Does your office violate Osha standards for employees per toilet?
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2013-title29-vol5/xml/CFR-2...
Is the Toilet Free?
111–120 of 126 posts
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#112A little torn about this. Reading through the comments, and kind of agree that the project is an interesting representation of hacker culture, and certainly stimulating/ morale-boosting to work on...
But on the other hand, I'm just a little bit sad that some clearly intelligent people have put time toward this problem instead of pressing issues like hunger or violence or any other number of social problems that are present all over the Valley and the US, not to mention the rest of the world. Secondly, every time I read an article about "using the bathroom for 1 less minute will save in total X years of your life!" I think about Wall-E and how much I don't care for that level of efficiency.
Alright I'll get off my box, because I'm sure this was a harmless and fun post, but this was just an honest statement of what I thought. I wrote about this (i.e., and get up on the soapbox with a loudspeaker) much more in-depth in case anyone is curious (or thinks I'm crazy) FYI: https://medium.com/business-startup-development-and-more/64d...
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#113These kind of projects are awesome. They may seem "pointless" or "a waste of time" to some PHB-types but they're a wonderful showcase of a great, true-hacker culture and I bet they do a ton for morale. I hope that any future startup I'm involved with has this sort of culture - it's a goal I'll aim for. Well done guys.
Moreover, the concept is quite abstract and has many similar applications. I used to work in a scenario when there was a specific gateway resource that was needed to be run by every developer for executing his code, was very expensive and people would annoy each other by suddenly remote logging into machine and disturbing others. Then we came up with a resource locking / waiting and current state showing software, along with estimates of when which machine would be free, so you could request a reserve slot. Some sophistication included things like how much of it was actually used by you vs reservation time so it could adjust appropriately.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#114Add a yellow light for when there are stalls available but all free stalls have recently been used for more than 2 minutes. So basically, yellow would mean "You could, but unless you really need to, you probably don't want to" ;)
Oh I get it, you're saying that it would probably smell like shit in there. wink.
I don't know about you, but it always smells heavily of strawberries after I've been there.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#115Your office is absolutely beautiful. I hope one day our company will inhabit a space that nice.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#116Reminds me a bit of the Trojan Room Coffee Pot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
Note that the HTCPCP protocol has recently been extended to fully handle teapots (instead of just returning an error) - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7168
I think that adding toilets is a very reasonable next step.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#117I wish I had the type of job that involved enough free time to do something like that.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#118I remember, about 25 years ago, a HUD on each an ever train carriage would indicate whether the toilet was occupied. The HUD was located above the baggage section at the end of each carriage. Occupied was red, and unoccupied was blank. No Raspberry Pi was involved, but through careful social engineering, everyone in the carriage know what the sign meant, There was a physical hardware based fall-back also, which was a…
Good observations, but let's also review what this does accomplish. The train system is reliant on mechanical linkage and line-of-sight, so can serve only a limited audience. While the Pi-powered version scales, making the toilet status accessible to everyone everywhere in the world by leveraging the connectivity of the Internet.
>While the Pi-powered version scales
It scales but the endpoint probably doesn't scale ( I don't know if 1 toilet can easily serve 100 people)
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, building new bathrooms or expanding existing ones can be a long and expensive process, so improving the efficiency of existing resources can be a smart way to go.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to declare the bathrooms unisex, especially if you have a serious gender imbalance at work. I worked at a startup office that had a (typical) 80% male to female ratio, but the building was designed with two male and two female toilets. These were the types of bathrooms that had a single toilet, a single seat, and a door for the whole thing, much like a bathroom in your home. Havi…
The video/gif on the article shows both men and women entering and exiting. There is only one LED. There is only one website. The diagram only shows three stalls. I venture to guess that this bathroom is already unisex.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're enjoying yourself and having fun, it's not a waste of time.
Creating useful things is also very fun. And takes about the same time/energy. Anyway, doing stuff with a raspberry pi has no hacker merits IMHO. Anybody can connect stuff to a portable supercomputer and make it do things.
I guess yours is the only correct definition of a "useful thing".