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Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#811

Post by japhyr »

gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #381
japhyr wrote: post #134

If you split your own firewood by hand, a Fiskars splitting axe is insanely better than any standard splitting maul you'd find in a typical hardware store: https://www.fiskars.com/en-us/gardening-and-yard-care/produc... For mechanical pencils, the Rotring 600 is the best thing I've ever written with: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZWYUA4/

Any advice on technique with the splitting axe? Use the same way as the maul?

I split about three cords a year, all by hand. It's mostly hemlock and alder. The biggest rounds are 24-30" in diameter.

I thought I'd need a heavy maul for the large rounds, but I use the axe for everything. On the larger rounds, start at the edges and work your way around. One nice thing about working in from the edges is that the edge pieces with bark are thin and have lots of split surface area, and all the inside pieces have no bark. So everything dries faster. I don't have any trouble missing strikes with this method.

The knottiest pieces for me tend to be spruce rounds from mid-trunk. I use the axe to get as much off as I can, and then either stack the larger knotty pieces in one area and burn them whenever they've dried enough, or use the chainsaw to cut through them one more time.

I haven't picked up my maul in 3 years.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#812

Post by jerome-jh »

I liked the HVAC controls of my 2005 Honda CR-V. Three big knobs: fan control, temperature, direction/mode. The temperature knob had one notch per °C. Simple and robust. All three were a pleasure to use even after 15 years, usually while keeping the eyes on the road. Oh and the vertical hand brake freed a lot of room between the front seats. No car is perfect of course. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=honda+cr-v+2005+dash&t=ffab&iar=im...

Wifi router WNR3500L with DD-WRT. True eventless running for 10 years. Cannot tell the same of my current setup. On PC the Debian GNU Linux distrib is pretty good for peace of mind.

I like Vim for its modal interface with old-school menus as a fallback and mplayer for its complete command line and keyboard controllability, and its effective OSD.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#813

Post by defterGoose »

jerome-jh wrote: post #812

I liked the HVAC controls of my 2005 Honda CR-V. Three big knobs: fan control, temperature, direction/mode. The temperature knob had one notch per °C. Simple and robust. All three were a pleasure to use even after 15 years, usually while keeping the eyes on the road. Oh and the vertical hand brake freed a lot of room between the front seats. No car is perfect of course. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=honda+cr-v+2005+dash&…

The second gen CRV is a study in "where else can we stuff something useful into this car?"

Mine is affectionately named "Truckquito" and he recently got a full length camper bed installed in the back.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#814

Post by wy35 »

Oddskar wrote: post #606
amarshall wrote: post #239

The Kinesis Advantage keyboard [1]. The height of the keys in each column are different because, well, the length of each of our fingers is different. It’s so naturally comfortable that it goes unnoticed and one’s fingers just fall into the right position. Placing one’s fingers offset left or right is so obviously uncomfortable that it’s basically impossible to have off-by-one typos. There is a lot of subtly well-des…

It was very good about 5 years ago, and is still quite comfortable. However I would say that today this has largely been superseded by a myriad of better choices. For the adventurous type there's e.g. Dactyl Manuform. If one does not care so much for the keywell there's Lily 58, Iris or Kyria. For built-in tenting there's ZSA Moonlander, Redox etc. All of these have better customizability, repairability and portabili…

I own a Kinesis Advantage 2, a Lily, and a Corne, and tried a Dactyl Manuform. IMO the Kinesis still wins hands down. I’ve tried dozens of keyboards but the Kinesis is the one I will always go back to.

Why? To be blunt, I don’t care at all about fancy keyswitches, or wirelessness, or portability. I’m simply looking for the most comfortable input device possible.

If non-ergonomic rubber dome keyboards feel like plastic chairs, all of the other keyboards you mentioned feel like fancy wooden chairs. Some of them might be incredibly well-crafted and contour to your body! But the Kinesis feels like a top-of-the-line high-tech massage chair. I’ve tried dozens and dozens of ergonomic keyboards —- and even made one, by designing a PCB and printing it out —- but at the end of the day, the Kinesis is the keyboard I will ALWAYS reach for.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#815

Post by mellavora »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #661

Google Inbox: The perfect modern frontend for mail. RIP. Sonos Playbar (got the Arc for free, sold the Playbar): Perfect sound, a timeless design, software was dope around 2015-2016. All downhill from there, when Sonos decided to pivot to supporting Alexa/Google Assistant and attempting to become smarter. Google Pixelbook: Super thin, light weight, super clean Linux system with first class support for Progressive Web…

My Sylvia is 20 years old and the coffee gets better every year.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#817

Post by jessriedel »

jjj123 wrote: post #806
jessriedel wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that if the prioritization decision was made as a trade-off then this could be a question of design, but something would need to be said about that. Saying "I like the design of my car because it goes fast" doesn't really make sense unless you bring up what was changed (e.g., the aerodynamics, or the missing backseats, or whatever).

You think a car going fast (faster than most others) is not part of the designed user experience of that car?

Speed is part of the user experience, and good user experience is the goal of, and usually relies on, good design. But the result -- speed -- is not itself design. Otherwise there would be no distinction between good products and good design.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#819

Post by dpflug »

jiggunjer wrote: post #420
guidovranken wrote: post #27

BitTorrent is amazing. It just works. Anyone anywhere can create a torrent of their files, dump the magnet link somewhere, and everyone else can reliably retrieve it. It is self-reinforcing; the more people using a torrent, the better the robustness, redundancy and download speeds. You can often get better speeds from downloading something via torrent than from a web server. It's an open protocol that is relatively e…

Why this over ipfs?

Speaking from my own experience, I've had a harder time getting data from here to there via ipfs. It's been a year or two since I last tried, but as I recall my troubles were the following:

* Transfers never starting, or not being able to exceed kbps. * Large amounts of data makes client performance worse. * Adding data to the store doubles the disk space used unless you take extra steps to mitigate that.

Meanwhile, I can point mktorrent at a folder, load it in my clients, and have it saturate my link within seconds/a couple minutes.

I'm keeping a close eye on IPFS and the Dat Project to take over here (and my use of Syncthing), but I'm hoping some refinement can happen first.

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