Search results for: “Ikea”
-
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…
-
Apple and China + more things
Apple and China Elliott Management wrote this opinion piece on Apple and China: Apple is a Chinese company | Financial Times – interesting assessment of risk exposure with a focus on the Apple share price. The Apple and China relationship started before China joined the WTO. Taiwanese contract manufacturers had built huge industrial sites in…
-
Hiro Protagonist & more things
Hiro Protagonist Hiro Protagonist is the main character of Neal Stephenson’s iconic novel Snow Crash. In the novel talks about the rise of the corporation to become a quasi-nation state, a winner takes all economy, a vision of a future metaverse, hacker culture and service hyper-competition with Uber-like employees. Hiro Protagonist is a hacker who…
-
Moviedrome
Alex Cox One of the cultural things that most defined the 1980s for me was the Moviedrome series of films on BBC 2. Late on a Sunday night, audiences were introduced to films by film director and academic Alex Cox. Cox had a singular vision and an encyclopaedic knowledge that he used to showcase the…
-
Afghanistan + other news
Afghanistan I couldn’t avoid doing a post on Afghanistan given what had been going on this week. The Afghanistan conflict posed a number of interesting questions about: The US Is Removing Records of Its War in Afghanistan From the Internet – Lives are on the line here, but helping them may mean destroying—even if temporarily—the…
-
Knowledge economy + more things
How does the UK rank as a knowledge economy? – Soft Machines – The big story is the huge rise of China, and in this context, inevitable that the rest of the world’s share of the advanced economy has fallen. But the UK’s fall is larger than competitors (-46%, cf -19% for the USA and…
-
CD ROM history + more news
CD ROM reflections How “God Makes God” is a 1993 CD ROM about probability, game theory, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary strategies | Boing Boing – I remember having my mind blown by this CD ROM at college. It reminded me of Jostein Gaarder’s book Sophie’s World in terms of its approach to making philosophy entertaining…
-
Things that caught my eye this week
Indonesia is a fascinating place in and of itself and comes up with all kinds of cultural nuggets. The latest one that I came across was the Vespa Extreme moped sub-culture. Vespa scooters are plentiful in Indonesia, as is the desire to invent. Car tuning culture is big amongst the middle class. But for those…
-
Small business + other news
Small business What does small business really contribute to economic growth? | Aeon Essays – not as much as politicians etc would have you believe. Probably the most emblematic example of ‘small business’ contributing to economic growth was Margaret Thatcher. Small business and financial services were supposed to replace the manufacturing sector which had been…