Paul Irish

There were over 200 winners of BusinessWeek's Design Awards. Here are the best.

The Muwi innovation lawn mower takes grass cuttings and turns them into something fun. The blocks can become balls for children to play with or be combined to make a chair or anything else you can think of.

Read more…

Paul Irish hmm!

In the 10 years that I've seen dialogs like these, I've always clicked "No" or "Restart Later" and the software ALWAYS works. The software installs indicate it's mandatory, but never is it functionally mandatory. Not TortoiseSVN, ISO mounting utilities, not even Microsoft Office; it always works without a reboot.

So why is this pattern so widely adopted?

Paul Irish hmm!

paullll irish: how can i learn regular expressions?
paullll irish: best
designgods: Hmmm..
designgods: you're looking to learn ruby regex, I assume?
designgods: I learned from a Perl book, then moved to the Perldoc regex references. Since Ruby shares an almost identical syntax, that should be a good start. If you have perl installed on your machine follow examples in a terminal or run a .pl file to get the hang of it.
designgods: move up to larger bodies of text… find some READMEs and see what you can parse out.
designgods: finally, once you've gotten a good feeling, move to the ruby regex docs as well as other illustrative resources (Why's (poignant) Guide was a great overview, and I think he goes into regex a bit)
paullll irish: :D
paullll irish: DONE! thank you!

Paul Irish hmm!

Myspace just added a feature where their musician's flash player stays paused if you're not currently looking at it.
Now you wont hear seven simultaneous songs if you throw open a bunch of profiles in tabs.
Thanks!

Paul Irish hmm!

every time i see your ugly little face pop up in my system tray,
i know who to blame for my browser hanging for the past 20 seconds.
how come you are so huge and yet do so little?
can you suck less?

ps. let's see if Apollo can help rid the web of you.

Paul Irish hmm!

i do.

Paul Irish hmm!

I think streaming is going to grow… even amongst the illicit media scene.

I think my viewing habits are somewhat normal for the standard p2p fiend. I download a movie from bittorrent, watch it once, then either save it to watch again (I rarely do), or delete it off my system.
From a data perspective, that seems pretty inefficient.

A better idea, I believe…
Develop a centralized data bank with a number of movies, tv shows and assorted media. Whenever I want, I can stream that media to my computer and watch it there. That IP system would use Peercast or some sort of bittorrent-powered distribution system to maximize performance as it scales. Of course, I still want the ability to download a file, in case I want to view it offline.
This system should allow me to maintain my own file system and IA. I don't need other people's media mixed in with "mine", though I sometimes will want to browse them. I haven't yet seen a UI that offers this mine/everyone toggle inside a filesystem, but it's completely achievable.

In addition to benefiting from having a larger potential library to use, you also shift legal responsibility, which is a nice perk, too.

I'd expect such a service to have some sort of cost associated, but given the savings of hard drive expenses, that cost is quickly justified.

Paul Irish hmm!

Visited Last.tv just now, which looks at your preferences on last.fm and tries to match videos on youtube that you might like.

What video do they serve me?
The Cuizinier video that I took at a show in Boston last year.

Obv.

Paul Irish hmm!

My work has a really awesome single serving coffee maker. And although I can get any number of different beverages on demand, I feel a little guilty because the system creates a huge amount of waste. Each packet is just discarded after use. I saw nothing on the system about recycling so I emailed the company.

Here is their absurdly thorough response:

Thank you for contacting FLAVIA Beverage Systems with your inquiry. We appreciate hearing from you and will be happy to address your concern.

Recycling of filterpacks is difficult because of the composite structure necessary to achieve the oxygen protection designed to ensure every cup of coffee is fresh when brewed. There is a common misconception that a sealed plastic container or bag is "air tight". Products like coffee are very oxygen sensitive and require much higher protection than can be achieved with simple materials. The thickness of our pack is less than one tenth of one millimetre. To achieve the same oxygen barrier with material used in freezer bags for example would require a bag 100 millimetres thick, about the width of the average hand.

It is technically possible to separate the FLAVIA waste into its component parts but this requires very specialised equipment. There is no infrastructure available at present to make this approach feasible even if it were sensible to do this with respect to the resources required versus what can be recovered.

We therefore believe the best disposal route for FLAVIA waste is through incineration with energy recovery. We have designed our materials to be extremely low in materials that cause concern in incineration and as a result used packs burn cleanly in modern incinerators.

Where there are no incineration facilities then remaining materials typically go to landfill. Because the FLAVIA packs are made from very stable materials, used packs are safe to dispose of in landfill without producing harmful emissions and breakdown products.

We are often asked about biodegradable packaging. At present the technology does not exist to make a FLAVIA pack from biodegradable materials that could be safely composted for instance. We keep this under constant review and have experimented with many materials and will continue to review the applicability of new materials using this technology.

Once again, thank you for contacting FLAVIA Beverage Systems. Please feel free to contact us again should you need further assistance. Have a great day!

Sincerely,

Customer Care
FLAVIA Beverage Systems

Now I do appreciate that, but if they spent just as much time trying to solve this recycling conundrum as writing that email, we'd be heading in the right direction.

Paul Irish hmm!

So creepy!

Paul Irish hmm!