Ged Carroll

Category: gadget | 小工具 | 가제트 | ガジェット

What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.

When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.

Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.

When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.

I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.

Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.

Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.

  • On wearing a smart watch

    At the beginning of the month I took the plunge and decided to buy a Casio G-Shock connected watch. After a week or of wearing a smart watch, I have a pretty good sense of the pros and cons of using it.
    Casio G-Shock Bluetooth

    The connection with the iPhone makes a major leap forward in the G-Shock experience. Using a G-Shock is rather like using an old computer system like a DEC VAX minicomputer, the experience is modal. Everything revolves around combinations of button pushes to get to the functionality of the watch. Realistically you can’t navigate this process while wearing a smart watch.  The manual is a quarter of an inch thick and the commands not exactly memorable. If you have clumsy fingers or are not paying attention you have to cycle through the complete set of button commands again
    g-shock modal nature
    The G+ iPhone application deals with every setting on the watch bar setting the time and date itself (which still requires a bit of button juggling).
    Untitled
    The achilles heel is battery life. Most of the facilities about the watch are about husbanding a relatively meagre lithium ion battery. What Casio’s engineers managed to achieve is imperfect but impressive. The battery life is the silent hand that ruled all aspects of the product design. In order to have a sealed in battery that lasted more than a day, Casio had to go with an old school battery. Out went modern G-Shock features such as the GPS module and atomic clock radio units used to provide accurate time based on location.

    Out too went the solar power option. Alerts seem to be polled every quarter of an hour for things like email. But then in this connected age, having a message to let me know that I don’t have email would be more noteworthy.

    This all had a number of effects:

    • The watch didn’t alert me to everything – that isn’t a bad thing. I do want my alerts to be consistent, so I shut down alerts from everything but Twitter, calendar and calls. I would have loved to have alerts for WeChat, SMS / iMessage messages, FaceTime and Skype calls but they aren’t on the programme (so far)
    • The watch did cure ‘phantom’ rings. I got to ignore ringtones out in public and at home unless my wrist shook. It also worked well when I couldn’t feel my phone vibrating in my Carhartt jacket
    • I remembered to take my phone with me on more occasions, the watch would vibrate if the Bluetooth link was broken

    The best bit of the phone for me was that it was still a G-Shock, it could be worn in the gym, the shower, whilst shaving, washing dishes or swimming. It is a watch for living rather than a Bluetooth-enabled human leash.

    More information
    On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge

  • DJ equipment + more stuff

    Pioneer To Sell DJ Equipment Business For More Than Half A Billion Dollars » Synthtopia – interesting move, particularly with the launch of the new turntable. Pioneer’s DJ equipment business gave them a fill up as hi-fi revenue dropped. Pioneer CDJs managed to replace Technics as the industry standard in DJ equipment for many clubs. What will happen with things like IP?

    Fareed Zakaria Never Stopped Plagiarizing: How Dozens Of Episodes Of His CNN Show Ripped Others Off | Our Bad Media – looks like a potential new media storm-in-a-teacup. If he plagiarises, he has good taste with the material he takes

    Daring Fireball: Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations – a key point missing here is that you don’t buy a watch when you pay for a luxury watch; you buy into the support network behind it which will keep it running at a price decades from now.

    Foreign firms should not control so much of the Chinese economy | WantChinaTimes – explains antitrust crackdowns

    This Chennai startup thinks the first click for an e-commerce purchase will soon be on a camera – reminds me of the virtual Homeplus (Tesco) stores in Korea

    Daring Fireball: Promotional Images That Hide the iPhone 6 Camera Bulge – interesting that John Gruber has called it a mistake

    Using app-specific passwords | Apple – Apple’s way around dealing with recent hacking scandals

    Facebook partners with Google, Twitter, others to launch ‘TODO’ – Inside Facebook – interesting move and interesting omissions in the participants

    The Apple Watch Won’t Kill the Swiss Watch Industry | The NextWeb – it makes sense that TAG Heuer would make a smart watch being the most feminine of the brands in LVMH’s roster of serious watch brands

    Are Agencies Killing Their Programmatic Golden Goose? | WSJ – opaque practices and pricing models of some of these agency groups have recently led marketers to question how their money is being spent, and in some cases to shun the groups completely in favor of building their in-house alternatives. More related content here.

    The single, buried statistic that explains China’s slowdown – Quartz – implication that construction is down

    DisplayPort 1.3 announced w/ support for upcoming 5K displays, enhanced 4K performance | 9to5Mac – 5k displays already

  • Ghost in the Shell

    Masamune Shirow’s Ghost In The Shell is a three-volume manga series (volumes 1, 1.5 and 2) that is based on a Japanese security service team who try and solve cyber-crime related issues.

    The stories deal with a future where technology is embedded into human beings and augment them. It is also based around a world where the internet of things is an everyday occurrence. Shirow’s future is believable. Unlike Star Trek, he recognised that the future is built in layers on the past. So you see this in the architecture in the background of picture cells.

    You also see that layers in terms of everything from clothing and personal effects to vehicles of the protagonists.

    The author obvioiusly goes deeply into the story as a thought experiment with copious side notes explaining either technological developments or why he has made certain decisions. The stuff that he incorporated was cutting edge scientific research at the time. Whilst I love the anime adaptions, this insight into Shirow’s thinking makes the books invaluable.

    The books seem to have been remarkably prescient about hacking and the risks of technology. In previous literature, hackers were generally on the side of good or libertarians. In Ghost In The Shell you have cyber warfare and cyber crime similar to our own reality today. A crumbling healthcare system, organised crime, private military entities and shadowy state actors.

    Unfortunately, the designers of smart televisions and refrigerators didn’t pay much attention to these books, otherwise they would not have left these products so open to being hacked. Come for the sci-fi stay the course of the books for the underlying ideas. More book reviews here.

  • Jim Yurchenco & other things this week

    Before IDEO was better known for corporate workshops and collaborative sessions; it did really good product design. This great interview / video by IDEO of veteran mechanical engineer and industrial designer Jim Yurchenco. Yurchenco is a throwback to when IDEO designed things.

    Yurchenco worked on the design of the original Apple mouse, in the video he discusses his approach to design. It is also great to see him actually using real tools, rather than just tapping away at a work station. Yurchenco was retiring last week and leaves IDEO with some 80 patents to his name. Alongside the original Apple mouse Yurchenco also worked on the Palm V, in his own words:

    That was a really important product for us, and the industry, Yurchenco says. “It was one of the first cases where the physical design—the feel and touch points—were considered to be as important as the performance

    You can read more on Yurchenco’s work here. I worked on the marketing of the Palm V and Vx. The exterior of the devices set the standard for the smartphones we got a decade later. The problem with the V and Vx is that they were held together with hot glue. Yurchenco made an object of beauty, but one that was very difficult to repair.

    The PDA launched with a lithium ion rechargeable battery around about the time that the Ericsson T28 came on the market. The T28 was the first phone with a lithium ion battery. This allowed Ericsson to make a really small clamshell phone. The Yurchenco design completely encapsulated the battery, rather like the first iPhone years later.

    Subtraction.com did a great job of collating the user interface (UI) designs done by Territory Studios for Guardians Of The Galaxy.

    In the same way that Star Trek, Ghost In The Shell and Star Wars have influenced engineers, who is to say that Territory’s work won’t be the creative DNA of new interfaces in the future?

    In the earlier days of the web, interactive content had a distinctly trippy feel, from site design to ‘Mind’s Eye’ videos and The Shamen’s generative screen saver.  Japanese group BRDG (Bridge) have gone back to that psychedelic feel with this brilliant discordant video:

    Twitter cards are something that is interesting me at work at the moment and I was particularly taken by this interactive one from Acura – the upmarket brand of Honda.

    Pizza Hut Japan, have managed come up with marketing gold by creating an interactive YouTube series based around the grand opening of a pizza restaurant run by cats. Japan is obsessed with cats, which explains the prominence of felines. I am just surprised that Jonathan Hopkins and Nando’s hadn’t done it much earlier…

  • Domain registrars + more things

    Anti-Piracy Lawyer Wants Domain Registrars to Silence Critics – interesting approach to the takedown to use domain registrars as a reputation management tool. Governments occasionally take this approach when dealing with websites based overseas, but its rare for a non-state organisation to try and manipulate domain registrars like this. It will be interesting if boutique shops like Consulum or San Frontieres start using domain registrars in this way.

    Android Fragmentation Report August 2014 – OpenSignal – looking at this gives an idea of the kind of challenges devs face

    WPP shares rise as profits come in ahead of forecast | City A.M. – as usual Sorrell’s business forecasts are more interesting than the results.

    The fashion case for mobile phone covers – FT.com – Keely Warwick, contemporary accessories buyer at Selfridges, which has increased its investment in phone and tablet cases by 30 per cent for autumn/winter 2014, says tech accessories are one of the store’s “most rapidly expanding categories” – are cellphone cases the new affordable luxury alongside make up and perfume? Back when I worked on the Palm V there was also luxury cases back then: Jean-Paul Gaultier, Mulberry, Coach et al (paywall)

    The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality (The Verge) – this feels more like a Wired magazine piece than a Verge piece, interesting nonetheless

    Behind Bold Designs, A Thin Skin: Zaha Hadid Sues Publisher For Defamation | Co.Design – this could be the architectural PR home goal equivalent of the McLibel trial

    The story behind the shrinking ranks of Goldman partners – Quartz – shrinking partners as it tries to cut its cloth to suit the new size of banking

    Kay Tye, Maryam Shanechi, and Other Pioneering Young Technologists | MIT Technology Review – its a shame that there isn’t great industrial designers in the group, but some great technologies

    Facebook Assault on Google’s DoubleClick Coming This Fall – The Information – (paywall)

    Adult Women Now Make Up Half of All Gamers, Outnumber Boys Under 18 Years Old – Gamers gonna game. – which moves gaming back to where it was when Atari made consoles. I wonder if the proportion of men over 30 playing games is still as high as it was

    Tony Alva Interview / Slam City Skates Blog – interview with one of the pioneers of skateboarding

    Smart wristbands gaining traction for site-specific payments and passes | JWT Intelligence – Disney showed the way, though it could be considered to be an evolution of the likes of Octopus and Oyster cards

    Jolla boss says mobile innovation has stalled | Marketing Interactive – stalled probably isn’t the word that I would use, I would say that we’ve hit a lull in mobile innovation and that innovation in general is ‘lumpy’ More related content here.

    The Internet of Things will be vulnerable for years, and no one is incentivized to fix it | VentureBeat – keep your home dumb

    Chinese internet censors target collective activities more than sensitive subjects, says Harvard report | South China Morning Post – implications in this for crisis monitoring

    Why John McAfee Is Paranoid About Mobile | Dark Reading – probably a reason why the US Government is now investigating stinger usage

    Most smartphone users download zero apps per month – Quartz – it kind of makes sense once I find something I tend to stick with it, am sure my app downloads would be below one a month now unless something with compelling utility comes a long. But then I don’t game

    Sony selfie camera pictures leaked ahead of launch | BGR – interesting idea. I know some people who have a Chanel perfume bottle shaped iPhone case so the look and feel makes sense. Would they use this alongside an iPhone though?

    Amazon China to Deliver Foreign Products Directly — China Internet Watch – Amazon is less than 3% of Chinese e-tailing

    Promiscuous media: News needs to go where the people are, not the other way around – Media companies like BuzzFeed, NowThis News and Fusion are increasingly creating content that is designed to live on other apps and services rather than just including links to their websites. – Web 2.0 model repeated with attribution being the important thing since that will bring people in to then see advertising