Jim McDonnell

Teacher
East Sussex

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  • 16 Comments
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  • "Seems to me, for humanoid bots to interact with humans there will need to be wholesale changes to H&S legislation too. Visit anywhere where industrial robots work (oranges and lemons, I know, but a not-totally-invalid comparison) and you're kept outside a cage, covered in hi-vis and wearing a hard hat. So now suddenly we'll be allowed within touching distance of similarly articulated and still pretty powerful machinery with all the gappy, finger-trappy  risks as well as software 'episodes' I can imagine happening inevitably, as with any computer system. Reporting always focuses on the hardware and their ever-closer resemblance to the human form, but there's going to have to be a huge swath of ancillary 'soft' change to enable close-quarter interaction between hardware and wetware, surely?"
    on: Interacting With Figure's Surprisingly Convincing AI-Driven Humanoid Robot
  • "A cursory search for 'volume level icon' seems to favour quiet-loud L-R over R-L..."
    on: FiiO Gets User Interfaces Both Right and Wrong
  • "While I appreciate his contributions to advances in tent manufacture etc, I call this one a miss. It's aesthetically unappealing (ymmv), and unless you pony up the extra 175 clams for the fly sheet, would you feel secure in this in windy weather? I'm out."
    on: Outside-the-Box Thinking: Helinox's Cot Tent
  • "Interesting, - on the left and + on the right makes perfect sense to me; I intuitively feel that volume goes from quiet to louder left to right, as with the L-R direction we read. Maybe I'm the one out of step here! The volume buttons on my tablet are laid out as you suggest, and they confuse me every time."
    on: FiiO Gets User Interfaces Both Right and Wrong
  • "Not even a mention of nurses' watches, which have been around for decades?They go for function over form, but IMHO are better than the dreadful faux-rugged aesthetic shown here."
    on: Alternative Form Factors: Non-Wrist-Based Watches
  • "These are crazy. Wasteful, unnecessary, ostentatious, gimmicky and more. And the 15-year-old inside me is screaming "I want one!" at the top of his lungs. Clearly I'm never getting the jetpack I was promised the 21st century would bring me, but this would take the sting out of that loss."
    on: Over-the-Top, Powered "Computer Cockpits"
  • "Never seen it done with a tin can (I hope they risk-assessed those sharp edges!), but have folded a paper one since I was v young: https://www.instructables.com/Circular-Paper-Airplane/"
    on: Toy Design: The Wing Ball, an Oddly-Shaped Alternative to the Nerf Football
  • "I'm baffled as to why this christmas-cracker junk is being given space here. It's not new, well-made, well-designed; is it an example of anti-design?"
    on: A Combination Thermometer/Compass/Carabiner
  • "Only ships within the USA. Shame, I'd have had this right away for my design teaching. Surely a deck of cards doesn't seem like it would be hugely problematic to post abroad?"
    on: This Card Game Helps You Turn Bad Ideas Into Better Ones
  • "Agreed - the inner material of the 'cup' seems to be wood, not a great material for suction. It looks like a spacer/washer to stop the thin metal base being deformed by the screws used to fix it to whatever surface it goes on... I'm unconvinced of the accuracy of most of the speculative waffle in the video. I can't see much compelling evidence of its 'travel' credentials."
    on: Industrial Design from the 1800s: This Portable Victorian Travel Light
  • "This is all over the web right now, but still no actual video of anyone actually riding it. So is it just sculpture? Ornament?  If it's not rideable, what's the point - other than an exercise in sci-fi design aesthetic, what's it adding to the motorcycle world?"
    on: Yamaha's Self-Balancing Motorcycle Seeks to Push Human-Machine Interface
  • "Anyone care to enlighten me as to why being square would speed up boiling? I can't work that out at all. I mean, I quite like the thing in itself, but that sounds a bit like snake oil sales pitch to me..."
    on: A Square Kettle for Camping
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