tbolt

The Aeropress Station Idea

The Aeropress coffee maker makes a great cup of coffee, and making it is a nice experience but nice != great. You don’t settle for a nice cup of coffee so the experience making it should be as good as the result. My idea is simple: A station to elegantly hold all of the pieces of the Aeropress. Just a butchers block of wood with cut outs for each individual part. I don’t have a good diagram, but it’s not hard to visualize how this would look with different cuts on both the front and top for each component.

It seems so very obvious to me when im making coffee via the Aeropress that there needs to be something like this created. So im releasing my idea to the wild. If there is enough interest, I may try to develop a prototype and head to Kickstarter. Alternatively, I would we willing to work with someone who has the wherwithal to make this happen. I have a pretty good idea of exactly how the block would need to be cut to accommodate for each component.

Trying to use inventor fusion, I created the mock-up below but it doesn’t really come across exactly how I want it to. As well, this would be something I would research more to see how folks are actually using them. I know how I use mine and I will keep the two primary tubes together after a “press,” but I don’t expect this in every case. So it would require some more development to find the “just right” layout.

The Aeropress Station Prototype

Reach out to me on twitter @tbolt if you want to know more and/or are interested in helping.

Flat Design

The hot topic of the month is flat design and expectations that it will appear in iOS7. What I want to know is, why hasn’t anyone pointed out that Windows Phone 7/8 is a quintessential model for flat design, and that it’s failing?

Yahoo Potentially Buying Tumblr for $1.1 Billion

Wild. Yahoo is on a march to redeem it’s late ’90s early ’00s title as a serious contender in the web-companies ring. Question I have is, where does this fit in Yahoo’s larger strategy?

Netflix Domination

Businessweek:

On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That’s more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined.

John McAfee is More Interesting Than You

From a slashdot article (which I recommend reading all of it):

I haven’t been involved with McAfee Ant-virus for 21 years. When I ran the company the software was the best and least intrusive on the market, and in 1991 we had 87% of the world market. What happened after I left was none of my doing. As to name association, I am a master at sullying my own name and, all things considered, being associated with the worst software on the planet ranks way down the pole. It’s barely a blip in the ocean of associations – madman, paranoid, child molester, murderer, drug addict, unstable, liar, to name but a few.Thank god I’m 67 and will probably be too hard of hearing soon enough to have to listen to them rattling around wherever I go. Amy, thankfully, did half the job already by bursting my left eardrum when she tried to shoot me in the head while I slept back in 2011.

and

It’s odd that people focus on the possibility that I might now be doing drugs (I’m not) and totally ignore the fact that from 1971 to 1982, 99% of my income came from smuggling and selling drugs. It’s a well documented feature of my past life. I was also taking more drugs weekly than most of you will do in a lifetime, and I was a totally indiscriminate user. Whatever came across my desk went up my nose, down my throat, in my veins or up the nether region. I never reached the notoriety of George and my writing, in comparison to him, did not merit writing books about my exploits, but we were not so totally different, he and I. I had my right testicle shattered by a hammer in 1974 when I ran afoul of some local drug barons in Oaxaca. Its the size of a grape now and shaped like a small frisbee. I have been in Mexican jails on three separate occasions and, frankly, I cannot recommend them. I was arrested in Bristol Tennessee in 1971 and charged with felony possession of a dangerous narcotic. A good lawyer got me of. (I always, oddly had tons of money that helped integrate me slightly back into humanity and smooth my transgressions).

Wow.

Yahoo and Dropbox

Big news today, Yahoo is partnering with Dropbox to do file attachments. Especially interesting considering Dropbox just purchased Gmail client app Mailbox. I’m going to stamp this as a Marissa Mayer move.

Techcrunch:

In case you’ve forgotten, Yahoo! Mail is still the No. 3 most-used mail service in the world behind Hotmail and Gmail. But the last time we checked, it was No. 1 in the United States.

BlackBerry 10

Highlights from todays unveiling

• RIM today announced it was rebranding itself as BlackBerry. An interesting move but not shocking.
• Two new devices running BB10, the Z10 and the Q10. The Z10 is a full touchscreen phone with a 4.2″ display at 356PPI, and the Q10 is a traitional BlackBerry device with a portrait keyboard