Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev.

If delicious cottage cheese is impossible to buy anywhere, it is always possible to make it at home

Yuki currently has two modes – singing and sleeping. He sings all the time. At night, he goes out into the yard and sings to the sky. Near the window, he sings to the flowers in front of the house. From the balcony – when his favorite dog disappears over the horizon. And in between, he sleeps soundly. Half of my phone is filled with pictures of the sleeping dog.

About the environment.

1) Over the last 8 years, I have not seen a single person who was heavily drunk. Nowhere.

2) In the same 8 years, I don’t think I ever spoke to someone holding a cigarette. That includes cigars and weed, too.

3) Throughout my life, I don’t know anyone who got hooked on hard drugs personally, nor by “a friend pointing out a neighbor”. This includes those who got hooked on weed or other substances after we had lost touch.

4) No one who went to work in their field of study (systems engineer) after university.

5) I might be wrong here, but from my high school and university peers scattered around the world, it seems like none ended up in the USA. From the physics and math class, I can’t recall anyone who has left (though surely some have, I just don’t know), but from the university, more seem to have gone to Europe.

I’m sure that people from all three categories are somewhere nearby, they just seem to hide all the time.

If any of my classmates/groupmates are reading this post, correct me if I’m wrong; a bit of a reality check wouldn’t go amiss in my world of pink ponies and pooping butterflies.

Continuing about the interesting from the Museum of Failures.

This time about Rigello – a sister company of Tetra Pak, which introduced the world to the first “eco-friendly biodegradable bottles” in 1969. The advertising campaign emphasized the environmental aspects, and Rigello was touted as the most eco-friendly disposable packaging that could even compete with reusable glass bottles.

To produce a 33-centimeter Rigello bottle, 11.5 grams of plastic and 8.5 grams of paper were used. An empty Rigello bottle weighed just 20 grams, compared to a 33-centimeter glass bottle, which weighed 310 grams. It was also claimed that the material could decompose in nature, which was considered an advantage in terms of preventing environmental pollution. And customers boldly threw them into the forest. Overall, it turned out that they would outlast any nature. In the forests of Sweden, those eco-friendly biodegradable bottles are still being found today.

Continuing to post interesting stuff from the museum of failures.

The story about the Amope Foot File isn’t found on Google at all, so there’s a chance that the museum just made it up. But what if not. Listen up.

The Amopé Foot File, actively sold between 2016 and 2018, is a prime example of how a successful product can simultaneously become a failure. This device effectively removed calluses in minutes, leaving the skin of the feet soft and smooth. Consumers really liked it, and many after seeing ads and “friends’ reviews” rushed to buy one for themselves.

However, here was the problem: customers needed to buy just one such device practically for a lifetime. The Amopé Foot File was so good at its job that it required buying expensive spare parts about once every three years, and that only if you really wanted to spend the money. This led to the company management dubbing the FootFile product as Foot-Fail, blaming it for unsatisfactory profit reports and falling stock prices.

Another example is the products of the Pyrex company. Initially, the company manufactured dishes made of borosilicate glass, which were very durable under normal conditions. However, since this dishware lasted too long (sometimes being passed down from generation to generation), the company switched to producing less durable soda-lime glassware, which encouraged consumers to make purchases more frequently. True, at the same time, Pyrex had dishes that would explode under overheating or sudden temperature changes. Not much joy for a kitchen. And then Pyrex found a reason why customers should switch to the less reliable soda lime. Link in the comments.

Or consider light bulbs with long lifespans. There are well-known cases of creating light bulbs that could last for decades without failing. For example, the light bulb in the Livermore fire station, USA, has been burning for over 100 years. However, such bulbs didn’t find commercial success because manufacturers preferred to sell bulbs with shorter lifespans.

And here’s my dilemma right now. Ideally, it’s about time to change my three-year-old iPhone 12 Pro Max. But almost everything’s fine with it. Well, the battery has worn out a bit, yes. It no longer holds 15 hours of active use like it used to. And that’s it. It’s a fine phone otherwise. It’s been three years already. So, AT&T is currently selling me an upgrade (with trade-in) to the iPhone 15 Pro Max for an additional payment of just $130 with zero-interest installment over 2 years ($5.5 per month). Well, what to do. I’ll be taking it. If it weren’t for the slowly dying battery, it would last another three years for sure. But then, in electric cars, batteries don’t degrade by 20 percent over three years. Maybe they specifically make it like that in the phone?

In general, the above cases are a classic example of the dilemma of products that are “too good” to be commercially successful.

Update to my list of good YouTube channels for drawing. If you have any recommendations, let me know—I update it from time to time.

I was curious about when and why airports started prohibiting the carrying of liquids in volumes greater than 100ml into the boarding area.

It turns out that the cause was an exposed al-Qaeda conspiracy (of course, it had to be them). The terrorists initially planned to use gas to create an explosive device, but later decided to carry hydrogen peroxide on board in bottles of rose water. Special attention was given to making the bottles look unopened. At that time, and perhaps even now, it’s difficult to detect liquid explosives with traditional baggage scanning equipment.

In intercepted documents, it was indicated that half a kilogram of liquid explosive could destroy an airplane, and there was a reference to a similar effect with the plastic explosive Semtex in the case of the Pan Am flight explosion over Lockerbie in 1988.

The terrorists, as claimed, were captured two weeks before the planned action. And since 2006, we can’t carry yogurts and shampoos.

Continuing about the interesting findings from the Museum of Failures. Meet My Friend Cayla, a doll that can answer children’s questions about everything under the sun. Released by Genesis Toys in 2014 and discontinued in 2017. In Germany, it was banned as a surveillance device because it turned out that the manufacturer not only sold gathered information to third parties but also sold partners the propaganda of their products through the doll’s speech.

By the way, if you thought this involves something like an embedded ChatGPT, no, for 2014 that would still be too much. Essentially, the doll was a Bluetooth headset for a phone, requiring a special app that sent audio to a server, recognized it, processed it, synthesized a response, and sent it back to the phone. This app partially used the internet to search for responses and partially its own DB. Meanwhile, Genesis Toys equipped her with a “personality” to keep the questions about the doll consistent.

If Cayla didn’t have a ready response in the local database, she would use the Wikipedia API.

She also has a list of approximately 1,500 “bad words.” If a child requests them or if they are present in a Wikipedia response, Cayla will give a sanitized generalized response: “I don’t want to talk about this.” It is asserted that “gay marriage” is listed in the category of “bad words.”

Germany eventually recommended parents not only dispose of the doll but actually destroy it before throwing it away, as the doll formally qualified as a spying device and violated local laws. From what I understand, it was even prohibited not just to sell the doll, but to simply possess it in Germany. Moreover, they were required not just to destroy it but to do so officially, acquire a document proving its destruction, and send this document to the authorities. Otherwise, a fine of 26,000 euros and/or imprisonment awaited.

Now, why exactly a mere headset in a doll caused so much uproar. Basically, there were four vulnerabilities:

1. Dangerous Stalker – altering the database content on the child’s mobile device. A strange vulnerability, but okay.

2. Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) Attack – between the phone and the internet with data request/response alterations during transmission. This one’s rather serious.

3. Guys found a backdoor. This point was translated by ChatGPT as “The backdoor gap of Cayla herself.”

4. Random Pairing – when the host device exits the range, a malicious device can be connected with a single touch to confirm.

So, some startups can indeed be painful;)

Continuing about all things interesting from the museum of failures.

In 2004, Febreze released a device called Scentstories. “You can play scents just like music—just insert the disc.” Each disc has five scents, changing every half hour. The discs were named “relaxing in a hammock,” “exploring a new trail in the forest,” etc.

Apart from the device resembling a music player of those times, brand ambassador Shania Twain notably “promoted” the device as a hybrid of a music player and an air freshener, which marked the beginning of the end for the project.

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Recently visited the Museum of Failure. I can post something interesting from there every day for a month.

For instance, did you know that back in 1987, the toy company Fisher-Price released a video camera called PXL-2000, which used a standard audio cassette for recording. It could hold from 4 to 11 minutes of low-resolution black-and-white video (120×90, 2 colors (B&W), 15 frames per second) on each side of the cassette. Moreover, at maximum speed — up to 42 cm of tape per second. It cost 100 bucks back then — that’s about $269 today. By the way, it still costs that much on eBay. The cassettes could only be played on this camera too. Everything would have been fine, but the mechanism was so noisy that it spoiled the sound quality. Ultimately, the toy company deemed the product a failure and discontinued it.

Here’s another story. About Lululemon. For a long time, the symbolic product of this brand was black yoga leggings, suitable both for training and everyday wear. They cost about $100 — not cheap. The largest size was US 12 (or Eastern European 48). But at some point, there were complaints from fuller-bodied women that the leggings became very transparent when they bent over in yoga, revealing a striking view to those behind them, which was upsetting. The company’s founder, Chip Wilson, could not think of anything better than to say that the leggings were not intended for women with larger bottoms (ok, sizes), which many perceived as body shaming, and Wilson promptly received a full backlash. As a result, the company faced losses of $67 million, which was about a third of its market share, and eventually, this led to Wilson stepping down as head of the company. I won’t attach a photo of the transparent leggings from behind on a big bottom.

#museumoffailure