Ikea Symfonisk speaker and other things that caught my eye this week

A great YouTube teardown of the Ikea Symfonisk bookshelf speaker. The speaker works with a Sonos equipped home and was designed in conjunction with Sonos. The Symfonisk bookshelf speaker is part of a range. They’re built for convenience rather than high fidelity.

Don’t expect it to last long after its warranty is over. The Sonos product design on which it’s based doesn’t deserve the premium that has been put on it historically. The Symfonisk looks like a low quality product which exists to help Ikea and Sonos cross-sell and upsell consumers on other products.

The Trump supporters protest ‘Stop the Steal ‘looked to an outsider like an absurdist performative art performance that went wrong with criminal damage and five dead at the time of writing.

https://twitter.com/dublonothing/status/1347078502412009476

If like me, you were left wondering what just happened? And then asking yourself what on earth is QAnon? Bellingcat has you covered.

At the moment American politicians are calling it a coup attempt and asking for the participants to be locked up and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I get it. What the politicians are failing to do is come up with the better, more attractive belief system than QAnon. I think that’s a problem. It’s why over 25 years after the Oklahoma City bombing, the far right is stronger than ever.

Jailing participants creates as many problems as it solves. It provides martyrs to a cause, like McVeigh became. But not jailing them says that their conduct is within the realm of respectability. As for a better idea, you could do worse than look at the Depolarization Project.

Stop The Steal, January 6, 2021 St. Paul, Minn.
Protestors out side the Governors residence in St Pauls, Minnesota as part of the Stop The Steal protests / coup attempt.

Drum and Bass seems to be having a renaissance, with it getting more prominence in the likes of Mixmag and elsewhere. A great example is this recent guest mix by Carl Cox for Edible Beats.

Sony’s Trinitron was a byword for the best quality TV experience when CRTs ruled display technology. This history of the technology shows Sony at its engineering best for decades.