In Tokyo

A quick update: I haven’t posted anything recently, as I’ve been preparing for a whirlwind tour of our foreign offices. I am in Tokyo today, and will see Beijing, Bangalore and Tel Aviv over the next couple of weeks. Regular posting will resume in early August!

Fun fact of the day: they have noodle joints here where you place your order from a vending machine. The process of choosing a random meal based on Japanese characters and a number is a bit like “breakfast roulette”, though most of us lucked out and got something tasty.

Some creative music videos

I rarely post music videos, but I collected a few creative ones: Justice’s Dance, Shit Disco’s OK, and finally Max Tyrie’s hand made Modest Mouse video:

The technology of the $100 laptop

Signal vs. Noise posts about the technology of the $100 laptop.

You can pour water on the keyboard…You can dip the base into a bathtub. You can carry it the rain. It’s more robust than your normal laptop. It doesn’t even have holes in the side of it. If you look at it: dirt, sand, I mean, there’s no place for it to go into the machine.

I got a chance to play with one of these the other day. The hardware is indeed very nice, with a distinctive design and a very solid feel. Unfortunately the software is horribly unintuitive. Maybe it’s still in development, maybe I didn’t spend enough time with it, or maybe I’m just too used to regular interface paradigms. My guess is that it’s a consequence of trying to reinvent the wheel, in the process disregarding decades of accumulated user experience knowledge.

I’ve posted about the $100 laptop before.

Feature creep

Surowiecki on feature creep:

The fact that buyers want bells and whistles but users want something clear and simple creates a peculiar problem for companies. A product that doesn’t have enough features may fail to catch our eye in the store. [...] But a product with too many features is likely to annoy consumers and generate bad word of mouth, as BMW’s original iDrive system did.

Nathan Sawaya lego sculptures

I love Nathan Sawaya’s lego sculptures. Make sure you go through the gallery, and check out Nathan’s site for many more. When I was a kid, I wanted to build lego’s for a living — here’s someone who’s actually pulling it off!