I should have done this long ago, but just got the bee stuck in my bonnet. When I first decided to attempt to support desktop and handheld browsers without duplicating content or using browser sniffing, […]
Category: Usability
The Trouble With USB Universal Charging
The recent announcement by the GSMA of broad support behind a USB-based universal mobile phone charging system raises hope of a universal charging solution, but also raises many problems that few have discussed. The first […]
W3C mobileOK hurts interoperability
I guess this is what happens when I stop involving myself in the development of Web standards. Am I the only one on the planet that understands content negotiation and how important it is to […]
Self-Documentation 001
It’s Monday, so I spent the usual 4:30 pm to 11:30 pm at the Red Cross—working on the comm van before and after the monthly disaster services meeting, discovering yet another reason why it needs […]
Laird Destroys Cushcraft
I’m trying to save Fridays for writing about Fabulous things, instead of Frustrating things, but an experience I just had necessitates postponing my daily themes a bit. At the Burlingame Red Cross office I’ve been […]
Illustrator Rant: Filled Up
I’ve spent another miserable couple of hours trying to figure out how to get Illustrator to do something simple–fill a region with a color. Something I’ve been able to do with AutoCAD since last century. […]
Illustrator Deserves Zero Stars
It started with a simple goal–to add another symbol to the family of radio repeater symbols I’m designing. But it ended in a wild goose chase through Wikipedia, geometry, and Excel’s function library. My current […]
RJ Connectors: Registered Jack=Registered Junk
I just spent a couple of hours trying to rig up a set of cables to connect my sound mixing board to a 4-way RJ-45 switch box, so I could switch my nice Heil microphone […]
ATMs Have the Wrong Number
I have long been aware that there were different telephone keypad layouts that put letters on different number buttons, but it was only this past week that I really started researching this topic in detail. […]
AT&T Wireless 411—Text Messages Now Useless
I occasionally use the expensive 411 service from AT&TᾹmainly when I need a number quickly, and don’t have time to search for the number via WAP. It used to be that the text messages would […]