Just got this from Jane in Sugru. Already printed and on my wall.
It manages to capture everything we should do to replace our dumb generic disposable consumer culture.
More on the site and a PDF too.
My ancient old Ford Mondeo (2001) is still going strong. In some ways I hate it for doing so. It’s an appliance and I don’t like appliances, I like things with character. Prior to it I only bought Citroens (BX, AX, Xantia) and I loved them dearly. But they were unreliable piles of junk assembled by drunks. Then, once we had kids, an appliance became necessary.
The “New” Mondeo was the second car in the renaissance of Ford. The first was the Focus in 1999. My wife had a Focus and it was as close to perfect a car as you could get. Interesting shapes inside and out, totally reliable and not a generic over-priced BMW. Her sister drove it for a few years after her and loved it too. The Mondeo kept the reliability of the Focus but was dead boring to look at, inside and out.
In 11 years, the only problems it has had are a badly designed handbrake and grab handles which pop out of the ceiling. It also loses the gas in the aircon too quickly and it needed a suspension joint replaced a few years ago. It gets one service a year across the road for €100+ and that’s it.
120,000 miles later and it bombs up and down the M7/M8 like a new car.
But in all this time, one thing has bugged me every day. The dashboard has a stippled effect which is a magnet for dust but is also impossible to attach anything too. Particularly phone holders. So I’ve always had to attach them to the windscreen. The problem there is that the angle of the screen is so severe, it is always awkward, in landscape-mode, far away and murdered by glare. In France, on holidays in July, the HTC Sensation overheated so badly using Google Maps Navigation that a 2 Amp charger couldn’t keep the battery charged!
Then yesterday, 11 years later, I had a brainwave. Sugru:
And ye know what? It flippin works!
Here’s to another 120,000 miles.
The lovely lovely people in Sugru sent me a littleBits kit and a great book yesterday. I have been intrigued by littleBits since I saw discovered it via the Adafruit site a while back. Soon afterwards they raised bunch of money and I was pleased to see Ireland’s own PCH involved in the production.
If you are not familiar with littleBits, it’s a beautifully simple way of learning about electronics using parts which just snap together using magnets.
I’ve had a little play with it and it’s great fun. However I won’t give any detailed impressions until I let some of my younger kids at it. I want to see what they think. The opinions of a 44 y/o who did Electronic Engineering in college are less relevant!
In the meantime, here’s a few pictures of the Starter Kit.
An old hack I had forgotten about.
There is nothing more annoying about phones than upgrading them and finding that your battery is a different size and won’t fit in your old charger, even tho the contacts line up. OK, there is one thing more annoying – owning a phone that doesn’t let you take the battery out (*cough* iPhone).
So rather than put the old HTC Desire charger in the bin, I went at it with a Stanley knife and some Sugru. Pretty it ain’t, but my HTC Sensation battery now fits perfectly.
A lovely film for Father’s Day from Jane and the Sugru team. It was a real pleasure having Julian, John and Ben visit us in Bandon.
Sibéal will be delighted to see her Raspberry Pi Lego case getting a great look in.
Tomorrow we’re doing more digging into Arduino with her, Oscar and maybe Oisín. First, the treadmill 
My mother isn’t obviously technical but she is incredibly practical. This is a woman, who at the age of 12, was sent to live with her widowed Grandfather, to take care of him! Nothing fazes her.
As she lives in Kilkenny, she always found the Sugru story interesting (Jane, the inventor, is from Kilk) and bought a packet to see what it was about.
Now, have a look at this big plastic bowl.
Not exactly special.
Except it is.
It’s over 40 years old and has been used to make my Mum’s legendary brown bread for that entire time.
A few years back it split on the side and Rose had been using various tapes etc to stop the bread mix leaking. But none were satisfactory. Then she thought of the Sugru. And it has worked perfectly. She’s delighted with it. I figure it has another 40 years to go.
For me, that bowl represents a generation of people who hate waste and believe, in their DNA, that thrift should be celebrated. And Sugru is the perfect modern symbol of that.
My 8 y/o daughter and I put together this Lego case for Raspberry Pi. All design concepts are hers and she built it. My job was to make it all fit and not wobble. Which of course we did using Sugru.
The case is a lot bigger than the RPi but that gives us expansion opportunities for USB hubs and battery packs. I like it and it will be our official Raspberry Pi case from now on.
Here are the insides:
Finally a video showing it in action with the OpenElec version of XBMC playing Peppa Pig.
Oh, and here’s another setup I did last week. RPi running on battery power with wireless mouse and Bluetooth portable fold-up keyboard. I’ve ordered a cheap bluetooth mouse so I only need one USB port.
I’ve interviewed many many people myself over the years and only hired two real duds in that time. Mostly I did it with gut rather than asking people to write code on a whiteboard or drilling them on software lifecycle. My aim was to get a sense of “can I work with this person?”, “does it look like they have a creative streak?” and “have they any interest in software outside of work?”.
Years ago, I even passed on the number one person in their year in Comp Sci in TCD because they ticked none of those boxes. They were just very smart, and I need a lot more.
I don’t know anything about the Google interview process apart from what I’ve heard about the crazy number of sessions and the silly logic puzzles. If true, I’d worry that you end up with a ton of people who all have a very similar profile.
Sugru’s post today about how Google commissioned them to do branded Sugru for Hiring Fairs suddenly made me realise that Sugru could totally change the way we all do interviews.
After the usual CV trawl with the person, hand them a few packets of sugru and a box of bits and pieces. Give them 20 minutes to do something interesting. If they come up with nothing, don’t hire.
What better way to see if someone really does have the type of creativity that is critical in this business?
One of my 5 darling children (identity unknown) decided to peel off a strip of the rubber backing on the Sky+ remote. This bugged me every time I held it. So I decided to have some fun with a Sugru repair.
Before:
I had a vision in my head for what I wanted to do. Unfortunately I have zero artistic ability.
The plan was something like a Spiderman web but this is what I gouged out:
Then I filled it with orange Sugru:
A bit of a clean-up later:
I love it and admire my handiwork (crude tho it is) every time I hold it. The kids are less impressed. Oisín aged 8 said “Dad, the last thing that looks like is Spiderman”.
Hack number 3 (ultra simple) to follow.
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