Category Archives: Design

An extremely useful label…

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…on the charger for my new Norelco 7310XL. As near as I am able to interpret, it means, “do not cut this cord off.” The charger’s rated output is only 350 mA at 15V DC, which is scarcely hazardous; even if you were to cut the cord with uninsulated metal scissors, while it was plugged into mains power, the worst-case scenario is probably a noticeable tingle. Perhaps a cut, shorted cable could heat up and, eventually, somehow, cause a fire? If it were 1AM on Friday the 13th and you had just broken a mirror while chasing a black cat under a ladder in the process of killing an albatross?

Is it even a hazard warning at all?

I am now, in fact, almost so curious about the label’s purpose as to attempt exactly what it seems to forbid, just to see what happens. My charger will stop working—that much I’m quite sure of. But surely no one capable of operating an electric razor, in the first place, would be surprised at that outcome. What about all the other possible ways I could destroy the charger? If it needs a “do not cut off cord” label, doesn’t it also a need a “do not blast with a shotgun” label? Doesn’t everything else I own? “Hello, Norelco customer service? I vaporized my charger with a thermal lance and it stopped working. What gives? Shouldn’t there be a label or something?”

Galilean thermometer photobleaching

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My brother bought me this Galileo thermometer (Wikipedia) as a Xmas gift in 2008. Out of the box, it looked very like the manufacturer photo shown at extreme left. The near-left picture was taken just today.

Over the intervening three years, it has been displayed continuously in one window or another, windowsills being not only useful locations to observe the temperature, but good places to show off the strikingly beautiful colors of the instrument. It was only a month ago that I noticed the blues and greens had faded away. I have noticed a similar effect in a pair of full bottles of Bomba energy drink that have also been kept in the sun (and for about the same length of time): the red is still red, while the blue has faded away. (Update: My memory of these bottles’ original colors was flawed. See this post.)

It’s likely the soda, at least, is dyed with Brilliant Blue FCF, aka Blue 1 (Wikipedia), and I wonder whether the Chinese-made Galileo thermometer also might have used the food-grade dye. It would be a sensible choice, for a manufacturer; with US consumption estimated at a million pounds a year, Blue 1 is dirt cheap, and obviously nontoxic, which the underwriters probably favor against the chance of an accident in which the thermometer breaks and the stuff gets into a human orifice or wound.

My standing desk setup

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It was Nomadic Furniture that first got me interested, almost a decade ago, in the idea of working standing up. I’ve tried several times, since then, to pick up the habit, but only over the past six months, or so, have I finally made it stick.

I built these two work tables from old card table legs, hollow-core doors, and extra-short molly bolts soon after moving into my current home, and published a Make: Project about it right after they were done. In spite of naysayers who believed hollow-core doors were too flimsy for this purpose, both tables have held up great, and are still going strong.

When, eight months ago, I was inspired by Mark Frauenfelder’s standing desk experiments to try it again, myself, I didn’t want to spend a lot on new furniture, or make any irreversible changes to my hollow-core door tables (which I am still quite fond of) in case it didn’t take. I had four of these cement “Dek Blocks” on hand for another project, and I decided to try simply setting one under each table leg, which had the effect of raising the work surface by about 6″, to 35″. This proved to be a very comfortable working height for me. Getting the monitor up to eye level on a wall-mounted shelf was also a critical change.

I have also found, per Benjamin Palmer’s suggestions as quoted in Mark’s follow-on post, that a barroom-style footrest or -rail is helpful for long term comfort, and the Dek Blocks also, by happy accident, provide a convenient means for adding one, as shown: Just slot a 2×6 (or other 2x nominal-dimension lumber) into the promolded slots in the front pair of Dek Blocks. Between the grooves in the blocks and the table legs themselves, gravity alone is sufficient to secure a footrail, which can simply be lifted away as necessary, e.g. for cleaning or maintenance access.

I now comfortably work from a standing position about eight hours a day, five days a week, and find it noticeably improves my attention span, energy level, mood, and overall health. There was some discomfort during the adjustment period, but, being a bit older and wiser this time, I didn’t try to just throw out my chairs and go from sitting all day to standing all day all at once. Rather, I worked up to it, starting out at just two hours in the morning, then going all morning until lunch (for awhile), and from there to standing up, all day, from 8AM to 5PM, except during my lunch hour. Done piecemeal like this, the transition was not uncomfortable at all.