of a mismatch between Dockerfile functionality and what you want to do. Dockerfiles are not designed to execute general-purpose programs, so there is an assumption in the design of Dockerfiles that you know (more or less) which files you want to COPY ahead of time. It sounds like you want a mechanism for COPYing all filesystem changes resulting from a RUN instruction without having to know what those changes are ahead of time.
In the future, maybe a buildkit HLB language will provide a macro system that makes this sort of thing straightforward to implement.
> this is more of a mismatch between Dockerfile functionality and what you want to do. Dockerfiles are not designed to execute general-purpose programs, so there is an assumption in the design of Dockerfiles that you know (more or less) which files you want to COPY ahead of time.
I don't follow that. In a Dockerfile, I want to install software, and software is usually distributed in packages like .deb. Why can I `RUN apt-get install libabc` and have a clean, automatic install of libabc, but not do the same with a libabc.deb file on my host filesystem?
> It sounds like you want a mechanism for COPYing all filesystem changes resulting from a RUN instruction without having to know what those changes are ahead of time.
That's one way of doing it, but it's more complex than the obvious solution:
> I don't follow the part about mounting a host dir in the build (how it would help)
It simply lets me give the build container access to libabc.deb, so I can `RUN apt-get install /mnt/host_folder/libabc.deb`, which will install libabc without putting `libabc.deb` itself in an image layer.
It would have been trivial to add this, but the Docker devs rejected it because "multi-stage builds can do this" (wrong), and it would lead to "non-reproducible builds" (because downloading packages from the network is somehow more reproducible?).
They finally added it as a non-standard option, which means a build process that relies on it won't work with a Docker install that uses the default config. It's the devs making it needlessly hard to use Docker for a perfectly valid use case.
If you're wondering why I want to install that locally-built software via a .deb, it's because we want to distribute it to all our systems, and we want to have only one packaging method to maintain.
My only complaint about the Swiss Army knife is the plastic plates on the handle didn't survive in a dishwasher – they've got warped. Still usable though.
What I like about tailscale is that it's a no-brainer to set up and use. I have no technical difficulty seeting up a VPN, but I really don't want the hassle of "doing work" at home. But the main reason is that my wife doesn't want me to over-complicate things. I've found myself looking only at simple solutions that work for both of us.
Gore-tex isnt that great these days, there are better options now.
It requires dwr to function, as soon as the dwr fails (pretty fast depending on your usage levels) its ability to breath ceases to function, at that point you're wearing a heavy, expensive, water proof coat that doesn't breath so it rains on the inside instead.
It's saving grace is that it's durable in heavy brush.
For a better alternative take a look at Columbia outdry, it doesn't require dwr so its breathability lasts for the life of the garment instead of requiring retreatments of dwr.
Frogg toggs are another option, way less durable but as far as breathable rain proof it doesn't get better.
Both outdry and frogg toggs are also way lighter than goretext. Though look around for the outdry they have heavy duty and light versions.
Legos; also the ender 3d printer. I had a nostalgic time putting the ender together. Felt like a lego set. That's not saying it was trivial (it challenged me) but that I trusted it every step of the way not because of previous experience, but because of the obvious well-designed aspects of the experience as I was putting it together. For example: I put on a part sloppily, and trying to attach anther part was the first real resistance I felt in the entire process -- physical that is, I had to study every page of the manual for a minute or two before even being able to figure out what the next step would need to be, but it was always clear after studying.
I'm sorry, but 3D printers, while quite an innovation allowing cheap and fast prototyping, are not well designed things. I own three, and talk to friends who collectively probably own close to 100.
They, including models with great reputation (e.g. Prusa printers), break all the time. Also the mere fact that there are thousands of mods for all of them on sites like Thingieverse to make them better is another indication they aren't really all that well designed.
Things like manual leveling, heat creep, bottom layer adhesion issues are common problems across all models.
They're finicky things with PLENTY room for improvement.
At work I've had several over the years and the Markforged Mark 2 is hands-down the best I've used. Easy to use, great software (the preprocessor/slicer is online and the support material becomes easier to remove with each update). Above all else, great documentation and easy to follow maintenance guides. It has 2 nozzles, one that dispenses carbon-fibre-filled nylon and one of which dispenses a single carbon fibre for reinforcement. Those wear out fairly quickly but they have wear indicators so you can quickly judge if they need to be replaced. Unlike your example, it doesn't have any upgrade parts as far as I know and hasn't been updated or replaced in 4 years.
Unfortunately it's like $15k and material is also very expensive.
I think the last consumer paper(inkjet/laser) printer I've seen with the same reliability as my Prusa Mini broke down 20 years ago.
I haven't had a single print come off the bed by itself and never had to level anything. In ~150 prints there was one failure. Of course I'm just a hobbyist, but still. It could be worse.
I agree. Inedible exciting and rewarding machines, worth the time investment, but it’s still very early. I’m sure I’ll be blown away by what’s possible in ten years or so. Today I’m still babying each print and the machine itself. Jams are the worst.
With the exception of having to occasionally replace the print head my mk3s are excellent. No leveling problems, solve all layer height with live z. Flex filament works great
Turbo Pascal 7, then Borland Delphi 5 were the most productive programming environments ever. Very few bugs, wicked fast, and full proper documentation.
…in terms of software, yes, Turbo Pascal is - at least for me - one of the finest software ever created…
20 years ago I reverse engineered the command line compiler BPC.EXE, 80kB of code, 40kB data, absolutely mindblowing whats in there. A masterpiece of software which should be open sourced (never going to happen…)
Anyway, thank you Mr. Anders Hejlsberg for Turbo Pascal!
I looked at the C++ version, but after you built a form, and started hooking up events, there was orders of magnitude more boilerplate code staring you in the face, and it wasn't something that you could edit without breaking things.
In pascal, you could edit the form, or the source, and nothing broke. There were also far fewer lines of code required to do something.
Well, I've nothing to compare it with, but I never needed to look at most of the boilerplate, (wasn't it in the header, which I never looked at? I think I looked at the pages of boilerplate once ever), could just make any necessary changes in the Object Inspector. Never had problems breaking stuff, maybe because I made changes that way. In fact I realized some time later that I'd been writing C! Like the person who realized they'd been talking prose all their life. Now (sometimes) I just write in C, never C++.
p.s. I started (after BASIC) with Turbo Pascal, in the 80s. That was so awesome for its day.
I remember VS 2000.. That was a game changer as an IDE for me. Though yeah borland c++ was great too.
Even metroworks for palm.
Back when IDE's did their job, out of the box.
i dont know if this is exactly in or exactly out of the HN wheelhouse, but: my keychain. it's a small hoop of plastic-coated braided strand cable with two threaded ends that screw together.
the plastic coating hasn't ripped, torn, loosened, or discolored. none of the metal has rusted. the thread pitch is big enough to screw and unscrew quickly but small enough to not loosen on its own and has good clamping force. the threaded end for passing through keys is small enough for all my fobs and keys. its tough and strong but pleasant to handle. no part of it is worse for wear even though i fidget with it and have changed keys multiple times. it also currently has like 11 keys and a large fob on it. ive had it for ~5 years and I'm fairly certain it's the most reliable thing i own. it's easy to use and easy to understand and it always does its job.
I've said this before, but happy to write it over and over. One of the co-founders was my old EM at Uber. He's as sharp as they get, and very kind and humble to boot. If you are looking to support companies started by people that are definitively Not Jerks, check this one out.
I genuinely loved the second-generation Zune. The aluminum case felt lovely in the hand, it had swipe-based momentum scrolling before that was common (without even a touchscreen!). It had a matte paint on the front that felt almost like velvet, the buttons clicked nicely, the UI was both gorgeous and practical, the desktop software was the same (after the first couple revisions). I was really sad when mine got stolen from my dorm room a couple years after I got it, even though I had a smartphone by that point.
Bonus entry: the GameCube controller. With that huge, luscious analog stick and that huge, luscious A button. And the overall shape fit the hand really nicely too. For any game that didn't make prominent use of the secondary analog stick, I think it was and still is the best game controller out there.
I was a huge fan of Windows Phone which based it’s Metro UI on Zune. I miss my Window’s phone dearly. I always felt the UI was far more intuitive and simple compared to iOS/Android.
Re: Gamecube controller: Agreed! It really did (does?) feel like the most ergonomic controller out there, though I do wish they had a z button on the left side.
Also, can't forget the notches in the analog stick area to accurately indicate direction.
I loved my Zune as well (it also got stolen, weirdly), not only because of all the reasons above but even the headphones were of excellent quality and lasted as long as the device did (in comparison, both iPod headphones I've owned broke after around 2 months).
The only major flaw it had was a lack of fonts to display unicode characters! I know it was mostly (only?) sold in the US but wanting to display artist names in Chinese or cyrillic characters must surely be a basic feature.
I find it interesting that most of the comments are about physical products.
The 'best design' is often something that's so frictionless and easy to use that it's invisible in day-to-day use. Everyday infrastructure like steps are something that's noticeable when they're off (e.g. spaced too far apart, or too steep); most are designed well.
It's easy to find things that are designed poorly. But much less tangible to find a 'best designed' item.
Agreed. It's real tempting to answer, "indoor plumbing". It's really nice to flip a lever and get clean, safe water. It's real good not to need to stroll to the outhouse, too.
Coming from a developing country, I was very impressed that you could get drinking water straight from the tap in some countries. My wife, a civil engineer, couldn't believe it either. There's just so much complexity involved in it, including storage, which can have rats and rust.
Normally we just filter the stuff between the tap and cup. And as a kid, we had to boil and store it, and just learned to tolerate the metallic/dirt taste at times. This was when soda peaked.
A local I knew in Mexico told me that the water in his town was safe to drink, and that the theory of unsafe tap water was a disinformation campaign by gringos/Coca-Cola. Spoiler: Was not safe to drink the water.
Mostly unrelated but I would like to be able to set the temperate and water pressure for my shower so I can just enter and press a single button. This would also be great for those showers where you can never get the water temperature or pressure right so you have to keep adjusting it.
I would also like to run a bath by doing the same thing, and having the water stop when it's at the right level. Maybe there could be a heating element that keeps the water at the right temperature so you don't have to occasionally top it up with hot water.
I'm sure this already exists but I've never seen it anywhere.
I have one in my master shower and it's fantastic. Of course, the water starts out cold (because the water in the hot water pipes are cold) but once it's up to temperature, it's very consistent, even if you have a toilet flush in your house which would reduce the pressure of cold.
> Of course, the water starts out cold (because the water in the hot water pipes are cold)
No, this should be considered a failure condition for a constant temperature shower. I don't care how they do it, just bleed the cold water into a separate pipe off to the side or something.
We have sent people into space, I want actual uniform temperature water.
the way I do it is just turn the shower on about 30 seconds before I get in, which works the same with half the piping and less energy loss due to circulating hot water (but some water loss)
I've seen a few apartments in Asia have small electric water heaters right before the faucet. They provide instant hot water until the main boiler's hot water arrives.
This is fairly common in newish kitchens in the Netherlands too, especially if the kitchen is far away from the boiler. Sometimes even with a boiling water tap, so you don't even need a kettle anymore.
- drop both the hot and the cold equally (due to house input being limited)
The hot water is fed by the same input pressure as the cold, so they are the same pressure system. A temperature drop on a toilet flush is a pretty big fuckup by the plumber in the bathroom.
Everything about fancy hotel bathrooms is a usability nightmare. Sometimes there are two showers (hand-held and ceiling-mounted) operated by a single lever which sets temperature, pressure, and which of the two showers is active. The risk of giving yourself a too hot or too cold burst is significant. I usually cower into a corner while sloooooowly messing with that lever.
For an extra bonus: You usually have three identical looking small bottles with 'shampoo', 'conditioner', and 'shower gel' only distinguished by a tiny label, something like black-on-brown or yellow-on-white. Good luck if you are wearing glasses.
Stayed at a hotel with a faucet with some of the features you described - button-push and straightforward temperature control - and it was one of the best shower experiences I’ve ever had. Would be putting one of these in my own master bathroom if it wasn’t so expensive.
Thermostatic mixer showers are very common (in the UK at least) and are very affordable (sub $100) and as reliable as your hot water supply. My understanding is that water pressure is much harder to control for; there's so many variables that you just can't do anything about, and without installing a giant tank and a pump if your pressure is low it's always going to be low.
> The 'best design' is often something that's so frictionless and easy to use that it's invisible in day-to-day use
OK, here's something I use every day that's reliable and clever and works almost as if by magic, even though nobody appreciates it: a three-way light switch. Simple, elegant, interesting -- and nobody notices or cares.
I think you're absolutely right.
Some obvious things come to mind: electricity, water as mentioned.
Here in NL I think the roads are particularly well-designed. We have well-designed junctions that prevent accidents in a very passive way (good visibility, the ability to make eye contact with crossing traffic).
You are right, people are probably missing a lot of things in plain-sight. Most of the comments are about some esoteric product or software - so nothing to add to the shopping list :)
Only recognize Google apps and Apple hardware from the other comments - they are great.
I've invested a lot of hard earned money into it. I have an ipad, iphone, a macbook air, an apple watch, airpods pro and a mac mini. Bought these over the years.
Just the way these things work so cohesively to me is pure magic. The attention to detail on extremely minor things is pretty impressive. I haven't had to think about "doing" anything with tech ever since I bought apple products. You just remember to charge them and everything just works. I come from a pure windows / android background and I was mindblown by how convenient things were.
I'd highly recommend Apple devices to friends and family.
At the same time, the interoperability of these devices outside the ecosystem is stupidly useless.
Just this year I figured out that I can't send an image without internet from my Android phone to the iPad. I could receive images over Bluetooth between two phones more than 10 years ago, but not today with the iPad.
I also can't seem to transfer images or videos from my Windows PC to the iPad with just a cable.
I would and do highly recommend to my friends and family to stay away from Apple.
Computers are meant to be interoperable and not locked into a single monopolistic system which then had the power to make your life awful.
The attention to detail is also overstated when Apple cannot get basic things right. I have an iPhone for testing stuff and recently a numbered badge appeared on one of those built-in music related apps. It wasn't obvious what the number referred to, and to find out, I had to dig deep on the web on some user forums. The reason turned out to be that Apple pushed some kind of updates (e.g. new sound effects or something like that), which are hidden somewhere 10 menus deep. To dismiss the number badges, you had to go and open each of the effects from about a hundred of them, because there is no indicator which ones are new. There is apparently no other way to dismiss the number badge.
A few days ago another badge appeared on a different app. When I open the app, it has no content inside and no menus. So now I have a little 1 there that simply cannot be dismissed as far as I can tell. This noise makes all of the badges useless.
If this is not bad design, I don't know what is. Apple, not even once.
> The attention to detail is also overstated when Apple cannot get basic things right. I have an iPhone for testing stuff and recently a numbered badge appeared on one of those built-in music related apps. It wasn't obvious what the number referred to, and to find out, I had to dig deep on the web on some user forums. The reason turned out to be that Apple pushed some kind of updates (e.g. new sound effects or something like that), which are hidden somewhere 10 menus deep. To dismiss the number badges, you had to go and open each of the effects from about a hundred of them, because there is no indicator which ones are new. There is apparently no other way to dismiss the number badge.
I'm actually really curious what this was. I'm not saying I don't believe you, but I'm incredibly familiar with apple devices and I can't think of anything that matches what you've described.
I also wanted to share a tip with you — you can turn off app badges in Settings -> Notifications -> Some App.
With iOS 15, you can also create a 'focus mode' where app badges are disabled, and just have it scheduled to be on all the time. If this sounds appealing, let me know and I'll walk you through it.
It was something in GarageBand. I went to check after I wrote that because I was bothered that I didn't name the application.
> I also wanted to share a tip with you — you can turn off app badges in Settings -> Notifications -> Some App.
That's a cool tip, thanks. Even though my iPhone remains on the desk serving only as a test device, my OCD will probably find this useful at some point if I ever encounter a similar issue.
> With iOS 15, you can also create a 'focus mode' where app badges are disabled, and just have it scheduled to be on all the time. If this sounds appealing, let me know and I'll walk you through it.
It does, though as I said I don't envision myself using an iPhone as an actual phone. In general, I'd love seeing more devices/software having a dedicated focus mode though.
There are some things I like, but never fell in love with them. iPhones died too fast. MBP had weird display glitches because of the lighting adjustment. The touch bar was less useful than a touchscreen. Keyboard is so bad that it's often the deal-breaker when trying to buy a macbook. It might be useful if I could just plug an external keyboard into it, but I need an adapter for that now and the adapter gets hot with all the things I put on it.
I mean the competition does a lot of things badly, but Apple products are badly designed too.
I managed to dodge every single bad apple product. I never bought MBP's only Airs. No touchbars. No shitty keyboard.
The products I've owned / own had zero problems maybe cos they're a subset of Apple products that do not have problems. What do you mean iphones die too fast? My experience has been quite the opposite.
US Forest Service picnic table. 3 kinds of simple flat cement castings. Held together by their own weight. Easily carried and assembled by two men. Cheap. Almost indestructible.
My Honda Element. It’s so versatile with the large side loading doors and the flip down removable back seats. You can toss a bike inside easily. It also is surprising short and has a small turning radius. I put 200000 miles on my first one before buying a second. Not a great looker though.
There are limited-release cars that I frequently wish I could have bought when they were on sale. The Honda Element, S2000, Prelude, del Sol, and Toyota FJ Cruiser are some that come to mind. I hope I'm not overlooking a cult classic today. Can anyone think of a cars like this?
I love my electric toothbrush. It cost me 20 bucks and it’s amazing. I analyzed it from a UX point of view and couldn’t come up with any designs flaw.
- it’s waterproof, so easy to clean
- it has a single physical button, nothing else
- it has a small flat stand on the back, so I can put it somewhere horizontally and it won’t roll, and the brush won’t touch the surface
- the heads can be easily changed, so we share the same toothbrush with my SO but have our own brush. The heads have a different color ring so they’re easy to recognize
- the charging station is small, holds in place and is generally painless. You just put the toothbrush on it and that’s it
- the battery itself easily lasts 2 weeks
- when using it the brush buzzes every 30 seconds but that’s it, you can ignore it if you wish. If you accidentally turn the brush off but turn it back on quickly, it remembers where you were and won’t start the buzzes from the beginning
- the best thing about electric toothbrush is that they gracefully degrade to a normal toothbrush. I love graceful degradation
I talked about users of more expensive electric toothbrushes (100-200$), but I’m confident mine is the best.
"I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience." - Mitch Hedberg
Turns out this isn't true. A Boston subway station had a pretty grim escalator failure a month or two ago[0], where the escalator broke and the stairs started to free-fall backwards piling people at the bottom.
Arcteryx Bora 95 backpack. Big, heavy, but super-durable and what you need if you're doing long backpacking trips and are not of the contemporary super-lightweight inclination. Mine is 25 years old and everything is still perfect. Out of production, their current backpacks are no substitute (and they know it).
Dewalt power tools. Not absolutely perfect, but normally everything about them just seems right, and the durability over 28+ years so far has been perfect (with one exception: a jammed chainsaw motor).
My Bourgeat 24cm vertical-sided saute pan. When I moved from Seattle to Phila. in 1996, I drove 400 miles out of my way to pick this up from a tiny kitchen store on the Oregon coast. It is the best kitchen tool I have ever owned. 25 years later, it remains my go-to pan for more than half of my cooking. Encased copper base, stainless body, I can burn the shit out of something in here, and after a night's soaking it cleans up like new with almost no effort. Sadly, although Bourgeat are still in business, they dropped this particular model a few years after I bought it.
Sandisk Clip+ music player. This is far from perfect, but it's also so far ahead of almost everything else when it comes to portable music while exercising. No touch sensing, just physical buttons, usable with gloves of various sizes. Storage size limited only by SD card availability (I'm at 120GB right now, could go larger). Battery lasts longer than I tend to remember. Rockbox firmware makes it work better. Plays every format that matter, plus a few that don't. Tiny, weighs almost nothing. Not what I want to listen to at home, but if I'm out running, cycling, skiing, snowshoeing ... I've just never found a better device. Out of production.
Ableton Push 2 control surface for DAW workflows. The tactile quality is outstanding, the screen quality is gorgeous, the knobs have just the right level of resistance to turning, it's just a thing of beauty. But what makes it so much better is that Ableton fully documented every aspect of this beast, which allowed me to make it work with my own software. The documentation is almost as lovely as the Push 2 itself.
* The AK-47. Love or hate guns, the AK was designed with tolerances that encouraged simultaneously good maintenance patterns and using it as a gorram hammer if the need came to it.
* Nalgene bottles. Impact resistant, infinitely screen printable, polycarbonate body, cheap and everything you could want.
* The venerable aluminum drinks can: The sheer amount of engineering that has gone into making a bit of aluminum for canning but with the design constraints of pressure and temperature, it's a very neat design.
* Fluxx, the game. Fluxx has one rule, the only base rule: Draw a card, play a card. There's no resolution order, no many pages of legalese text like Magic. There is Fluxx.
And that's one of the things that makes Fluxx well designed. I can teach someone how to play Fluxx in 30 seconds: "Draw a card, play a card. When the conditions for winning have been achieved, the game ends." The one thing I don't like about Fluxx is the later addition of Creepers, but those are easily one of the most write-off-able types of cards ever created.
The AK-47 is an interesting example because while the base design was amazing it also has had numerous design changes over the years that kept it (somewhat) competitive with "state of the art" designs - the original design was so good that it allowed that to be the case.
In addition to its linear descendants, it was widely copied and some of the copies where arguably better (the Isreali Galil, the Finn RK62, Vector R4).
One of the few guns to appear on national flags.
All of that said, for a professional army there are many better (where better is context dependent as most things are) service weapons but for "was a farmer, now an insurgent" use the AK has few equals.
Also for the pedantic, what most people think of as the AK47 is actually an AKM, the actual AK47 had a relatively (compared to its entirety) short service life, the Soviets started phasing them out in 1959.
The family of rifles has change remarkably from wood furniture in 7.62mm to modern polymers and 5.45mm and while they've rejigged the internals and changed things around an AK<anything> is immediately recognisable and you can see the AK47 in all of them.
The only other platform that I can think of that is remotely as adaptable is the AR-family.
I don't own guns, I think civilian ownership of guns is fine if very heavily regulated and with a purpose - even if that purpose is "I like shooting targets" (UK model of gun control) - I'm just fascinated by the history/engineering.
As a backpacker, Nalgenes are vastly overrated for real trekking. They’re rugged for no real reason - you’ll do well swapping your nalgenes for dead simple 1 liter cheap plastic water bottles from the gas station. When they’re empty they weigh nothing and you can crunch them down. And they’re far tougher than one would think - mine are going on years. Weight and volume are the metrics that matter.
Nalgenes are nice for casual around town use though, they’ve got a great aesthetic and the stickers are fun.
I would add that the Glock 19 might be the perfectly designed handgun. it is intuitive enough for someone who has never used a handgun before to be familiar in 30 seconds with how to clear it, how to load it, and how to shoot it.
Knipex Plier Wrenches ... so much better than an adjustable wrench and useful for all sorts of small tasks beyond bolts.
Park AWS-1 three way hex wrench. Makes working on bikes so much faster.
Dynafit Ski Touring Bindings... the patent has expired and there are loads of copy's based on the original idea now but they changed the sport of ski touring in a way that can't be overstated. (tlt5/6 boots and now the scarpa alien rs are up there too as well as modern powder skis)
Petzl Nomic Ice Tools. Again much imitated but they way they work with the human body to make climbing ice (or rock) easier was revolutionary and is something you can feel just by picking them up.
Leica M6 - or m series in general. what if we made a camera from a squished piece of pipe.
Hah thanks! Unfortunately hillmap is in a semi defunct state. Most of the apis that made it work are gone or really expensive and i haven't had time to make my own replacements.
Oh man! Thank you so much, It is hard to convey how much I have used hillmap. I just had to check in and make sure the site was still up.
Anytime I want to roughly get a sense of distance it is my first and only thought, from planning offtrail backpacking and ski trips, to trying to figure out how far I ran on a given day, or trying to talk my girlfriend into swimming various point to point routes.
I'd say of the pin bindings the race style are the ones I think of when I admire the design.
Thanks! It is all almost all client side and easy to keep hosted but the elevation and slope stuff has stoped working. If you or anyone on here wants to figure out a cheap alternative to the google elevation service and slope angle layers and wire them in let me know.
Yeah the original u spring design now used in race bindings is classic (I use afk trofeos now) but really it is the boot binding interface that is important and remarkably versatile/long lived.
Sony MDR7506 Professional headphones -- haven't changed since the 80s (on which a lot of classics have been recorded/mixed with).
Honda S2000, particularly the F20C 2002-2003 model years. High-revving 9000 RPM redline, completely driver-focused cockpit (tachometer from the Senna-era Honda Mclaren F1 cars), minimal computers besides ABS, hidden radio, et al. Bolt-action gearbox. The driving experience is sublime.
They're a $100 pair of headphones. By the time you break the cable you can ask yourself: "Do I get a higher end pair of monitors like an Audio Technica set? Do I just slap down another benny for a second pair?"
That's literally the cost-to-good ratio you're looking at: They're so good that a super common mod I've seen is to replace the cable with a [$4 mini-xlr connector](https://www.redco.com/Redco-TB3M.html) once you kill the cable, which will be about 10 years from when you buy it. They're so good for the cost that you can easily justify slapping down $100 for a new pair delivered next day from Amazon. They're cheap enough that these things are what I've seen medium-end museums put in for a good, durable headphone to play media with. Looking to mix a few tracks on the cheap? Absolutely tolerable to mix against. Need headphones for the sound guys at that event? Got you. Need cans for the DJ whose ATH-m50s got dunked on? Keep a few pairs of these and nobody will complain in a pinch. Need something that has the range for field recordings from birds to heartbeats? MDR-7506 will do you just fine.
They're also everywhere. I once saw a bucket full of them on a movie set. I've seen stacks of them in college sound rooms. Sound folk on a TV station set? Right there. Radio engineer? Yup. Talk show host? Probably.
They're not the best headphones in the world. There are people who will fight to the death over which Grados with which DAC and amp and what not will give you the best sound. But even they will concede that "I need decent headphones for under a c-note that will last me" can easily be filled by the MDR-7506.
Kitchenaid direct-drive stand mixer. I have one from the 1950s that has been used multiple times a week since it was bought new by my grandmother.
The dough hook, whisk, and other attachments secure in place with machined fittings so there is no play or wiggle. This has made them last.
I took the top off of it 10 years ago to make sure it was still properly lubricated. That’s all the maintenance it has ever had. (Well I broke one of the Pyrex mixing bowls…but eBay)
I just got one, and am impressed that the attachment port has not ever changed, so any attachment will work on every Kitchenaid mixer. Can I ask what you use yours for? I'm still trying to figure out what its best at.
Solves all the problems with an ice cream scoop. Critically, this version had a rounded front. They seem to have moved to a straight front, which I can't imagine being as effective?
In my late 20's, I tried to spend a couple of years with those old-school Gillettes. Was not a fan. It did teach me a lot about why contemporary razors work better and are safer, and it felt worth learning that before going back to my Gillette Sensor. Also, nod to the Venus (primarily marketed to women). That razor makes even the Sensor look savage, and gives such great shaves on rounded surfaces.
I agree on the razors. I was using my dad’s old Gillette DE razors but have come to love Merkur slant. It’s expensive but is fantastic. It’s very hard to cut yourself with it and gives a fantastic shave.
I'm amazed no one has suggested Chromecast. It just works. Click a button on your phone or laptop and the video or song you were listening to or want to listen to suddenly appears on the TV. Even grandparents seem to get it. Maybe Apple TV is a similar experience but Chromecast is as good as it gets
Until you try to put it on an isolated VLAN for IOT. Then all hell breaks loose on trying to configure a firewall to correctly allow it to be discovered and cast to.
I used to love it, but have had very annoying connection issues of late. Also shuts off and restarts during some use. I had to switch it over to 2.4Ghz recently which I think did it in, which I had to do for connection of home devices with "dumb smart" plugs.
I know a lot of people seem to love Chromecast, but for some reason using a phone to control TV never made sense to me. I prefer the physical remote. And for sending screen to the TV, the quality was never good.
Our Chromecast and the one included with TV haven’t been used for years.
The Chromecast was never amazing, and having to use a phone or Chrome to control your TV is really weird. Having a Chromecast was better than nothing though.
However if you’ve used an AppleTV you realise that the Chromecast is actually a pretty terrible solution, compared to just having a device with apps.
I have an apple TV at home, but for the price chromecast works well. It's really great for 2 cases:
1. Connected to a tv in a workplace, anyone on the local network can easily use Chrome to share a screen instead of passing around an HDMI cable.
2. Lately hotel rooms sometimes have a chromecast or apple TV, and it's a welcome feature of the room to open netflix on my phone and cast to the TV. In fact I think I should ditch the HDMI cable I keep in my suitcase and replace it with a chromecast. They are pretty small, too.
In both of those cases, I would prefer to only use casting/mirroring and not actually login to the device and/or install apps.
The Chromecast meant "oh I want to watch a movie tonight" becomes:
1. open chromecast on TV
2. open stream app on phone
3. push chromecast button
4. pick movie
* it creates social actions: A bunch of friends sitting around can share youtube videos with each other.
* it vastly simplifies streaming audio (e.g. spotify)
I bought a chromecast so I could put videos on my tv while I eat dinner. That's legitimately 90% of what I use it for. The other 10% is streaming video from Plex/YT/etc or to dunk my screen for jackbox.
I agree - I have a 1st gen Chromecast and it still works really well after quite a few years. It doesn't always play nice with my wife's iphone but considering how little it cost, I'm not complaining.
It's not a simple system. Technically all you need is upnp to perform all those functions. A raspberry pi with a build of VLC that only always plays full screen and a slideshow of some kind in between use. However, with the google product specifically it is deliberately designed to handicap itself and require all kinds of extra software (google at services, the YouTube app, etc) on the mobile device. It may look simple from the perspective of someone who already has all the added necessities, but try playing a video on the Chromecast with your own choice of software and you'll see it for the nightmare it is.
I don’t think that’s a fair way to judge a product. It’s made and marketed for sending videos from android phones to your TV, and it does that well. It doesn’t handle tasks it wasn’t built for well? That’s fine.
Useability outside of a very narrow window is abysmal on a product. That's not fair to say? I think it is. Imagine a kitchen knife that only worked with a certain cutting board.
Not counting the radio, the car had a tiny number of buttons and switches- window up/down, headlight knob, and 5 buttons. There was nothing extraneous or redundant. There were no door lock buttons- the lock indicator was the button to lock the door, and the door open handle was the unlock button.
Also, every darn control in the car was exactly where it was supposed to be. It’s hard to describe it, but even from the very first time sitting in the car, I never had to search or guess how to operate anything. I would think about needing to do something, put my hand where I thought the control would be, and there it was.
I’ve never had a machine delight me like that car in its simplicity and elegance of design.
cars used to be so well designed. you never had to look down at a screen to see what was going on, it was just there, at your finger tips. You could tell what gear you were in, if the handbrake, lights, indicators were on/off or virtually anything without taking your eyes off the road for even a second. The interface had evolved with everything being exactly where it ought to be. When you changed it it made a reassuring clunk so that you knew. Now it seems like everyone is reconfiguring the keymappings on a 90s flight simulator while they're driving.
This is why I desperately hope that manufacturers don't follow Tesla's example of putting everything in a digital UI. It makes sense when you have a limited amount of space in which to support infinite uses (e.g. a smartphone) but not in something like a car where having dedicated, tactile controls is both a safety benefit and a more enjoyable user experience.
The really annoying thing is that now they have touchscreen computers but you still need some proprietary hardware tool to fix software problems in the car. Why do no cars expose debug info / service tools in their UIs?
My Skoda has an issue with headlight levelling and I'm pretty sure it just needs some kind of software reset or recalibration but they just don't let you. Infuriating!
I'd like to throw in my 2000 VW Golf MK4. Was the last model they made before the design turned all bubble like. All the interior controls were actual buttons and knobs and had a good feel to them. Probably one of the last cars to have glass headlights that don't get plastic corrosion too.
Leerburg police leash (for dogs), although the one they sell now is (of course) a crappier version of the one I’ve owned for 10 years now. It’s a leash with a snap at both ends, and three o rings at different points along the length to attach the top snap. It can be held like a regular leash, or slung over your shoulder if you’re for example at an outdoor eating place. I keep it on the shortest length while on walks on sidewalks and at the longest on parks and such. It’s so amazing I’m shocked it’s not a standard leash design you can buy in pet stores.
Such a little thing, but: the Rules Reference card in introductory-level Magic: The Gathering products. Magic's full rules are 250 pages of legal-lite text, and yet, this little folded insert, with just five cardface's worth of text, amply covers everything a complete beginner needs to play. It's a brilliant example of cutting an explanation to the bare minimum and piggybacking on background knowledge.
Thinking of software, probably early "beta" Gmail. There was so much about the email experience that was improved by a stable web client, with what felt at the time like unlimited storage.
Thinking of hardware, I've never been much for Apple products, but the iPhone (particularly early models) is undoubtedly a design marvel.
The iPad, too. I spend hours with it every day—mostly reading and watching videos—and I rarely have to think about it as a device. It just lets me get absorbed in whatever I’m looking at.
I don’t use it much myself, as I’m not an artist, but the iPad app ProCreate seems to be a masterpiece of good design, too.
I'll go a game route: Mario Kart. It's just so perfect. All of them from the SNES to the Switch.
I've played countless hours and never get bored. The level designs are all so interesting and unique I find myself discovering something new every time. It's social and I've seen it dominate dinner parties.
MK64 was the first MK game I played. Having played titles proceeding it, I feel that MK Wii and MK8 are more balanced. MK64 has horrible rubber banding. It’s to the point where your level of skill can mean nothing if you make one costly error.
> It’s to the point where your level of skill can mean nothing if you make one costly error.
But usually you're playing with people who are not experts at the game, so they also make 0-1 costly errors per lap. It's hard to find someone who makes no errors.
Most items also favor the people who aren't first or last, so there's a chance those will change the outcome.
> MK64 character driving attributes also vary, but the character select screen doesn’t inform players of this
This is true, but you can explain the differences easily and they're fairly intuitive (because they're all based on size).
The perfect game for me is Tetris on the original Gameboy. The ergonomics of the controls and form factor were so perfect. They fit into the neurons of a human brain like, uh, a Tetris piece.
My Doc Martens. The design of a shoe is pretty well worked out, but the devil is in the details, and my Docs have been carrying my fat ass through deserts and snow and jungles and cobblestones and pavement for twenty years, and I got em used. That's not just down to materials, it's down to design.
The Gerber Chameleon (and its Remix followup) pocket knife design. (https://www.gerber-tools.com/Gerber-Remix-22-01969.php) Absolutely brilliant - the pivot itself is a ring, so when you use the knife you have zero chance of slipping and cutting yourself, and instead of a side to side motion for cutting, you just use your hand naturally, the way you would a handsaw.
And the iPad stand and mount I use, whose brand escapes me. It folds compact to fit in a bag and the legs and main clamp separate for easy carrying, but the feet pivot outward or can be used, when pivoted inward together, as a base that can be slid into a holder (that came with it) or anything that can hold it up. I often slip the feet behind the vertical pipes in our kitchen to watch videos while I'm doing dishes, and I've built a lap desk that uses pipe strapping to allow me to slide the stand feet underneath the desktop, so the iPad itself doesn't take up any space at all on the desktop - it's just hovering over it like an IKEA worklight. Fantastically simple and useful design.
It kind of pains me to say this, but I'll say Sonos from about 5-6 years ago. When I first got a couple speakers, I touted it as the best consumer electronics experience I'd ever had to except maybe some Apple products.
Unfortunately, it has been consistently downhill the past couple of years. What used to "just work" now constantly has issues and glitches, and speakers I got just a few years ago that work great are now essentially EOLed in their software. I've definitely purchased my last Sonos product.
Sonos + Spotify have been so spotty. Playing music from Spotify consistently starts tracks halfway through a song. Sometimes no music plays at all even though it displays as playing in Spotify. Sometimes Spotify just cannot connect.
I have something like $3500 in Sonos speakers; it’s really disappointing how unreliable they are.
I know this is very different target markets and product desires, but I have 3 Google Home mini speakers I have spent under $150 on + my privacy from our overlords. Works very well with Spotify and solid sound for someone who isn't an audiofile, and while not amazing design, very solid. My condolences to the OP on their failures of late :/
Shopify pay (I think that's the name) that texts a code to complete the checkout at web stores I think is a great friction reducer.
Modern tents that just have a couple of elastic cord connected structural members the tent hangs off that go up in seconds. Anyone who put up a tent 25 years ago must see how much innovation there has been.
Almost everything about cars - if you think of the conditions and amount of use they have to survive (and despite massive annoying failures). I had a Mazda 3 with rain sensing wipers that I loved, I've driven lots of more expensive cars without them and I don't understand why they're not ubiquitous
I bought it 11 years ago, a couple years after moving out. It was more expensive than many of its competitors, but the build quality seemed worth the investment. Early in my career, it was a big investment.
I have used it nearly every single day in that time, and honestly never stopped to think about it until now. It's been a fixture of my life. Other than the occasional descaling, it's been perfect without maintenance.
Beyond that, as someone who drinks a lot of coffee - I'd also like to mention my classic Bunn coffee maker. It has a reservoir of water it keeps hot, the new water you add displaces the old water like a water heater, so you're able to make an entire pot of coffee in under 3 minutes.
I have one of these and I use it about once or twice a week. I have one major design gripe with mine: the Keep Warm functionality is enabled by default. It does at least remember if you turn it off but for some reason it resets to default if my power cuts out. I happen to live in a slightly rural location where a 1-2 minute power cut happens now and again. If I use the kettle after the power outage it keeps reboiling the water until I realize I have to once again disable the Keep Warm switch. Other than that, it is a really good kettle.
There is a removable filter on the spout which is just a wire mesh attached to a plastic frame, and a little bit of plastic that attaches that to the metal. Cuisinart states it to be BPA free.
I don't find any of it reason for concern though. It's not submerged during boiling when at the max fill line, and even then I'm sure it's a heat safe plastic. The filter itself is easily removable, the mount is probably removable with a little effort. I'd much rather have the filter, given my hard water and the little chunks of limestone the filter likes to catch.
The Bic pen is genius. Im a writing utensil snob, but I have but the greatest respect for the bic. When you need a indelible pen that will just work and not run.
As long as I dont have to write w/ it for too long ;)
Zojirushi rice cookers. Even though the shell is plastic it has a durable feel to it like you don't find it kitchen appliances anymore. It'll still work in 20+ years type feel
I'll second pretty much any old rice cooker with only one button design. There's a reason every Asian home considers it integral.
More than just rice, you can do so much more than one would think in there. I cook a Spaghetti Squash by just placing it inside on warm. No oil or anything. Then I go to work, come back 10 hours later and it's perfect. Can open it with a butterknife.
I'll take it over a slow cooker any day because it can set to a boil. The warm setting is perfect for most things and I've used it to make stocks, confits, yogurt, stews, curries and eggs without worrying about burning down my kitchen when I'm away as it will set itself to warm when there's no more water to evaporate.
I still use the Zojirushi rice cooker I grew up with after my parents bequeathed it to me. We probably got it around 2000 give or take a few years. So definitely bumping on 20 years.
I’ll second this. Got one for Christmas last year and have used it twice a week all year. It makes the process feel foolproof, and is the easiest appliance to clean in my kitchen.
Never made a bad batch of rice, and have accidentally left rice on keep warm for hours and hours and everything was perfectly fine.
Personally hate them, they’re slow, can be replaced with an instant pot, and old crappy rice cookers still with decades later. Cute logo, good for keeping rice warm without drying it out. What appliances are you using that don’t feel durable?
I bought this no-name set of three from a small family-run neighborhood hardware store in Brooklyn for $20 somewhere around 2002. The guy behind the counter was surprised by the price and that they even had cast iron pans. I've used them regularly since. They're the oldest cookware in my kitchen by a large margin.
I've taken them camping, and I cook with then in my kitchen daily. I've cooked any food imaginable in them, from crepes, to patched eggs, to pizza, to all sorts of meats and stews and sauces - on the stove and in the oven. And they still work as well and look like the day I first pre-seasoned them.
Came here to say this. Any sand cast iron pan, including enameled versions. There is no better pan for searing meats. Seasoning raw cast iron with walnut oil is simple, and makes food release so easy except for eggs. They last lifetimes, are abundant in second-hand stores and garage sales, are easily restored, and even the raw material is abundant not just on Earth thanks to supernovae. They suck if you live in a group household with people who use soap and abrasives on them that removes the seasoning, abandon them in the sink to rust, or refuse to towel dry them. Enameled cast iron is terrible for food release, so don't get an enameled skillet, but the dutch ovens from Le Creuset are amazing. They don't rust, and the way they hold and distribute heat, and the lids hold moisture make them amazing for baking bread and oven roasting. The Le Creuset cookware designed by Raymond Lowery are objects of lust. Do google them for a mind blow.
20+ year old farm equipment. They are easy to use, simple to maintain, often repairable by the farmer on-site (with perhaps a trip to the store to buy a small part). I often found myself marvelling at the complex things that could be achieved by an arrangement of gears, such as the contraption on a square baler that wraps the bale with two pieces of twine and ties two perfectly tensioned knots that will hold the hay together in that shape for years.
Is this still true, or is it 20 years from when you started thinking about how good things used to be? I ask because somewhere in there I assume there is a period where ICs were introduced but all the kinks might not have been worked out. It maybe that I have the time scales wrong myself though.
I cannot speak to whether this is still true for modern farm equipment for two reasons. First, my family ran a small livestock operation and older machinery was more affordable to buy/run/repair and fulfilled our needs. Second, the farm has since been sold and now I'm a mere city boy.
Does IC mean integrated chips? I have certainly read that modern farm equipment is less repairable, and I would not be surprised if they played a role. But I don't claim any knowledge about that. I may also have the time scales wrong.
Robinhood was my first experience with stocks, and attempting to use a traditional broker's interface has really made me appreciate how good Robinhood's UI is. I guess it's one of those "you don't notice when it's working well" kind of things.
I went to sell some stuff this month, and was very sad to learn that most people have moved to Facebook Marketplace. Apparently it's much more difficult to sell stuff on Craigslist now.
Unfortunately Craigslist got loaded down with scammers and they never figured out a good way to get rid of them. Facebook has an edge since you can not only look at the seller's profile but you can also see how long they've been a member of Facebook. I'm sure zombie accounts or scraped accounts happen but it doesn't seem to be common, especially if you stick to buying from people in your community. Not sure how well it works for sellers.
That's understandable, but it does suck for those of us that want to sell stuff but don't use Facebook. I managed to sell my PS4 Pro despite having an empty Facebook profile, but I'd imagine a less in demand item might be a lot harder to move, if people tend to want to see that you're a real person. My account probably looked like a scammers.
Any Japanese bathtub. It's deep, you can fill it to the very top, and it's designed to overflow rather than deprive you of the top 1/3 with an annoying safety drain.
Perhaps tangential, but it still astounds me how Americans scoff whenever I mention that we have floor drains in Australian bathrooms. "What, is your bathroom a locker room or something? snicker". Setting aside how it helps with potential flooding* and makes the floor tiles infinitely easier to clean, it also allows things like this.
*I've also had comments like "why would your bathroom ever flood???" as if nothing water related could ever go wrong.
Astounds me Australians have only one drain. In Finland TWO drains is now preferred. Especially in student dormitories and such. The reason is that people pass out in shower and block the drain.
In cold climate water damage can be fatal, because of heavy insulation and subsequent mildew bloom in it.
I was also surprised that most American showers only have a temperature control and not pressure, and the toilets waste several litres of water every flush.
The good ones are quite tiny and make out of a single piece of fiber, at least that's what they look like. All corners are round and there's a floor drain meaning you can make a splash and not worry about it. Their small size makes them ideal for hotel rooms and apartments alike where space is a premium. Since they are prefab you can also put them into the garden as standalone modules which some people prefer.
Mamiya 7 camera. It is ergonomically great, especially considering its size and large film area (6x7). Good shutter button with a lock.
Its 65mm lens is amazing to use - the edges line up almost perfectly with the massive rangefinder window, so it's like taking a picture of what one eye sees. This is great because I believe the best images are the ones that look like seeing, that make it seem as if beauty is commonplace.
- HP products before Corina took over. Especially the HP-28s and HP-48GX
Hp basically put a lisp machine into your hands. The 28 is better than the 48 except for I/O, battery door, and screen and CPU speed. (What can I say. I love the clamshell)
- mechanically, anything by Honda
- Lada Niva. A relative has one in S. American. While out w/ him a cop pulled us over just to tell my uncle that he had better: “take good care of my little Russian!”
I came here to say the same about HP calculators from the 35 to the 48. I have almost every one. The 42 is a great daily driver, and the 41 a workhorse. The 28 was my first and the 48 or 49 may be the best IMO.
Late to this thread as usual, but I might as well submit mine:
My Fender Telecaster. It’s a paradigm of simplicity, reliability, playability, and tone. From the original barrel-style string saddles to the 2-pickup/3-way switching system to the high-output single coil to the bolt-on neck construction to the straight string-pull head stock, there is no better guitar on the planet. What’s even more impressive is that it was designed by a non-guitarist and was one of Leo Fenders earliest designs (and is largely considered to be the first mass-produced electric guitar). I own far too many guitars of various styles and cost, but I nearly always perform and record with my Tele. It’s my proverbial desert island guitar.
I'm relatively new to electric guitar and have a Tagima telecaster clone (T55pwh). I love it - it has no business being as good as it is for as cheap as it is.
One thing about telecasters that you mentioned that is probably not the best design is the 3 barrel string saddles that make intonation challenging (since you can't adjust the intonation of one string without changing another one too). My favorite telecaster player Tim Lerch has a video explaining the way he sets up his teles, and one of the things he does is change to compensated saddles.[1]
Awesome video. I have indeed heard about the intonation issues with the vintage barrel saddles, but personally I can’t really tell on my Tele. It stays in tune better than most of my guitars and the intonation is far better than on my Les Paul Custom with the Tune-O-Matic bridge.
The Aeropress. I've made coffee in all sorts of different ways over the years, but for me this is the one that strikes the perfect balance between flavor and convenience. After a long period of making french press coffee, it was an absolute revelation the first time I popped out the little nugget of spent grounds from the Aeropress.
IBM Model M keyboard. Great to type on, just works.
Built June 2, 1987. I've been typing on it for 20 years myself, never had any problems except issues with the third-party USB converter not playing nice with some KVM hardware. And I guess the time I spilled coffee in it.
I have to say one of my new favorite tools as of this year is Tailscale.
To steal Apple's annoying marketing phrase: It just works. I've never had to fiddle with it's settings or spend a bunch time figuring out configuration crap. I just install, and login and that's it. There's no need to care about manually configuring Wireguard devices or to care about key management, which I would think would get annoying quick as you add in more and more devices.
MDN and the NHS website are some of the best knowledge base websites I know. Each do a really good job of communicating information. They put a lot of thought into the language they use and it shows.
Conversely, the "F1" help in so many other Microsoft (especially windows) help page - which often ignores preferred browser - is the absolute worst help system I've ever seen. Literally never once has that page aided me in any way.
Corded Wahl professional hair clippers. It’s the AK-47 of hair styling products: indestructible, never jams, and incredibly low maintenance. Clean out the detritus and give it a little oil now and then and it will work practically forever.
The Galaxy Z Fold 3 I'm typing this on is really well implemented. It's not perfect but it's a marvel of engineering and an excellent implementation of an ambitious idea.
The app Sync for Reddit Pro has basically precisely the UI I want from a reddit app. There's almost nothing I would change.
I absolutely love the feel of just about every part of the Xbox One controller, and you can even get back buttons on the Elite model.
My 2005 Prius feels great to sit in and operate. Foot operated park brake, keyless entry and pushbutton start, comfortable seating and controls, plenty of space, sensible layout.
All models of Macbook Pro except the TouchBar era have been a pleasure to use.
I don't even care for peanut butter and this just hits. Super smooth, not too sweet - i eat it by the spoonful. I literally did not think there was any difference between different peanut butter brands until I had Pic's.
AFAIK approximately all “no-stir” peanut butters only have peanuts in them. People don’t buy them because the oil floats to the top and causes a mess and if you don’t stir, then the bottom 1/5th is like glue.
My truck is to stir up separated peanut butter in the jar with a handheld electric mixer using the whisk attachment, then put the jar in the refrigerator to slow down future separation.
I love Kroger's natural peanut butter (ingredients: peanuts,salt) for $1-$2/lb. It's amazing to me that the hydrogenated crap is more expensive, and the name brand natural stuff is more expensive still!
Google, Old reddit, and HN, can't believe they've stayed true all these years.
Brands, I or a friend, has had extremely poor success with, enough to call out:
Dell (their quality control dropped off, I think, they used to be great), Amazon Basics, Mini Cooper, Fitbit, Beats by Dre, Goal Zero Yeti, new Reddit.
I'm also a fan of Garmin smartwatches, they have some amazing functionality and are serious tools for athletes and outdoorsmen. But they are handicapped by glitchy software.
Thanks for the recs, though Google has caused unexpected design problems in my usage. Sometimes it unpredictably switches to dark mode, then light mode on Firefox and Safari. Google's answer box also sometimes displays wrong information (infamously, "Google turned me into a serial killer" on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622100).
I'm curious about Amazon Basics and Beats. For the former, they sell so many products that the ones I buy are pretty good (e.g. office supplies), but I have run into other products with middling reviews. For Beats, I would expect them to be good because Apple acquired them, so it's interesting to hear they have problems.
Google: I just appreciate sticking with the design simplicity after all these years and not going full New Reddit with the front page. That serial killer thing is hilarious and scary. Their draconian customer service may be the worst ever.
Amazon Basics: is the ultimate cheap product. Everything I've bought has just failed alot faster than if I bought a more name brand.
Beats: I thought the same thing about Beats. I bought the power beats pro and one of the buds wouldn't charge unless you fiddled with it and checked the phone to make sure there was a connection , which doesn't sound like a big deal but it's a hassle to do every day.
And if the base was jarred accidentally while charging it could lose that connection. It was just a hassle.
The amount of times I went running with only one earbud working was too many.
I mailed them back and the new set they sent had the exact same issue.
I have cheapo 30 dollar bids now and they don't have that issue.
This was like immediately after it was purchased by Apple so maybe the Apple QA hadn't kicked in yet.
Just to be the contrarian I am, I'll say that dell is still actually pretty good. You just have to buy the business models like the precision to get the best experience now
Maybe that's the issue. I bought consumer XPS's. One had a fan go out after 1 year. One had a keyboard failure out of the box. My co-worker had hardware issues on theirs.
>> Used the insurance money to buy a macbook pro and never looked back.
And that MacBook will probably outlast 3 Dells.
When my new Dell failed out of the box, I switched to my 6 year old MacBook pro I had waiting in the wings and was able to keep on working. It worked great until the new work MacBook arrived.
When I have to turn my work MacBook in, buying myself another MacBook. And still have the trusty 6+ year old one in the wings.
Toyota Sienna minivan. Having driven only sedans and coupes, and grew up riding in 90s-era SUVs, I was shocked to discover what modern "minivan life" is like... as a parent. For me, my reference for modern is the past two weeks of a mundane 2010 Sienna LE. Every couple days, I notice something new and thoughtful.
The side doors are powered and can be controlled from the remote, since kids won't often open doors for themselves or you.
The last row of seats can fold down flush with the floor, since we alternate between having more cargo space and passenger capacity (like trips with grandparents or for instance, equipment for sports or music).
The car windows come tinted. One less worry/discussion about harsh glare or sunlight on our young kids.
There's a second lighter outlet right beside the first, which is handy for our electricity-dependent lifestyle.
There is a compartment on the driver's side, near your head, that reveals sunglasses.
There are cupholders upon cupholders on every interior panel, which seemed absurd to me, until I saw them used by my own family. And when you've filled them all, pop open the coin tray and a slow reveal unfolds... yet another cupholder, like digging into the hesitation before the punchline of a joke.
Newer minivans cover more use cases, like automatically popping the rear door by waving your leg, or changing the middle row positions to accommodate side-by-side car seats, and I'm curious to see which features have staying power and which don't.
We often applaud elegant solutions to a well-defined problem as a good design, or at least I feel like software engineers tend to, but I have a growing admiration for designs that solve a problem complex enough to resist being defined once-and-for-all. Those problems tend to be "human" problems that are as deep as human psychology and change as our society changes.
In terms of physical things, my Audio Technica ATH-M50x headphones. I have been quite literally wearing them all day, every day for the past three years and got no complaints.
I got the predecessor of these (ATH-M50) in high school and I still use them 15 years later. Have a bit of peeling where the headband touches my head, but working perfectly otherwise.
I’ve used my m50s so much over the last 10 years that I’ve replaced the cups, and worn out the headband. I fixed the headband with a tennis racquet grip
Pebble Time Steel. I’ve played with other similar watches, like the Fossil hybrid smartwatches, but those can’t touch the software and other design aspects that Pebble nailed back in the day. I wish it could last forever!
We paid $1,000 (a LOT of money) for our set when we were just married in 1980. Every piece of that set still looks like new, with a mirror finish, and every lid handle and pot handle is still tight like it just came out of the box. They are naturally non-stick, cook everything with only a tiny bit of water, and are indestructible. The ones pictured on the website today look exactly like the ones we have used daily for 40 years, since they cannot be improved upon. Made in Wisconsin since 1906 and every piece is guaranteed forever.
They are only sold direct or at county fairs, home improvement shows and the like, but they are worth the high price since you will NEVER need to replace them.
Most Chinese dictionaries have a different search bar for English words and latinized Chinese words (pinyin). Pleco let’s you toggle your search from English to pinyin and back again with a button. It also lets you navigate from words to their characters and from characters to words that use them.
Most importantly, it color coded characters so you can see how they’re pronounced more easily which is incredibly useful for beginners.
I used to have a large dobsonian telescope made by Orion. It had a good quality mirror. It came with features like automatic tracking.
In general, a dobsonion telescope has a simple design that made it cheap and easier to use compared to other telescope setups. The dobsonion mount also allowed for a large aperture that would have been unwieldy otherwise. For me, it is an example of how complex things can be made simpler and easier to use.
I would add binoculars in general are pretty amazing - putting the distance between optical elements of a refracting telescope into a small ergonomic package.
The Aerostich Roadcrafter single piece motorcycle suit. It’s not the best protection, it’s not the most weather resistant, it’s not the warmest in cool weather, it’s no the best ventilated in warm weather, but it is the best all round motorcycle suit I’ve worn.
Best of all you can step into or out of one faster than most people can take off a jacket. Every time I put it on I feel a rush of joy and satisfaction.
I'm an avid collector of Japanese chef knives. They are not only beautiful but design of each of the distinct blade shapes have been honed over hundreds of years for usability. Using a knife for the job it was designed for is a very pleasurable experience.
It will only talk to Swiss people but we have an app called Fairtiq that makes taking a ticket for public transport super easy. You basically swipe in when you enter the bus/train/boat and swipe out when you arrived at your destination. It can be many changes or hours later and the right tickets are bought for you behind the scene.
On the topic of transportation, the official app for the Swiss transports (SBB CFF FFS) is also a joy to use: input your start and destination and you have your minute-by-minute travel plan with changes. It's fast, precis and tells you about alternative and delays if needed.
It sounds like a marketing post but I just realized how grateful I am to have to travel around. (I have no car)
I don't know whether it has been a while since you last used the SBB Mobile app, but it also offers the same functionality: start the trip by dragging a slider, stop it at the destination and the price is automatically calculated and charged from your card or invoiced at the end of the month. It works with the half-fare card, as well. Works all over Switzerland on trains, busses, cable cars etc. I haven't tried it with boats yet. :)
My Withings Steel HR. It is just enough smart watch for me. Fitness tracking is good, sleep tracking is okay, app works better than the FitBit app, and has better Apple Health integration. Battery lasts weeks. And I think it looks pretty nice. I think it fits into the category of “calm technology”, which is tough to do for a device that has notifications as part of the core functionality.
So much functionality and extensibility in a pretty small software, it almost didn't change in years, and still does its job very efficiently, and my favourite part is that you can literally do every possible action with just a keyboard.
I love software that doesn't require a mouse. Terminal emulators and shells are obviously things I love using (hello vim users), but Total Commander is probably the only GUI software I respect because I could do just fine if my mouse got broken.
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Also, Keypirinha + Everything search.
Both of those individually are great and do their job well, but the fact that you can combine them makes them even better. Oh, and Total Commander also can use Everything search.
Most handtools. Estwing hammer, some pliers that probably go back to the 50's, chisels, planes, saws etc. You can use them all day long, every day and they 'just work', hardly require maintenance and will most likely outlast me.
The 1zpresso J-Max coffee grinder - beautifully engineered, very clicky and satisfying to use, and creates great coffee grounds.
Airpods Pro - Again, the physical design and "sound" interactions when placing the buds in the case, closing it, opening, etc. all give a sense of satisfaction. The noise cancelling is great, and it's not fussy like other bluetooth earbuds.
Pilot Frixion pens - I played with erasable pens when I was kid and they always kinda sucked. The Frixion pens behave how I would imagine an ideal erasable pen would. Great for designing things on paper, especially the multi-color pens.
3M Command Strips - They hold shit on the wall and they're super easy to apply.
I've been a happy user of Frixion pens for the past 10 years and Moleskine notebooks for about 4. It's a shame the two don't really go well together however, at least in my experience
I bought a Breville Barista Express when everyone started working from home. It's one of the best product investments I've ever made. It's beautifully designed, reliable, and makes amazing coffee. Has a steamer and grinder included. And I probably paid it off in all the coffee I didn't buy from coffee shops.
Maybe I'm too easy to please, but every day since I unboxed my Kobo Forma I've been impressed with it. The backlight is adjustable down to barely noticeable for night reading with the lights off, and in bright light the e-ink looks great. The weight in the "spine" is perfect, and the rest of the unit feels near weightless. The battery lasts weeks. And the device has performed flawlessly for over a year now, which is honestly more than I expected for a somewhat niche electronics product. I use it for queued blog posts via Pocket, or some light fiction before bed or during lunch break.
Same here, the one criticism I have is that I had to put tape on the toner cartridge to defeat the toner empty sensor. After doing that I've been able to continue to use the "empty" cartridge for an additional 5 or 6 years (I only print maybe 50 pages a year though).
The remote feature of VS Code. It is so good that I completely forgot I was on a remote machine and was pissed it had crashed - until I realized that my internet was down.
It is even so good that if you start something that listens to a TCP port, VS Code will just forward it for you.
VS Code itself is still not nearly at the level of things like IntelliJ.
Mine is still going usefully for me, albeit with High Sierra. For most tasks, it's performance is on-par with my 2019 MacBook Pro - which I suspect comes down to thermals more than anything.
A lot of what I use it for is just headlessly running FFmpeg over ssh.
The original iPod, the very first one with the wheel that actually turned.
I don't think I've ever known a product I loved more. I got so much pleasure from it that it made me want to learn more about product design.
I thought the later static touch-wheel wasn't as good, and firewire was such a great way to load it with music, fast charging and super fast data transfer.
I've never been as happy with anything "cloud based" - something is always broken somewhere.
I had the first-gen, spinny-wheel iPod. While I love (still have it) as much as you, I don’t think it was as good as the touch wheels that followed shortly after. By the end of mine’s daily use life, the wheel had loosened up enough that the music would get louder as I walked because my gait would rotate the wheel. Past that, it was perfect and I cherish still owning it, I just wish the wheel had held it’s firmness.
The Blichmann BeerGun (v1 -- I'm sure v2 is fine but it's not the same).
It does exactly what it is supposed to. It's better than the "pro" tools, despite being marketed to homebrewers. It always reliably fills bottles, to a consistent fill, with quick and easy pre- and post-purge with CO2.
Moreover, the engineering is beautiful. Every part has a purpose. Everything that could be a stock part is. Each custom part is machined as simply as can be.
God i love my pebble so much, oldest piece of tech I've kept, but the most reliable. Good if you can get your hands on one but I have a feeling they're going the way of the radiant cobtrol toaster in that their prices are set to go up
I liked to read while lying down and e-readers are an objectively better experience. I can never hold a book in a comfortable way - and ereaders are backlit.
They were making something that would be recognizable as a book (or booklet) at least as early as late republic, which ties in to my point that the format has been refined a long time.
I think you mean the codex? It was like a book, except the pages were bound on alernating sides. Not the best design, they improved on it in the middle ages. The codex achieved parity with the scroll in 300 AD, so that the modern book format coming just 200 years later means it wasn't around for that long.
I’m also a great fan of my (Japanese) unit bathroom control panels. I can set the shower and bath temperature to a specific number, automatically fill my bath to a specified level with the press of a button, have it keep the bath at temperature, let me know when it’s full when I’m in the living room.
It’s glorious. Every time I’m staying anywhere overseas I cannot believe I’m back to fiddling with a hot and cold tap again.
I just got a new pram, the Baby Jogger city elite (sort of a cross between a stroller and a pram but I call it a pram), as a general rule I find prams badly designed and this does have some things that I think could be improved, but two things are really superior on it: the locking mechanism, and the folding mechanism.
The Locking mechanism is the less impressive but still useful, most locks on a pram are done by the foot and you have to push down on a bar or some other lock near the wheels and then when you want to start you need to kick up on them. Fair enough, although obviously now you are putting your locking mechanism near the area most likely to get dirt and rocks in to wear it down, and other potential ways it can be damaged.
Furthermore since you are using your foot to lock and unlock it can be something of a hassle because let's admit it, most people are not very
good at manipulating things with their feet.
The city elite locker is by the handle, you can pull it up to lock, pull down to unlock. That's nice. You can easily see if it is locked, because it's at hand level not down at foot level, you use it with the part of your body most people use for manipulating objects - the hand - and finally it is unlikely to be damaged because you ran over some big rock.
The folding mechanism is the impressive part, in the middle of the seat is a thick strap with some instructions on - I think it says 'Pull up to fold' but I'd have to go down to check the exact wording. When you pull up by this strap magnets on the sidebars of the pram are released somehow and the pram folds in half automatically.
Yesterday I had to take a taxi with it, when the taxi driver saw this action his eyes bugged out and he laughed and said "now that's smart" (in Danish though) he commented on how he had a lady the day before who could not figure out how to close her pram and mine was so easy. Indeed some of our previous prams have been so irritating to fold that my wife generally left it up to me to do. It is equally easy to unfold.
Everything has a downside, and this ease of folding means that sometimes you can be doing something with the pram and accidentally start the folding process, but because it is easy to unfold you can stop it as you feel it starting and put it back right. Believe me, this sounds more irritating and problematic than it actually is but I figured I should note it anyway.
Dyson vacuum products are pretty damn impressive. I have an 9 year old Dyson DC33 and every time I take it apart to clean it, I can’t believe how thoughtful the engineers were. Repairability is 9/10 and built like a tank.
I would respectfully disagree. We have that Dyson, about the same age. The basic (plastic) engineering is very clever, but I think also made to fail in the long haul, in ways that can't be fixed. That's what has happened to ours over the years: it still sort-of-kind-of functions, but suction is terrible, various clips and mating profiles no longer really engage fully...
Last month, I decided to go all in on a Miele. Time will tell if the incredible expense turns out to be worth it in the long run. It is WAY easier to use in most situations that our Dyson.
Yes, I’ve fixed my animal vacuum in major ways 3 times and it was very easy to do. The vacuum has been running well for a very long time in vacuum years.
The BMW G650GS was the best bike I've had. Almost zero maintenance. Reliable. Amazing fuel economy. Decent on road when sat down. No probs doing 600km days. Decent off-when road standing up. It could handle deep sand when fitted with good tires. Not very sexy looking, but the perfect jack of all trades. And, yes, master of none - which is why BMW could not market it much further, I think. Pity.
Yeah, I think the 650GS was too good, in a way. So they cancelled it, and focused on marketing those over-engineered half-ton things that people get regularly stuck on, anywhere off-road.
That and Macromedia Flash! I love how easy it is to make shapes and curves in Fireworks and Flash. Its an object-oriented UX. You click an object on screen, you'll get its visual and textual properties. You click the screen, you get your canvas properties. You can group, ungroup or do unions on objects. Layers are only secondary to objects, unlike Photoshop with its layer-oriented UX. Illustrator? I dont even know what the UI/UX is supposed to be, its just a mish-mash of tools.
My Casio GW-9600 electronic dictionary [1] was an amazing help in learning Japanese. It's perfectly optimized for quick word lookup: it boots from sleep instantly, the definitions are previewed as you type words, it has a full physical keyboard, and the screen is large but low-power so it rarely ever runs out of battery. The metal frame also makes it durable to falls on cement, etc. The content was, of course, also huge, almost guaranteeing that every word I searched for would be there. Well worth the money. I'm sad that the newer models became much slower; when you have to look up hundreds of words a day, there's a big difference between 5 seconds and .5 seconds.
My favorite dictionary app is a Thai one from word-in-the-hand and Paiboon [2]. The dictionary data is quite extensive, and includes linked categories like "food", "pronoun", "geography", "counter", etc. Tapping on the category tags takes you to other words of the same category (great for studying, say, restaurant vocab) and also to articles that teach you Thai via phrases and cultural info, and to grammatical explanations for, e.g. counters or prepositions. On top of all that, it supports several romanization schemes and includes baked-in information to help you learn to read the Thai orthography. It's a fantastic combination of extensive dictionary with good information for learners. Plus it has a (limited) export feature, which is something that Ex-Word never supported (except for if you bought special hardware to export to).
Google Inbox: The perfect modern frontend for mail. RIP.
Sonos Playbar (got the Arc for free, sold the Playbar): Perfect sound, a timeless design, software was dope around 2015-2016. All downhill from there, when Sonos decided to pivot to supporting Alexa/Google Assistant and attempting to become smarter.
Google Pixelbook: Super thin, light weight, super clean Linux system with first class support for Progressive Web Apps, Android and Linux apps. Chrome OS features the simplest software update process I've seen in action so far. The design is unique, the keyboard was perfect when right when Apple decided to ship shitty butterfly keyboards. 7 years of software updates.
Rancilio Silvia: Budget Espresso maker that's close to indestructible. Everything can be serviced, replaced, upgraded, there's no shortage of replacement parts, the Espresso is great once you know how to use it.
Aeropress: Simple to use, fits well into almost all travel luggage, and produces great coffee with little effort.
I’m not sure about the best designed things ever, but here are some purchases in the last year, that I’ve really appreciated:
Corona 10-inch Pruning Saw
I had been using an old pair of loppers to trim most of the low hanging branches in my yard. This pruning saw is so much easier. It can cut through a 4-inch branch like nothing. Also it folds up so there’s no need for a sheath.
EGO 650 CFM Blower
Electric lawn tools are amazing. No dealing with fuel and oil. Plus they are so much quieter. This blower has been a life saver this fall. Planning to purchase an ego mower soon.
Leatherman Skeletool CX
The skeletool has replaced my pocket knife on camping trips. It’s not like most leatherman tools with 100 functions. The skeletool has about 7, but pocket knife, pliers and bottle opener cover most of my needs.
Outdoor Voices Sunday Short
Bar none my favorite pair of athletic shorts. Extremely flexible, comfortable and they look pretty good. I can wear them working out, lounging around the house or out to run errands. I probably own 6 pairs.
I think the aeropress coffee press was very well designed. It's made of three sturdy, plastic parts that wash easily and last a very long time. It makes a great cup of coffee. https://aeropress.com/
I'm also impressed by the MSR whisperlite international camp stove. The international edition is designed to work with a variety of fuel types-- white gas, kerosene, etc. The stove compacts down to a very small size. It produces a jet sufficient for boiling a pot of water in less than 10 minutes. It can be easily maintained and there is a market for parts. https://www.msrgear.com/stoves/liquid-fuel-stoves/whisperlit...
PS. This is a very interesting question. Although I suspect the OP was looking for products and UI/UX, I think higher-level categories are more objective and timeless bastions of design excellence.
PPS. Note these which stand out to me fall roughly in to two categories: those which harness physics, and those which avoid or abstract it.
Bit of a random one but I give kudos to the winged corkscrew. That's the type that has two levers on each side, which you push down to raise the cork. Wikipedia tells me it was invented by one Domenick Rosati and patented in 1930. Why do I like it? Makes pulling a cork easy, and the design is simple and elegant.
There's a lot wrong with this design. It is perhaps reasonable to use on new wine with pristine corks. But corks are a natural material, so they have a lot of variability, and they do degrade over time. If you open a lot of wine (e.g., if you are a waiter or sommelier) or you drink wine at many ages (e.g. if you are an aficionado or collector) then you need more control in where you place the worm in the cork and how you control the extraction of the cork (for instance giving lateral pressure). This is why you will never see people who routinely open wine as part of their jobs with a wing corkscrew.
(Even worse, wing corkscrews are most likely to have an auger type of worm rather than an open helix. This is not inherent in the design of the corkscrew, of course; many wing corkscrews have open worms. Just something to watch out for if you are buying one.)
Lego is pretty high on my list: it's all about composition with reuseable components that have just the right size. Also, the basic interface is stable since 1958.
Those faucets that allow you to control three things (amount of water, amount of hot water, amount of cold water) using a single joint (random picture from imgur https://m.imgur.com/G3Yydd9 ). People use taps/faucets with 2 knobs in 2021??? Wtf.
Japanese sportsbikes are some of the best designed and engineered things I’ve used. Some designs haven’t even really evolved that much since the 80s as they were already pretty much the apotheosis of a high performance two wheeled vehicle . Tires, suspensions and brake designs have improved due to (i guess) materials science and manufacturing more than even design. Plenty of engines are used in models for decades because they were so good and overengineered. Aside from the engineering side of excellent performance and reliability the UI is very intuitive, and especially on Honda the ergonomics are near perfect to the point of disappearing out from under you. Of course same could be said of some cars but the design space is so huge its harder to nail down an ideal car.
I loved my TiVo, almost everything about the end to end experience was flawless. Just recalling the ‘be-bip’ sound of interacting with the UI still brings me joy. The interface was as simple as you could ever hope for (and structurally similar to the navigation in iOS). Up, down, left, right, pause, rewind, fast forward, thumbs up and down. Everything was built on simple consistent primitives and everything felt immediate, in a way no TV has to me in more than a decade. Even the control felt nicer in your hand than the usual slab of plastic. Coming home to new episodes of Star Trek it had kindly decided to record always gave me a warm feeling that this smart little box was on my side. Too many devices feel like a fight against something utterly soulless these days.
Redwing boots with a steel shank and toe cap. Totally indestructable, classic styling. Once broken in they conform to your foot shape to provide amazing support, comfort, and protection from puncture or crushing. They are American made, and the town is gorgeous.
ech. I used to wear redwings. i could only get a year or two out of them.
I've been switching off between two pairs of wescos for 20 years now and while one of them is finally about to go, the second one is still in solid shape.
Old-school microwave ovens; one knob for effect, one knob for timer (which implicitly starts the microwave), and one button the open the door (which implicitly stops the microwave).
Today's modern microwaves ovens have _horrible_ UX. I talked to someone a few years ago who'd worked at an oven manufacturer and told me that UX people aren't involved in designing these ovens anymore; the process is entirely driven by marketing departments requiring more buttons, weird sliders, digital UIs and other ridiculous features - all to increase sales and convince people they need a new microwave when 99% of people really don't.
Yeah, the Evoluent Vertical Mouse gave me two working hands and a lucrative career. Pretty good value. Five Stars. Would buy again, in fact I have, so I have one for every place I use my laptop.
Outerknown Pacifica jacket. It's not often you see extraordinary looking fashion from the land of the stars and Stripes. Mostly I wear European brands. I remember falling in love with it and buying like the last one. Too bad that other than its amazing design it has little going for it. There were a bunch of loose threads on mine and it felt kind of itchy. But I still have it and when I wear it it often gets noticed. https://www.gearpatrol.com/style/a505232/outerknown-fall-201...
Sorry for the shameless plug but I have a problem with the Bialetti Brikka. I think it's great, but recently I did a full cleaning of all parts and since then it stopped working. Each time when the coffee is starting to boil up it spurts out of the hole in the lid and makes a huge mess. I checked everything but didn't find anything that might be causing this. Any ideas how to fix it? Thanks!
The Nack Pro utility knife[0][1] is a great tool; it's easy to operate one-handed and is virtually indestructible. The handle contains 30 blades in a rotating magazine; you change blades by rotating the base of the handle. I bought one in the early 2000s and it will probably last me the rest of my life.
Python is still the best-designed language I ever used, warts and all. It's often grouped with Javascript because they're both interpreted and "duck-typed", but imho the gap between them is huge.
Svelte is amazing for UI logic. It makes hard things feel easy and simple, and really hard things to feel possible.
QBasic was a horrible language, but its IDE (if you can call it that) was incredibly helpful for beginners. Maybe I'm nostalgic, but I never experienced such helpful hand-holding in programming ever since.
Sorry it's all about programming. Most real world design is either too trivial or too impossible to make an impression.
It feels pretty disingenuous to write off all real world design as trivial or impossible to make an impression. For instance, aluminum cans are a great example of quality design
I'll rephrase it - programming is the only field I know deeply enough to be deeply impressed by the accomplishments I'm seeing.
I'm sure I interact with well designed entities all the time, without even knowing it. One of the properties of really good design, imho, is that it's not meant to be easy to notice.
My dryer door. It opens both horizontally (easy to take things out) and vertically (eaay to put things in). And it does so in a totally natural way, based on where you naturally grab it when you're coming into to load or unload it.
The rest of the features of the dryer are fine - it has wifi that I don't use, but it dries the clothes the way it's supposed to. But it was totally worth it for this door...
I’m not really the type to fuss over wine glasses but I was gifted a set of Veuve Cliquot champagne flutes (similar to the glasses that come in this set[1]) and they really are beautiful. The shape of the glass makes the bubbles fizz to the top in this tiny perfect spiral in the center of the glass. You can tell they were designed by someone who cares about champagne and pays attention to its presentation.
The bicycle wheel. I can't believe 16 hours and nobody mentioned it (that I found anyway). You will find few things that serve their functions so well with such a minimum of material.
The General Public License. The foundation of Linux, Wikipedia, and more. Every company and government agency that took it on lost. It uses the rules it wants to subvert to subvert them.
The United States Constitution. So far it has withstood onslaughts and survived. We may be seeing the end of it, but people have said that before. It's inspired many others. The United States may be young, as cultures go, but our Constitution is, I believe, the oldest.
Goruck backpacks. They remain unbelievably comfortable with heavy loads, last forever and the clamshell design makes them easy to pack and more importantly find your stuff. The only backpacks I will buy anymore.
The gr2 and gr3 are excellent travel bags when you need something bigger. Only backpacks of that size that I have found comfortable to carry with just shoulder straps.
The EasyCard (悠遊卡) in Taiwan. It’s an IC card frequently added onto just about every other card, like bank cards, student ID, or you can just buy one at the convenience store. You can store value on it, use it to ride metro, trains, busses, ferries, rent a share bike, buy groceries, anything at convenience stores, pay for food at lots of places, badge into buildings, and I keep learning more things I can do with it. The card, of course, is just a card, but the network and the number of things you can use it for is amazing.
iPod touch: for $200 you get an extra screen that looks great on a device that's almost ethereally thin.
RayBan Stories glasses: for $299 you get functional wearable normal-appearing glasses that take pictures and make 30-second movies. Wonderfully easy to set up and use.
For working on bicycles, my favorite tool by far is the DT Swiss Spokey Pro spoke wrench [1]. Beautiful, ergonomic, pricey, and worth every penny. It completely transformed my attitude toward wheel building and truing. There are very few activities I do that are more meditative and satisfying than putting together a great wheel.
Pilot 402 stapler. Peavey T-60 electric guitar (especially the knobs -- Peavey is the only guitar company that really nailed good knob design). The Haskell language (not because it's perfect, but because it demonstrated what was possible). Rust as well, for the same reason. The modern steel-frame piano. The 1981 Mazda GLC. Suzuki Omnichord. The Moog 960 sequencer (which I've used in the form of its Behringer re-implementation for eurorack modular).
I had an OP-1 for a number of years but I could never progress beyond 2-4 bar loops. When I bought my Deluge I made a full track in my first two hours with it, and I was pretty proud of it. I own a number of groove boxes now, but have only ever managed to completed tracks on my Deluge.
Fujifilm Mirrorless Cameras (mine is 2nd gen XE2). First ever interchangeable camera I carry with me to all my family trips. Excellent build quality, physical controls, high quality lens options and not to mention insanely great jpegs straight out of the camera. I have taken so many wonderful pictures and captured so many precious moments of my family and kid, it is easily the best purchase I made by a long shot.
I lived in a brutalist concrete block and the interior, fixtures and general way of life (big communal garden, waste disposal rather than weekly bin collections, community spaces in the building etc) were far superior to anything I've ever experienced.
This mechanical pencil
https://uniballco.com/products/kuru-toga-elite-mechanical-pe...
It just feels so good to write with and it just doesn't break. I've used so many mechanical pencils and some feel better, but they have quality issues. This pencil just works.
The VapCap fromm DynaVap for vaping weed. I use a Ti-Woodie Cocobolo for several years now. it's very robust, very simple, easy to maintain and clean and hands down the best vaporizer for small doses, absolutely efficient. I use about 0.02g for a session. That wouldn't be possible with almost any other vaporizer without. and you get everything out of the weed. also it's reasonably priced.
Creates slices of cheese. Very cheap, very efficient at what it's supposed to do, and the more you use it the better it gets (it gets slightly more bent = more cheese per slice).
I second this. I picked up one second hand a while back. The placard indicates it was built in 1997. It needed a good cleaning and had clearly seen a lot of use, but is perfectly functional. The shower arm was showing slight signs of rust around the hole but getting replacement parts is trivial as the design hasn't changed in decades.
I like the wick-based kerosene stove the Chinese have recently invented. Pressure-based kerosene stoves can be really difficult with some old fuel you got from rusty barrel in Eskimo village. And they are dangerous too.
Wick-based works like a lamp, but with 8 wick. Very clever burning chamber makes it burn with blue flame. Probably works equally well with any kind of oil, example diesel.
Tonal <www.tonal.com> is amazing. It is the fitness system of my dreams. A resistance training setup with digital weights that hangs on the wall. It is filled with high quality content that showcases how to take full advantage of the tech. An ai combined with a well designed adjustment system and suddenly weight training is so fun and fluid I can do it every day.
I've been looking into a home gym and am torn between Tonal, Mirror and other offerings. Just curious if you've compared Tonal against Mirror, Peloton, etc?
I don't want to come off as aggressive or smug saying this, but I was considering buying one of these and my friend gave me a used book called solitary fitness and I got a nice muscular build without needing a gym. When the gyms closed because of the pandemic nothing changed for me, because you can't take whats in your noggin. Plus it's muuuch cheaper. Just tryin to save ya the trouble
I think my keyboard [1 - pic][2 - site] is almost perfect. It is not full-sized but I don't have to compromise on features etc., as with a simple Num Lock toggle I can move between having a numpad and having access to arrow keys and the 'home row'.
My singular gripe is the fact that I can't assign macros to any of the numpad keys - "Num 1" and "Num 3" do literally nothing when Num Lock is off which is a bit of a waste. Was hopeful that a firmware update would come along to help with this but AFAIK none has.
K2 Cinch bindings. If you snowboard with skiers, who are constantly complaining about the time it takes to do up your bindings after getting off the lift, these things are awesome.
I liked the HVAC controls of my 2005 Honda CR-V. Three big knobs: fan control, temperature, direction/mode. The temperature knob had one notch per °C. Simple and robust. All three were a pleasure to use even after 15 years, usually while keeping the eyes on the road. Oh and the vertical hand brake freed a lot of room between the front seats. No car is perfect of course.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=honda+cr-v+2005+dash&t=ffab&iar=im...
Wifi router WNR3500L with DD-WRT. True eventless running for 10 years. Cannot tell the same of my current setup. On PC the Debian GNU Linux distrib is pretty good for peace of mind.
I like Vim for its modal interface with old-school menus as a fallback and mplayer for its complete command line and keyboard controllability, and its effective OSD.
The Leatherman MUT. I've carried it clipped to my pocket every day for ten years now and it's still going strong. Carrying six two-ended driver bits, replaceable blades, and a hammer end has covered such an enormous percentage of my use cases it's unreal. Having a steel poking stick on you at all times is surprisingly useful.
I’m not a knife fetishist or anything, but a weird number of my favorite household items are edged things.
I grabbed a Global 12” chef’s knife after reading about it in Kitchen Confidential twenty-ish years ago, reminded of its superiority whenever I’m in a friend’s kitchen. I am sad to admit that IKEA makes a very decent clone, though.
An old nemesis gave me a Benchmade serrated knife with this miraculous spring-button release, absolute joy to handle.
I used to tie fishing flies in Montana as a kid; fly-tying scissors are fantastically sharp and useful for all kinds of micro projects. I often use them for extracting slivers that tweezers can’t reach. For macro work, nothing beats a pair of sewing shears; get a decent set and you’ll never touch a standard office or school scissor ever again.
Oxo scissors for the kitchen, though — the blades comes apart so you can clean the space between the hinge, lotta gross stuff will build up there in the kitchen.
The best bicycle lights ever made are the Sparse anti-theft lights. Unfortunately their business didn’t pan out, but you can find some remainders here and there on eBay.
The current best lights are the Knog cobblers. They have three drawbacks: dismal battery, usb-a, and easy to remove (thus easy to steal). I’m hoping that an inevitable “rev 2” will solve the first two problems.
I got to handle a Leica Q2 fixed lens camera today. I don’t know much but about photography, but the build quality of that thing… it puts my new 16” M1 MacBook Pro to shame.
Also the Microsoft Elite game controller is just bewilderingly nice to handle.
Have had the exact same Kershaw knife for about the same period of time. It’s my go-to for opening boxes and things around the house. It’s a great product.
- WD40
- Duct Tape
- zip ties
- Pilot's "Better Retractable" ballpoint pen
- Rhodia reverse book dot book note pad
- Thinkpad x220, x230, and x250
- MacBook pro 2015
- Nokia 5110 and 3310
- Henckels Professional Chef knife
- Emacs Orgmode
- Microsoft Paint
- Microsoft Excel
- Lego
- ipod shuffle 4
My most useful watch for daily life and my job (pilot) has been a Citizen Navihawk JY8035.
I have many styles between the Apple Watch and a Garmin Fenix to a 5$ Casio. The functionality is amazing both day and night.
Features I wanted:
Automatic time updates to the second
Analog face
Digital second readout
Solar
Visible at night
Secondary time without any button presses (I use UTC)
I list it because it is the best designed watch I’ve used. I’d use it over a breitling any day for functionality. However I would gladly give up one of those circular dials for a date readout. It takes one rotation to switch between the secondary time and the date currently.
I have had the blue angels version for many years. Now that I am old and need reading glasses, the watch has lost its appeal. I still keep it charged and ready to go, though.
You said things, so I am excluding software (like the original version of the Square web app)
JVC Flats
GBA SP (the pocket clamshell one)
Retro microwave with the original-ipod style single knob controls
More generically, forks
Grand Prize Winner:
wood Staunton chess set - beautiful, durable, affordable, practical. The piece design is exquisitely balanced between representation and abstraction
My first car was a 1985 300D Turbo Diesel. It spoiled me for all future cars. It drove wonderfully and had a ton of charm.
Not great in the cold, the controls were weird as only German cars can be, and acceleration was paltry by modern standards, but it was a tank that could seemingly drive forever. You still see some on the road.
Funny, I just used my Brikka coincidentally 5 min before reading this post. I think you are right. It's such a simple design and creates better espresso than most of the expensive machines that people use at home usually. Roughly made of 6 replaceable parts, backwards compatible with other Bialettis, no plastic capsule waste and easy to use.
Last year I picked up a HP Jornada 720 from Ebay out of curiosity. Considering its from the year 2000 it's impressive how much it can do. The build quality is sturdy, the keyboard is amazing and the OS feels more snappy than most of my current setups. I wish they would do a reboot with better screen and wifi. I'm not sure if it's "the best-designed" thing I have ever used, but it impressed me.
Almost android device once they became more powerful and had root, around after 2016 is when only root matters.
Full Linux CLI, all the game systems of the 90s playable, all the hardware devices of the 90s emulated but much better (the Pokédex app was very good, TI emulator, etc), OTG docking for wired devices or you can use BT for hardware. They can do 90% of what your current phone can do but everything is a bit slower and worst, so using it as a dedicated device for various purposes like a Linux man page app at your computer, a device to game on, attach a controller, spares your non easily replaceable battery, if you have an iPhone and didn’t jailbreak, having a handheld Linux computer in your pocket is convenient to easily use CLI tools and SSH/MOSH.
I hate how rooting became pretty much non-viable on Android. Losing OTA updates is a dealbreaker for me and all I really want is having an option to record my calls, which is legal in my country and often comes handy. It sounds like something a smartphone should definitelly be capable of by default.
It’s not default because of other countries. It’s still very viable, I never got a better experience than recently. Look up some roms on XDA for your phone!
Zeiss Axio Imager research grade upright light microscope with DIC, phase contrast, and fluorescence. It's easy to use without training if you've had at least a high school or college bio course with a real microscope. It's stable and sturdy, the lenses rotate into position with a lovely stop, the stage moves steadily, the lenses are fantastic. All the microscopy perks are there, but just the way the basics are assembled into an instrument make it a gem, from focusing the eyepieces, to focusing the image, centering the stage, aligning the beam in the optical axis, inserting prisms or filters. It reminds me of my 40 year old Husqvarna sewing machine, built solid and heavy and designed to be used with controls to be handled.
I'm voting for this as well. I think Apple released a very well-built machine at a reasonable price for a 1st generation. The M1 sips battery as it leaves the Intel processor it replaces in the dust. I'm really happy with the Air I bought and considering another 16 GB RAM Air instead of the new M1 Pro or Max.
I'm going to go a bit more low-tech than most, and say a simple wooden reamer. Nothing juices an orange better, and it's literally something you could whittle. I don't think the design has changed in centuries, and I don't think it can be improved.
Definitely an amazing piece of design. The electronics/digital part can be a little unreliable on heavily used machines, but the mechanical part is sublime and so robust.
Telegram. It's fast. It's snappy. It pushes the limits of what a messaging app can be. Every time I want to do something, I find the feature already there. And the performance of the app is consistent throughout all the platforms.
These are the best products I've used in the last decade:
1. 2013 Macbook - Still us it. Though bought the new m1 today.
2. Pelican Kayak - Special edition for costco (has detachable bags). Probably not the best kayak. But at $300, probably the funnest thing I've purchase per $ spent. I've explored so many places with it; beautiful, sublime places filled with birds and wildlife. Super fun. 70% of the world is water.
3. K2 Rollerblades - Hate running, but rollerblading feels like a superpower
4. Delonghi Expresso machine + Oat milk.
5. Sony FDRx3000. Like a Gopro, but better. Though now badly needs an update.
6. DJI drones.
Best deal ever: All you can jet pass from BluJet. Flew around the world for $600 for a month. (plus some minor fees).
A Huskee Cup. Low maintenance, made from coffee husk, great seal with the lid, and I love that it can hold hot coffee but not burn your hands due to the fins running along the body. Many local coffee shops also give me a discount on takeaway coffee if I bring my own takeaway cup, and some offer a Huskee Cup swap program where you can leave your dirty cup with them if you've been carrying it around after drinking your last coffee and get a clean one for your next order (personally I prefer to just keep my own though).
Zorijushi rice cooker. It can cook rice perfectly and can hold cooked rice for days.
Facebook portal. Yeah Facebook privacy and all that but that's a good product that allows me to call people without having to mess with the phone. The audio and video is super clear. I use it despite it's from Facebook.
Work sharp knife sharpener. It's superior to sharpening the my knives with the stone.
Apple airtags. I often forget where I put my keychain so this is really well executed. Apple airpods. They just work and they are nice enough.
Hakko soldering station. I don't know if the recent Chinese usbc ones are better but the hakko one I have work well enough for everything I want to do.
I'm surprised to see the Portal listed. We have one for letting the grandparents talk to the kids, and it is the most unreliable piece of technology I've owned. Constant connection issues and laggy UI.
I have owned both. AirTags are superior to Tile tags in several major ways: (1) the batteries are replaceable (although I understand newer Tile tags also have them); (2) when you get close enough, the Find My app can give you directions to the tag; and (3) there are far more iPhones/iPads out there than Tile users, so if you leave your tag somewhere, its location is much more likely to be found with pinpoint accuracy.
This $14.88 pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones from Walmart's ONN brand. You'd swear you spent $1000 on a pair of Grado cans. I don't know why they're so good, but they are. I bought 3 pair for backup in case the first fails. I'm convinced it's a COVID anomaly, like upscaling because you can't source cheaper parts, or something similarly unusual.
Hydro Flask pint glasses (sadly, now discontinued). The big win is that the insulation prevents condensation, which is a real annoyance in warm weather. The textured coating has a really nice feel to it, and I love the colors. Added bonus: they don't break when you drop them. They're twenty times the price of actual glass dollar store pint glasses, but worth it. Mine make me happy every time I use them. Sadly, they're now discontinued, but a couple of places have some (dwindling) stock. (Hydro Flask also makes a 16oz Tumbler, which I don't like as much.)
I really like my Microsoft Sculpt keyboard, and my Gameboy SP. I can't imagine ysing a different keyboard at this point. I do wish they'd properly iterate on it somehow, but it's great.
- Canon 5D classic. Fits my hand perfectly and the way colors are popping is something that i chase in photography to this day
- Older Intuos drawing tablets. Super sturdy, great experience to work with, and battery-less pen tech which for many years was offered only by Wacom products
- iPod Classic. Great interface idea with the touch circle, nice metal back.
- HHKB Keyboard. Something i use to this day and don't really plan to change, even as I'm strongly into custom keyboards as a hobby. The layout is just too perfect for programming, especially if you're used to Vim.
to this day when I upload any photo from it people are asking me what exactly did i do in post and are suprised when i honestly answers there's no post besides cropping the frame. To this day this is my fav camera.
I just got the new Thermapen One and used it yesterday for Thanksgiving dinner. Although it is a relatively small evolutionary step from the ThermoWorks Classic, it is still a great design.
I have been blown away by how reliable and convenient my Growler is (a Stanley Classic Easy-Pour Growler 64oz). I love carbonated water and work in an underground mine, I fill that thing full every day I work and bring it down. I never lose pressure (aside obviously from when it's opened), it stays cold seemingly indefinitely, the safety latch ensures the swinging lid hits nothing, and the thing is so solidly built it hasn't sustained a single nick despite falling on rock, etc. I'm a happy customer.
I have a John Deere riding mower where you have to raise the seat to get at the battery and other mechanical components.
To raise the seat, you have to swivel a tiny by stout metal latch that keeps the seat from bouncing around on it's hinges. The metal latch is held in it's position by gravity-- you have to use your finger to swivel it when you want the seat to move.
This is engineering at it's finest. Effective, durable, efficient in it's purpose. Timeless design as well-- I don't think it could be improved upon.
Epson EcoTank printer. We purchased ours in 2018 and haven't yet needed to refill the ink reservoirs (getting close though) and it comes with an extra refill set as well.
I replaced a really old Brother laser printer (10 years old?), thinking surely a state-of-the-art, high-end inkjet would outshine it. The ink does seem to last forever, but the print quality is so much worse than laser (for text/vector graphics at least). And I always have to run the "clean print heads" before I can get a clean print, since I only use it every month or so.
The “Rex” potato peeler. A perfect piece of design: ergonomic, solid, low-cost.
Small fact: the lateral “blade” to cut out the eyes of the potato is obtained from the removed central part of the main blade; some newer models have it extended from the grip…
For me it would be mostly tools I've used that come to mind.
In the random order I thought of them here are a few that stand out:
Miller 35s Mig Welder,
Victor Cutting Torch,
Mac Mini,
Vise Grips,
Suzuki Samurai 4x4,
1985 Toyota Pickup 4x4,
LED Flashlight,
Handheld compass,
Handheld Garmin GPS with Maps,
BBedit,
Beverly Shear,
Super Cat Alcohol Stove,
Raspberry Pi,
Lancaster Metal Shrinker/Stretcher.
Everything from Valco Instruments, where the founder and CEO (Stan Stearns [0]) launched using his own engineering designs and continued to maintain a prototyping bench indefinitely, long after he had numerous gifted engineers employed.
Not familiar with the hardware that Vici sells, but it sounds like you'd be describing HP test equipment if you were describing tools used by EEs and techs.
- my texas instruments ti-86 (still rocking strong since 1997)
- thinkpads: T42, X220, w530, T440... they're just great.
- my wenger/swissgear carbon backpack
EDIT: actually my regular bialetti moka is replacing an induction moka (still from bialetti) because the induction moka is hard to open (due to the round base).
Perfectly cooked eggs every single time, bought this in 2014 still going strong: KRUPS F23070 Egg Cooker with Water Level Indicator, 7-Eggs Capacity, White https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00005KIRS/
I've owned 2 pairs for 4 years total now and they just work. Very convenient to use and the design is great and they fit well into my ears.
Most inconvenience I've ever had was that they sometimes randomly don't connect once in a while but a simple disconnect/reconnect fixes that each time.
Honestly, android M was the peak of mobile experience and it has only degraded since.
The one plus 3t is the best phone I've ever used. Close second is the nexus 5.
It's a difficult question because you don't really think about things that work seamlessly in your life, you think of the ones that have UX sticking points.
*nix OS's and their terminal with various commands. The idea of pipe operator in terminal is just mind blowing, high praise to the guys who came up with this, they literally included FP concepts inside a terminal back in the late 60's.
My Stanley no. 5 handplane. It's so simple in design but absolutely brilliant at doing its job, so solidly built ( I got it second hand I believe it's at least 15 years old).
And there's just something about it's refined heft that makes it a pleasurable object to hold.
Sanrenmu clone of a kershaw Cryo with no spring loaded flipping (I consider it dangerous)
Nalgene water bottle, I wrapped mine in cloth tape and it serves as a foam roller
Concept 2 erg
Mealsquares
...weird pick: Core Transformation by Connierae Andreas. After experimenting with a dozen different therapy modalities it blew them all out of the water.
Been thinking about this a lot lately because I've been reading that Don Norman book, so I have several examples on the brain:
- 2000 Toyota MR2 Spyder. For me, it's the perfect example of explicitly choosing qualities to sacrifice (straight line speed, utility, interstate ride comfort, safety) to maximize the qualities you desire (very affordable, zippy, perfectly balanced, convertible, charming, fun beyond belief in the corners). Doing so allowed them to make a mid engine convertible sports car, using just use the engine from a Corolla, meaning repairs are cheap and rare (once you or the original owner solve the oil-burning issue the engines are known for). There's something so refreshing about design that doesn't try at all to appeal to anyone but the target market, and does everything possible to appeal to them in every way that matters.
- SSH. The moment I first used passwordless ssh to run commands on a game server across the room from me was the moment I truly fell in love with computing.
- Rust. I won't beat a dead horse, but the borrow checker was a real lightbulb moment for me in programming, and finally established an understanding of memory management and strong typing that has served me well even in other languages since.
- Thinkpad x220. The keyboard and the Linux compatibility alone were enough to convince me - the simple determined dependability has grown my love more and more over time.
- Nasal strips. Such a simple but clever little design to solve a host of pretty insidious air intake issues.
- Bass Ukulele. Being able to take a fully functional bass guitar on a plane as a carry-on is a transformative change. Helps too that they're fun as all heck to plunk on.
- Magic: The Gathering, especially the original Ravnica block. The beauty, intricacy, and depth of the design has brought me to tears more than once.
- Team Fortress 2. Same, minus the tears and plus a lot of hootin' and hollerin'.
- Kinesis Advantage2 keyboard. The physical design an instant halt to my wrist pain from typing all day. It being so configurable is a delightful plus.
- DrinkMate/SodaStream. Cheap, plentiful, easy carbonation in the home has helped keep this fella sober for years.
- Fellow gooseneck electric kettle. No frills, no gimmicks, just set the temperature, set the timer when you're ready, and pour.
- Loaded Bhangra longboard. Another example of sacrificing what you don't need (convenience, maneuverability) for what you want (immaculate balance and foot feel for dancing).
- Sony PSP. The degree to which it was ahead of its time still staggers me. I had an entire library of every NES and SNES games, plus a music player, plus an internet browser, all in my pocket in 2006. I still believe that if Sony had embraced instead of fought 3rd party applications, they would have taken over the world.
Honorable mentions: Marimekko backpack, Rotring mechanical pencils, the Shinkansen, the Taiwanese and Japanese traditional train systems, air-inflated blood flow restriction bands, vanilla rotation barbells, and the Kensington Expert Mouse with the ball and the 4 buttons.
Also many, many many many examples of evolved design in nature (birds, rats, succulents) and natural languages. I'm thinking in particular of the tone system of the Taiwanese dialect of Hokkien (there are obviously many others, that's just the one I know), which seems unintuitive to the extreme to an outsider but allows for an incredible density of information and for allowing you to know at any moment in a spoken sentence when a clause ends, without the need for a pause.
In its day I really liked Ableton Push (and 2 of course). The best hardware - software integration and experience I had ever tried. It allowed, at least in the "sketch" part, to start producing music by taking your eyes off the computer using software.
My Roku 3 is great. I bought it years ago and am still using it on my 1080p TVs. It just works, even behind a Pi-Hole ad blocking DNS server. It may crash once or twice a year (but then auto-reboot itself) and very rarely do I ever have to manually reboot it.
Various versions of the kindle. It's got excellent battery life, is easy to travel with, feels great in my hands, and is just what I want from an e-reader. Especially the new version w/ the metal body and yellow-back light.
You have clearly never tried to make a second cup - Allessi produce a far better designed coffee maker that shows a far more comprehensive design philosophy- I’ve been using mine for almost 40 yrs ( arghh so long!!!!)
RethinkDB. You copy the default configuration, restart the server, and you have a database supporting queries and real-time notifications, and a web interface to monitor and interact with the database.
I have a Nokia (now Withings) Steel HR watch. Very minimal design as far as smart watches go but is extremely reliable and the battery still lasts a month even after 5 years of ownership and daily use.
Loom is fantastic for quickly creating and sharing desktop screencasts. I use it frequently to demo features to clients, or make recordings to supplement a question or comment for colleagues.
I picked up this nice bluetooth keyboard the 3E neo recently. It's a japanese brand. It fold's into pocket size but feels so sturdy and the keys are the perfect size. So satisfying
Probably not, but maybe something out of the same factory. It can be bought on Amazon Japan.
This is their site:
product.3ec.jp/neo/
The IC-BK20se from iClever does look very similar and might be available, but no guarantees. I decided to go with the japanese product because the marketing material seemed more polished.
I had a look at the model with the trackpad but the keys were a little smaller. Bit too small.
The 2019 Volt dispensed with the five position climate control dial in favor of three toggle buttons, finally allowing me to select "everything" or "defrost and panel".
I really like my LG monitor controls. First, it it joystick that allows to select options really easily.Hundred times better than buttons. Second, sounds of turning on is very pleasant.
Good design? I have a brompton bicycle which certainly scores high, and also a strida bicycle which scores high also , even though quite different in design.
For me, it's undoubtedly my Macbook Air. Everything about it is near close to perfect. Apple really knows how to beautifully mesh hardware, and software.
Why is the bottom smooth and not flat like traditional octagon design? As far as I can tell that’s the only difference from this pot and their other ones.
Cassette player was just too finicky to fix and maintain. I would prefer the same device, but with SD-card recorder. But then alas, there is nothing to listen on SW-bands anymore.
BTW. I have now modified my Sony, the cassette player is totally removed, but in the cassette bay there is a loose wire with 3 mm plug, which has suitable dampening so that it acts like cellphone headset microphone input. I can now record programs with my cellphone.
pokemon-go, i mean it is a game, it doesn't really exist, but it does exist, because of the augmented reality thing. (playing it with my kids, don't really know if it is good for them, as it blurs the line between the real and the imaginary...)
Google maps on iPhone 1. Even with Edge network speeds and without proper GPS, an online map in your pocket with pinch zoom was simply a gamechanger. Everything was intuitive to use and the virtual keyboard worked better than anyone expected. Behind the scenes, I understand it was due to a predictive algorithm.
If you think about it, airplane toilets. Small and efficient. They tend to have a clear design cue to know how to push open the door. The door lock also turns on the light, so it’s almost impossible to accidentally leave the door unlocked.
Frequenter suitcases. Only available in Japan, they have completely silent, user-replaceable wheels. The one I have is exactly the largest possible carryon size for most airlines.
Anker 45W usb-c GaN charger. It’s not much bigger than a standard iPhone charger. Overall a bit smaller since actually, since the power blades fold inside which is a nice touch. I just travelled for a month. I brought only this charger, one lightning cable and one usb-c cable. It was good enough, with a little bit of foresight to swap things out, to keep my all of my work and personal stuff charged (2 MacBooks, 2 iPhones, Nintendo switch, mouse and usb-c shaver). Made possible by the standardization of usb-c. It’s a bit of a nightmare for all of the various incompatibilities for data transfer and video but for charging it’s great!
GPS in cars, in Japan. They are usually slow and have terrible UIs. But, they usually give a picture perfect view of which lane to be in, even showing you the highway signs exactly as they appear in reality. And even 10+ years ago, a highway radio system broadcasts traffic conditions and (I think) highway toll information to the GPS units.
3M command strip hooks. Essential for home renters and have a clear indication of how to remove them.
Ski boots with a walk mode. At the lower end they let you walk easier but may be a bit less stiff. At the high end, they let you choose between touring mode and downhill mode, barely have a stiffness penalty and as a bonus let you walk easier. If you have a budget of under $800 don’t even try high end ones on because they are impossible to not buy. These are interesting to research too because it turns out there are only a handful of high end ski boot designers in the world and some of them are on the ski boot forums to answer your questions.
My biggest one is AirTags. They seem to be completely unadvertised recently, probably because when they first came out there was discussion about privacy. Like AirPods, you just open them and they sync and start working.
They are cheap for what they are, I got 8 of them and put one in every bag I use. I’m a forgetful person and have left many things behind over the years.
So far I’ve conveniently been able to find stuff I’ve left in another room, which is nice and once was alerted when I left my suitcase in one of the main stations in Paris. I got the alert that I left it behind well before I got on my train without it.
When I demo them to people, they are usually blown away when they realize they work anywhere there is an iPhone nearby. Not only near my iPhone.
I also put one in expensive shipped items for work. Has been great to be able to see where stuff is. It works reliable to things show up on the tarmac as soon as a cargo flight lands.
I cancelled netflix more than a year ago, maybe something changed since then.
But at the time I’d list it as an example of user hostile UI. It had lots of unpredictability (few fixed UI elements). Also: autoplay and a search that never says if an item is not there but tries to offer alternatives.
I disliked it so much that whenever I wanted to watch something on netflix, I’d first check whether they actually have it and I used a different tool for that.
I imagine the design challenge that Netflix faces is that they cannot keep movies forever due to publisher prices being too high, and customers are always looking for something new to watch.
Thus they have to try to make the most out of recommendations, and try to maintain a bit of an illusion that their current catalogue is bigger than it actually is.
For the keyboard, why this one specifically? A k400 is perfect for a home theater pc. Sometimes it is nice to have a trackpad at work and switch off using a mouse
I miss rotation switch on iPad. It's the best way to change orientation on tablet. Enabling/disabling auto rotation in control center is horrible UI. What I should do is open, enable, close, rotate, open, disable, close. Android's rotation icon when rotated is acceptable.
The kettle and green cutting board fit inside the main setup (pots) so it takes up no extra space and you can stuff a couple of knives, forks and spoons inside the setup as well.
You can comfortably cook for two with this so its weight between two backpackers with other equipment like tent is not that heavy!
I got the Stainless Ally combo because you need to clean it and stainless cleans easily with a simple metal scourer, you can even get black soot off it easily so you cant ruin it like you can with non-stick coated camping stoves.
You can run it on pure alcohol, methylated spirits, petrol (gasoline) and other flammable liquids, although Meths is recommended and with a push even small twigs, branches and kindling if you run out of flammable liquids.
You can also get a pressurised gas burner for it as well which I dont have so cant comment on.
I've cooked for 2 near Ben Macdui wild camping on the Cairngorm plateau in a few feet of snow one Easter when the UK was getting hit with plenty of snow, a Met Office amber alert gale force storm not far from The Devils kitchen, Snowdonia another time I like to test things to destruction and this is one tool which gets my recommendation!
Plenty of decent evening meals, none of this freeze dried just add water nonsense and a decent cooked breakfast in the mornings, namely sausages, bacon, hash browns, baked beans, black pudding and eggs with HP Brown Sauce. Most of the weight in my rucksack when I go wild camping is good food!
The two pots are slightly different sizes so they fit inside each other russian doll like one way but the other way they stack on top of each other so with the green cutting board for a pot lid, you can keep cooked food warm/hot whilst cooking the rest of a meal up. Yes you may be swapping two stacked pots with the frying pan periodically if you want to do a fryup for breakfast or steak, mash and veg for an evening meal, but if you like cooking thats part of the challenge of having decent food in the most remote inhospitable parts of the world.
Its very bash proof as well, I've seen state of the pressurised gas burners break out of the box on expeditions whilst being pumped where as the Trangia has no moving parts to break, its the best designed product for me because of its simplicity and ruggedness. You could chuck your rucksac down the side of a mountain and it would still work!
A little tip, if you like a Full English breakfast dont take a bottle of cooking oil, take some hard solid blocks of pure saturated fat aka beef dripping. It doesnt melt except in the hottest of environments so its still solid during a British summer and you wont risk a flimsy bottle of cooking oil splitting inside your rucksack and you dont have to have the weight of a ruggedised bottle to store cooking oil inside your rucksack. Every good chef knows, is where the flavour comes from whilst giving you the calories to do some very nice expeditions.
When camping in the snow when its below freezing, take a couple of fuel bottles as you will burn through more fuel especially if the only water around you is melting snow.
All in all it gets my top marks, best designed, could not recommend it enough prize, design award, etc etc every time.
Except the fuel issue is annoying. Alcohol is bloody stupid fuel in the long run. It vaporizer easily and just disappears. And does not burn at all in -30C, That is why I modified my Trangia to accept Primus multifuel burner. Except in Chile it totally stopped working. because the local kerosine was so low quality.
I was finally happy, when AliBaba invented cheap Wick-based burner. It burns just about anything oily, from Diesel to Lamp paraffin. I modified it to accept Trangia top and kettles, maintaining good wind protection and flame shield. However infamous Polar Explorer explorer Alex Hibbert was not impressed: https://youtu.be/FU0cPkkjPkk
This may sound silly, but:
- my hacked iPad. It's first generation, original software was stupid, but with "RedSn0w" and all of Freeman's Cydia apps, it has turned into my favourite device. It has a full, Linux-like file system, I can have all sorts of material on it, SSH works fine, can use it as a controller, and I can still browse (some) internet sites. (Using it to write this). I have Macbook Pro, a bunch of Linux boxes, couple of nice Acer laptops, but this ancient iPad is so very well made, and all the Cydia stuff just works. My partner has a modern iPhone, but I like this old iPad, where each key on the screen is half-an-inch across!
- my AR-15. AK's are prohibited where I live (and so now is my AR), but folks need to understand what a fine triumph in modular design and excellent ergonomics, the American-designed AR-15 rifle really is. Early rifle designs were just not good - soldiers would pull the trigger, and be blinded as the breech blew up in their face. The AR is light, lethal, and reliable. Like most good design, it is the result of continuous improvements over a long time span.
- The Piper PA-28 "Warrior" general aviation light aircraft. This is just an amazingly successful design effort. Everything in aircraft design is a series of trade-offs, weight, strength, durability, reliability, ease-of-use, safety, complexity, simplicity, and so on. I did all my fight training as a young fellow on Cessna 172's, which are also excellent examples of very good design. But the 172 feels like what it is, to fly - a solid, simple workhorse. The PA-28, with a 160 or 180 hp engine, manages to feel quite different - like being able to drive a Camaro around in the sky. It's not a Ferrari, but it had several fine design features that made it feel like a much more substantial and flyable aircraft, especially for a kid learning to fly. It was real fun. The wings were tapered. Compared to older "Cherokee" models, which did not have tapered wings, the difference was significant. It is, of course, a low-wing aircraft. This makes for a much more attractive flying experience - you are driving a platform, not hanging from a wing, in a little box. And this aircraft has a stabilator, instead of a tail-plane and an elevator. On the Piper, as you pull and push the control wheel, the whole rear wing tilts up and down. This is just a genius design feature, and gives the aircraft a nice lively feel, even if you are flying the cheapest, entry-level version, which does not have retractable gear. (If renting at a flying club, you probably won't have any retractables - since some student might forget to drop the gear, and may well wipe out the aircraft.) Our club had one Warrior, and it was a very big treat, when I could book it and take it away up north, for a weekend. The little design genius features, made it very fun to fly. I recall dropping the flaps involved pulling on a lever, much like a sports-car emergency brake. (On the Cessna, to put down flaps, you throw a switch on the panel, and listen for the servo-motors). But on the Piper, you pull on this lever, and feel the wind on the flaps, as you pull them down. You literally could feel the air, as you flew thru it. And with those tapered wings, and the rear stabilator, you could drop a wing and dive down quick, and the whole experience was wonderful, because of these specific design improvements over the old square ( non-tapered) wings of the older "Cherokee" models.
- lastly, (call me crazy, if you must), the original APL computer language, which I learned when very young, because it was the only interactive environment available. APL was (is) very different, but it turned out to be an amazingly useful languange and environment to learn. I met Ken Iverson (the inventor author of APL), and he and I did not see eye-to-eye on things. But APL was a work of genius. APL was very popular inside IBM in the early days, and the first IBM P/C was actually pre-dated by an IBM Personal Computer that ran APL, called the SCAMP, which came out in 1973, if I remember correctly. I still use APL applications, and we use them, because they make us money. And that is always important in any product design... :)
When I was a kid, the tub in the bathroom had two knobs to control the faucet and shower: one marked with a red H, one marked with a blue C. Easy to understand, consistent with the faucets in the kitchen and bathroom sinks, easy to control. There was the little thing to pull up and redirect the flow from the faucet to the showerhead.
Every tub/shower fixture in the apartments I've lived in and all the hotels I've visited since has been different. They have all replaced this simple arrangement with some godawful thing that tries to combine the two variables of "amount of hot water" and "amount of cold water" into one knob/lever/dial/whatever. Usually with absolutely no markings. It takes an annoying amount of time to figure these out the first time and sometimes they remain annoying forever - the one in my current apartment is mounted at a weird angle, so "off" is slightly to the right of pointing the handle straight down; maximum hot water is somewhere below pointing straight right, and pointing straight right is cold. Pointing straight down is an annoying, chilly trickle.
Every time I take a shower I miss the simplicity of two knobs, clearly marked.
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The humble handlebar-mounted bicycle gear shift. So much more pleasant than reaching down to a little lever mounted on the frame like I did before these became standard on even the cheapest bikes. Just move my hand over on the handlebar a little, grab, and twist: there's a little resistance, then a distinct click as it moves to the next spot, which changes the tension in the cable and makes the derailleur do its job of moving the chain from one gear to another. It is not perfect, but its failure modes are much more prone to "a little out of alignment and now you skip over a gear or two in the middle" than "it's super easy to shift the chain off the gears entirely". People have come up with other ways to alter the gear ratio between the crank and the wheel but they are all much more complex and power-hungry than the grip-shifter and derailleur combination.
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If you want a specific brand and model of thing, my Tom Binh "Pilot" bag is really nice. Durable, reasonably cute, carries my computer and everything I need for a day going out to cafes to work, with enough room for a change of clothes or two if I stuff it tightly. Has some nice touches like a pocket in the center with a drain hole for a water bottle or a compact umbrella, and a pocket in the back that unzips on the bottom so you can empty it and slide it over the extended handle of your big rolling bag when traveling. I've had it for like half a decade and it's been my main bag for a lot of that time. https://www.tombihn.com/collections/travel-bags/products/pil...
I dunno, I really want as little electronics on my bike as possible. Riding home with no shifting capacity because I let the derailleur run out of power sounds a lot shittier than keeping to back roads because my lights ran out.
Part of why I think the existing shifter setup is great design is because it’s purely mechanical. And it’s cheap enough to come standard on the cheap $300 bike I bang around town on, without any worries about it looking like something worth stealing.
It was the perfect design, nothing could be added nor taken away to make it better.
But apple being Apple they redesigned it to be crap then discontinued it.
On the topic of designing great things and Apple …. Can I say that I hate Apples “minimalism above all else” approach to design. For example I want computers with lots of ports - what’s the point in buying a minimal Apple computer only to instantly plug it into another box that provides the basic ports I need for keyboard mouse external disks and camera? Somehow though the designers at Apple think this is the optimum design. I do acknowledge recent Macs bring ports back but still not enough.
I also hate it that Apple got rid of the standard headphone jack - for gods sake why? Answer: Apple designers.
I loved the original iPod Shuffle - the one that looked like spearmint pack of gum. This may or may not be what you're referring to, but to me it was Perfect; the only Apple product I've truly enjoyed without the 5-25% incredible frustration I typically hit when I stretch my usage of any other Apple product. It felt like Apple philosophy distilled - beautiful, minimalistic and stylish but usable and useful too, even well priced and reliable. In fact I still have mine!
The following generations lost the allure somehow. Smaller, but that smaller form factor didn't actually work for me; it did not fit in my hand or in my pocket as nicely, you now needed a cable to charge it (how very Un-Apple in theory, how very Apple in practice!).
But the first one was just perfection. I got a couple of other MP3 players since in as similar format as I could find, both no-name clones and big-name versions, but nope, none of them were as smooth and easy.
P.S. Do *NOT* get me started on loss of 3.5mm port ;-<
I was skeptical, I liked my ports. Now I plug in all my devices at once, through a dongle. I like that a lot. It works well for how I work: either at my desk, with everything plugged in, or away from my desk with nothing plugged in.
They probably should've moved the ports to the power brick. That would've been ideal.
They did this for the new iMac, albeit only the ethernet port. It's the one that makes the most sense and doesn't appear to result in a larger brick, which I imagine would be considered a requirement by Apple.
I believe there's some third-party hubs available that provide power and ports galore via one or two thunderbolt cables, but you're looking at at least $200.
Power brick as cable hub is a really interesting idea. Feels like you'd have to move away from "brick plugs directly into the wall" to make it work though - imagine sitting in a cafe with your power plug six feet away, and wanting to use both that and some other device.
There's no such thing, the Shuffle and Mini were separate models.
The Shuffle was the size of a USB drive, used solid state storage, and had no screen, the Mini was the one with the first touch Click Wheel and metallic colour choices, and used a 4GB spinning hard drive.
HP 8566B spectrum analyzer and 8510C network analyzer. HP RPN calculators. Really any late 80’s and early 90’s HP test equipment. Built like tanks and designed by engineers for engineers.
Hakko 950 soldering iron. It's an analog dial version of an extremely awful digital interface. It's small and compact so takes up little desk space, heats up fast, has incredibly stable heat and adjustments don't require looking at what your hand is doing.
SawStop table saw. It‘a a great saw in general, but what absolutely blew me away was the assembly. Extremely well thought out, from the order in which boxes of parts are opened, to the instructions, to the assembly procedure itself. I could not come up with a single improvement.
The only affordance of such a plate is its push-ability, and the fact that someone actively installed a metal plate (instead of just relying on the door's natural flatness), as well as its location at the point of maximum leverage (all the way to the right of the door, in the door's vertical center), is a clear signifier for such push-ability.
Not only that, but it does its job without offering any other confusing affordances (such as a vertical handle which is also technically pushable, but which many would interpret as being meant to be pulled).
Whenever I need a relatable, succinct example of affordances and signifiers for my engineering comrades, I turn to this one. Anyone interested in design is doing themselves a dis-service by not reading Don Norman's classic.