My favourite Canadian bank, PC Financial added a brilliantly designed feature to their ATMs: No more addition mistakes. Enter checks one at a time, and let the ATM do the math. So smart! Why didn’t anyone think of that before? Wells Fargo does this now, too — they scan the checks and read the amount …
Continue reading “Design roundup: PC Financial, Canada Post”
This is from my American Express blue online statement. Apparently "24, 25, 26, 25" is descending order. Sigh.
My new Trek bike came with not one, not two, but three warning stickers. They difficult to read, state only the obvious, help no one, and leave an annoying, gooey mess when you remove them. I wonder if bikes in other countries have to be covered with crap like this.
Paris is about to get what could be the world’s largest Yellow Bike Program(ish): On July 15, the day after Bastille Day, Parisians will wake up to discover thousands of low-cost rental bikes at hundreds of high-tech bicycle stations scattered throughout the city, an ambitious program to cut traffic, reduce pollution, improve parking and enhance …
Continue reading “Ladies and gentlemen, start your bicycles”
In the Seattle Times, Floyd McKay laments the unfriendly US border: In a reputable international survey, 39 percent said the U.S. was the world’s worst in terms of being traveler-friendly, including document processing and “having immigration officials who are respectful toward foreign visitors.” The Middle East and South Asia were “next worst,” at 16 percent. …
Continue reading “US border crossings worse than middle east”
Jakob Nielsen, look out. Parker Mitchell has a few things to say about the importance of understanding user needs: In particular, we will propose that the efforts of people in this room ensure that technology development efforts better incorporate the functional, economic and social/culture realities of prospective users. In my case the “users†are rural …
Wendy Seltzer, a former EFF attorney and current professor at Brooklyn Law School, posted a clip of the NFL’s copyright notice to YouTube as an example of fair use. Pursuant to the DMCA, the NFL’s bots find the clip and send YouTube a takedown notice. Wendy then sent a counter-notification and YouTube reposted the clip. …
Hello, BPW? 1995 called. It wants its web site back.
Here’s a feature suggestion: I’d like the ability to pause and resume a post on Craigslist. Here’s the scenario: I post an ad in free stuff I get 10 responses immediately I want to stop getting responses until I can deal with the ones I’ve already received If I delete the ad, I can’t repost …
Continue reading “Craigslist suggestion: pause and resume listings”
I wrote one of these for Mailman last fall, and finally got around to putting together a quick script to back up your MySQL databases. It optimizes and repairs all of your tables, then creates a directory for today, dumps each database into a SQL file and zips it up, leaving you with a directory …