I don’t know about anybody else, but this festive season has been marked by a huge increase in junk e-mail traffic. It’s gone from the usual ambient level to a flood. Don’t these morons ever take a break?

Amongst tool aficionados one debate always rages - is it better to have a single-purpose implement that does one thing really, really well, or is better to have a tool that does many things in a small package? Sort of toolbox vs Leatherman or Swiss Army Knife.

In my plasterboarding adventures I realised that the board lifter was a perfect example of the specialist tool. It does the one job just soooo well. But I can and do use the power screwdriver for lots of different things and it’s really good. And then I realised that the screwdriver is, [drum roll], a platform. I can slot all sorts of things into the chuck and it becomes a specialist drill, screwdriver, hex key, spanner, whatever your need. It’s extensible, it has plugins.

An example - when driving plasterboard screws they tend to go through the board quite easily. So you can adjust the clutch so that it’s not so strong, but then it won’t go into the batten. So lo, you get special wallboard drill bits that have a cowl over the bit that set the screws to just the right depth. It’s a specialist wallboarding tool

So we love tools that do one job very well, but why does the combitool hold such a strong hold on us? I reckon it’s because we use it for quick fixes, the unplanned emergency maintenance job, the get-you-home bodge. And hence it has warm affection, even though we know it’s not the best job.

I’m intrigued by all this because it directly impacts mobile use. When penknives came out they were for just one thing - trimming quill pens, and over the years they have accreted extra bits for removing stones from horse hooves, laser pointers and other stuff. So mobile phones used to make and receive calls. And now they have a gazillion things that most people don’t use. (Come on Swiss Army Knife owners - have you ever use the stitching spike on your knife? I haven’t!)

So what does that make the phone’s extra functions good for? All those emergency tasks, the things that you have to do as you’ve no other tools at your disposal. And that’s exactly what we see. Good triangulation.

Board and lifterOriginally uploaded by Richard M Marshall

No, not a reference to the deluge of dodgy pharmaceutical e-mails we all get. In this case it is quite literally screwing our ceiling together after it was removed by an errant contractor.

This weekend saw a major step forward - fitting plasterboard (drywall) to the battens already fixed in place. All this was put up with screws - not the nails that would have traditionally been used. And why? Better tooling.

I must have driven about 700 screws above my head while working on this project. I could never have done that by hand, not even with a Yankee. I’d probably have been struggling to manage to put in that many nails by hand. However, with a power screwdriver it went up easily and smoothly.

Also worth mentioning are the amazing Screwfix double-helix turbogold screws and special drywall screws. They are so much better than the kind of soft steel rubbish that comes in plastic blister packs in retail shops.

Not to mention the wondrous panel lifter, shown in the picture that gracefully hoists full-size boards into the air with an easy turn of the handle. Ah, the joy of tools!

Ah the wonders of the web. Following links I came across the Outbursts of Everett True, a cartoon from  1906 and it reads like it was written today. Astounding - and I do so identify with his actions!

I’ve read a lot of people recently complaining about DRM, and will having been annoyed that I couldn’t copy a CD onto a minidisc to listen to it in the car, I’d never really been that annoyed about it. And I’d rather pay for music as that way people will continue to make it for me.
However today, after listing to a wonderful piece of Penguin Cafe Orchestra music on Radio 3 Breakfast, I decided to go hunt on iTunes for it. Lots of it. But then I can’t put it onto the PCs, my phone, or anything else. Grrrr. So now I get it.

Down with DRM!

As designers of web and software user interfaces we rarely get the chance to work with sounds. It’s all visual. I always try and make use of the vibrate functions in mobile applications, but that’s really restricted to gaming or alerts.

If you’ve ever seen part of a film without the music, you’ll know how much the accompaniment contributes to the overall emotional power.

This was all rammed home to me yesterday when I watched a couple of Public Safety Announcements at the UTalkMarketing website. One was anti gun crime and from the UK, the other was a safety ad for restaurant staff from Canada. Both have pretty gruesome visuals, but on their own those would have just been realistic special effects. However the audio was heart rending and was carried on over the end message. Note that both adverts are distressing and that the first one has an 18 certificate for cinema use only.

In the first example, after a boy had been shot by his mother in front of his family, the sounds of screaming, weeping, sickness and more hysterical weeping cut right into you. In the second, when the accident happens the screams from the victim are stomach churning.

Interesting that more and more web ads are starting to have people talking to you, or sitting there smiling and blinking looking like they want to talk to you. Does this make them more compelling, I wonder. Certainly makes that MDU slot even more annoying.

(BTW The correct treatment for severe burns is to flush with cold water for ten minutes, and then wrap the affected area in a clean, lint-free, sterile material. Cling film is ideal - take off and discard a few turns, and it’s sterile. Ensure that burnt skin is not put against other burnt areas, wrapping fingers, for example, individually. Wash eyes outwards.)

Not normally inclined to post links to things on YouTube, but today’s video investigations led me to find the following song which I thought was really quite funny.

Hmm, the blog software is eating the embedding code. Sigh.

Here’s a link while I figure out how to get round it!

Update: “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by a third party.” sez YouTube.

All too often recycled products are less attractive versions of their all-new equivalents. At best, in the case of toilet roll, the product is just as good.

However this weekend I discovered Eco Wool, a loft/floor insulation product made out of 86% recycled plastic bottles. Conventional loft insulation is glass fibre, and very unpleasant to work with. It sprays fibres all over the place, necessitating masks, and causes massive itching on any skin it happens to touch, so gloves, masks and all-over clothing is needed.

This is not the case with Eco Wool - it’s like a huge roll of cotton wool! While it does generate fibres and I would recommend wearing a breathing mask, it’s a vast improvement over the conventional fibre product. In particular you just tear it with you hands, avoiding the usual problems of cutting something fibrous. It also seems to be somewhat more rigid than glass fibre filler, making it easier for fill a ceiling which was what I was doing.
Full marks to the makers and to B&Q for stocking it.

Incidentally, this insulation represents an amazing degree of standardization. My house was built in 1870, yet this very much 21st Century product is exactly the right size to fit between the joists.

What’s happening recently with passwords? For some reason more services seem to be restricting both the characters and length of passwords. I find this out as my passwords have mixed case, digits and punctuation. It’s the latter that cases the most problems, but the fact I choose 10-character passwords is also problematic.

Since it’s just going into a database table, what’s the problem? Why restrict things?

And then there’s the stupid error messages like “passwords don’t match” when it’s actually too long.

And don’t get me started on the “enter the 2nd, 4th, 5th and 7th character” nonsense. The vast majority of people will have to write down their password to work those out, which is much less secure than just letting them type it in normally.

Yesterday morning when I switched on my Nokia N95 the browser wouldn’t start. The screen flashed and nothing - immediate exit. I’d not been fiddling with it, hadn’t changed bookmarks, nothing! Maybe it was the diet of celebrity trash that is was displaying during testing one of our current projects. But seriously, how can that happen? Software just stops working. Hardware I understand, but in all the too-many-to-count years I’ve been fighting with software, I’ve never understood how this sort of thing can happen.

I had to backup the content, reinstall the phone, and restore the backup. This worked impressively well, although it’s a nerve racking experience. The only thing that isn’t exactly back as it was pre-backup is the location of downloaded applications. These have all moved back to the Applications folder, so I’ll have to sort them out into more logical places.

The recovery process was very good, however the problem shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

OK, take that back - not everything was restored! Two of our applications failed to be restored. Oh well, downloading them again is easy, but shouldn’t be needed.

And more - my Flickr details have not been restored. Sigh.