Improve your aim

Apparently other men have poor aim and miss the toilet. How can they miss such a large target? They simply aren’t paying attention. By putting a small picture of a housefly (why this?) on the inside of a urinal, “spillage” declined 80%. (how did they measure spillage? and what poor soul got that job?) Someone should sell a sticker that can be placed inside a normal toilet bowl and market it on Oprah. You’re certain to make millions. Incidentally, toilets are designed poorly because there’s still the issue of splashing. That Dyson vacuum cleaner should work on this.

Primitive PayPal

This snippet from a story on cell phones was impressive. People can be quite clever.

Ugandans are using prepaid airtime as a way of transferring money from place to place, something that’s especially important to those who do not use banks. Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission.

NTFS Links

I’ve been using junction.exe to create hard links in the XP file system. Unfortunately, it’s a command line tool and the junctions look like normal files. I ran across this shell extension that appears to work very nicely. You can make junctions or hard links easily in the file explorer. And it modifies the icon so you know it’s a link.

XO Laptop

I finally got my XO laptop from the OLPC Foundation last week. My first impressions are mixed. The laptop is an inch less wide than a Lenovo X60 and the same weight. The keyboard is unusably small, even for my girlishly thin fingers. The screen is nice, but the reflective gray scale screen requires more ambient light than the Kindle. The WiFi is great. As for the applications, I cannot imagine many children using these programs without being directed by well-trained teachers, which are in desperately short supply in developing countries. Most of these apps are what nerdy adults wish they could have had when they were kids. [the XO shut off suddenly here!] For personal use, the Asus Eee PCs are a better deal, particularly because it has a normal sized keyboard. On the other hand, the XO can be used as an ebook reader. It’s still just a toy, though.