Changing the world one small step at a time. I live close to the Swiss border and it happens that my mobile phone registers with a Swiss operator instead of Deutsche Telekom (who sends me a monthly invoice). After learning the hard way that roaming costs money and happens more often than I thought, I […]
For various reasons not being discussed here, I use an account with a bank that belongs to the Cashpool network for withdrawing cash from ATMs. They are far from offering a large number of ATMs, so I need to look up the location of an ATM once in a while when I am away from […]
T-Mobile offers to notify customers when a new invoice is ready to be printed by the customer. The order in which the notifications arrive is peculiar. 00:43 in the middle of the night the invoice is sent as an email attachment. Good. The PDf file comes together with an electronic signature so that you can […]
I am a loyal user of Windows phones. My first mobile phone was a Siemens C25. When I was no longer able to find replacement batteries on Ebay many years after the manufacturer stopped selling them, I switched to Nokia. And years after student had adopted smartphones I switched from a simple „can make phone […]
I have a habit of taking pictures of public electronic displays that have failed or that show error messages. The point is that the people looking at the displays cannot act on these messages. There is no use case for showing a message to someone that might only be irritated by an error. These displays […]
At eQ-3/ELV, we developed equipment for time and attendance management. You could buy tags, terminals, and software to record and evaluate time spent at work. Some competitors were admired, because they had managed to create good products and sell them with healthy margins. ELV was good at creating good enough products for cutomers with smaller […]
At eQ-3/ELV, we developed equipment for smart homes, e.g. to control light and heating. The products were designed for home use with respect to pricing, quality, and features. Earlier this year I visited an engineering company in the Lake Constance region. Engineers had been assigned to provisional laboratories until more office space would become available […]
I was travelling lately. At CGN airport, they had installed new full-body security scanners. A small sign indicated that the scanners were supposed to cause no damage to passengers‘ health and that their use was optional. However, the setup of checkpoint led people to believe that use was not optional. Equipment had been placed so […]
I was not in a good mood the other day. IT was Saturday, the town was full of people, the shops did not have in stock the items I wanted, and the machine that takes back your empty bootles refused to accept some of those bottles my children had inserted. After waiting in line for […]
Last year, seven weeks ago, I ordered light bulbs online that I had been unable to find in local stores. They were displayed as being in stock in a quantity larger than what I ordered, so I trusted that information. Having worked for a (formally independent, practically closely related) company, I had no indication to […]