Otaku No Zoku

I just got done watching a “Sex in the City” episode.

Okay, I’m addicted to it, I admit it.

However, one thing struck me, when Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carre Bradshaw is using her Apple laptop, why doesn’t the Apple logo flip around to be the right way up?

Yes, I’m sure Apple could print the logo the other way round so that it is upside down to the owner of the laptop when they look at it closed up, but it would be so much cooler if it would automatically flip around when you open up the screen.

A perfect use for eInk.

Why don’t modern dishwashers know whether the dishes inside are clean or dirty? Why can’t a dishwasher indicate clean dish status on the front panel so that your spouse, or room-mate doesn’t have to ask?

You could use a variety of methods to determine dish cleanliness.

The simplest, though most error prone, would be to detect whether the door has been opened at least once since the dishwasher was last run. Of course, if someone goes in to just get out a clean mug, then you have a false negative, the dishwasher detects the door has been opened and so now indicates that the still clean dishes will need cleaning.

The other solution is the dishwasher knows the “dry weight” of being empty, or mostly empty. The washer can detect how many dishes, by weight, have been removed, and when it detects that the weight has begun to increase, the machine could be reasonably assured you are now loading dirty dishes in to it.

Very few people I can think of would take out clean dishes and then load them back in again. You might if a few did not get clean the first time through, but generally you would have unloaded the dishwasher first, realised some were dirty, perhaps hand rinsed off the dirt, and reloaded those specific items back in to the washer.

A personal friend of mine, George Moudry, has been tinkering with automated code conversion for a year or two now and has finally come up with something that actually appears to be approaching usable functionality. The Code2Code website takes regular C++ code and converts it to C#. The software is not yet Beta, and only the first version so don’t expect too much out of it but it is certainly interesting to see what kind of results the converter produces based on code you feed it. Try it out as George is looking for feedback on what areas to improve it.

Ten Changes To iTunes

1. The PC port is atrocious. It is sluggish at best, and at its worst “like molasses in a Montana winter.” And it has been getting worse.
2. Reduce the amount of memory it uses. Hundreds of megabytes is ridiculous and whilst Apple have improved it with each version, it still takes up almost 200 megabytes on my current music collection.
3. Make it shut down faster. Saving the XML database at program exit takes several minutes. Use a real database to store all of the data. When iTunes crashes any changes you have made to your library since you last exited are gone forever.
4. The user interface or application code was never designed, at least on the PC, to handle 100,000 audio tracks. Trust me, I know this, I’ve tried it out and it is clunky at best.
5. The user interface needs to have “Don’t ever play this flag.” Trust me, I never, ever want to listen to any one of the fifteen variations of “Do you really want to hurt me?” that are on the various 80’s compilation CDs.
6. More granularity on “favourites” including a “thumbs down”
7. Better management of “dead tracks” and “duplicate tracks” and new tracks added to the library.
8. Share your database between multiple computers, especially important when trying to synchronize my laptops and workstations.
9. Make it smarter about handling multiple iPods.
10. Put some decent tag and rename functionality in to the application rather than the half-arsed interface it currently has.

Microsoft, stop attempting to make an inferior version of iTunes. I didn’t think it was possible but you achieved it with the latest version of Media Player.

Won’t somebody please innovate in their user interfaces and study the end-user’s “work flow” rather than the competition’s application?

iTunes. It’s a piece of crap. Unfortunately it is the best piece of crap available.