A great read from the author. It reminded me of my previous life as a bioprocess engineer, where I led investigations into biologically contaminated batches in biotech. It was fun stuff and I still remember some of the best advice I received from an Executive Vice President to never underestimate a microbe.
On this subject, I once led an investigation in which Bacillus cereus somehow survived in situ media sterilisation for 30 minutes and >121.1°C, despite there being no cold spots. At the end we realised it was the bioburden load of a media component and water temperature used during compounding.
I put it in AI and even that couldn't fix the sentence sufficiently for me to understand it completely.
"So, in ordinary language:"
"One dirty raw ingredient introduced far more spores than expected, and the way it was mixed into the water made the sterilization cycle less effective against them. The autoclave itself was probably not broken."
"The exact relationship to water temperature remains somewhat ambiguous because the HN commenter did not provide the detailed investigation findings."
To be fair I omitted some key information.
The 'dirty raw ingredient' mixed in room-temperature purified water wasn't sterilisable. The same process but mixed in 60°C purified water was sterilisable.
It actually took me a minute to decide whether or not to upvote the AI-content post. But it was informative, you were forthcoming on the origin, and the GP has yet to elaborate. Thank you for posting that.
I’ve had a very similar experience to what has been described.
A few additional elements from my experience:
- Trust within the team meaning the required competence and delivering on time.
- Team size.
- Team empowerment, imo the most important one. If the team doesn’t feel empowered for whatever reason, this will bring most of the things listed in the article to a halt.
Head tracking is not precise enough from my experimentation. ScrollPods provides a scrolling experience on par to that of a trackpad/mouse in my opinion. Also give horizontal scrolling a try which is turning your head left and right to scroll down/up. The best way to describe it is surprisingly natural. Happy to hear any feedback whether it's constructive or positive.
Because of Spatial Audio.
Give it a try, you will be positively surprised. Especially on scrolling via turning your head horizontally. On the problem you described I implemented a gesture called pause. Meaning if your head exceeds the degrees you have specified it will pause ScrollPods automatically.
I don't own AirPods and never will. I file them under "They sound amazing if you've never listened to headphones that actually sound amazing". The same category as Beats by Dre.
And why would I ever want Spatial Audio? If I'm listening to music, I don't need to sound like it's coming from a specific direction. If I'm watching a video, it's already going to have stereo sound. I don't need it to change based on head movements. If I'm on a Zoom/Teams meeting, I know I can create positional audio, and moving my head to face the voice is just going to be weird.
The scroll wheel works. I don't need to replace it. If I want to free up that hand, I think the better solution is eye tracking from the web cam on top of my screen.
Fair comment. It’s a macOS app that lets you scroll hands-free with your Apple headphones (AirPods Gen 3+, AirPods Pro and AirPods Max) by gently nodding your head up or down. You can also set it up to scroll by moving your head right or left. I also strongly agree with your final comment, as I have a lot to share about what it’s like using ScrollPods day to day and the convenience that comes with this. Like sipping an iced coffee with right hand instead of scrolling or sitting 1 meter away from my desk to stretch my legs while reading a presentation. Thanks for reminding me and I will prioritise this in my next blog post.
> It’s a macOS app that lets you scroll hands-free with your Apple headphones (AirPods Gen 3+, AirPods Pro and AirPods Max) by gently nodding your head up or down.
Man, you write too damn much.
"Use your AirPods to scroll on macOS by head movement".
Because your title mentions EC, I just learned it’s the EC that approves the market authorisation. I always thought it was the EMA but apparently this is “just” a recommendation and in some cases the EC and EMA disagree.
Thank you! With the perception of maturity within HCI, there is a resistance to look at these fundamental building blocks. Instead, they are often taken as fact based on consensus, even though they absolutely can and should be challenged.
My take on the bias toward the “latest craze” is that it's probably a result of finite attention spans, as well as a fear of falling behind, which leaves little space for fundamental concepts.
A good example for ScrollPods was to support scrolling only through up/down head movements initially but many users asked for left/right head turns to map to vertical scrolling as well. Once implemented, the horizontal axis felt much more natural and less tiring. Thinking about it deeper, this makes perfect sense from a biological and anatomical perspective. I mean humans would probably be way more concerned with an ambush from a predator from the side or behind rather than above which shows in our peripheral vision for horizontal versus vertical visual field.
You can’t scroll in one window and type in another window at the exact same time. Your hand has to stop typing on the keyboard, move to the mouse and then scroll. There are many cases where a user would want to scroll and type at the exact same time without needing to keep switching back and forth between the keyboard and mouse. I then describe a solution to this problem. I hope this is clearer.
That paragraph is pretty extraordinary with what is being claimed.
Crazy to think that anything could survive 25 kGy.