More Audio Engine speakers

The best desktop speakers, ever

Everyone’s lamenting the decline of proper stereo equipment. Teens are losing their hearing to their tinny iPod earbuds and nobody knows what non-compressed music sounds like anymore. People don’t buy stereos these days — listening to music in one’s living … [read more]

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Buying (classical) music online, digitally

For the past 6 months, I’ve been listening to classical music almost exclusively. (There’s a much longer post – or maybe a series – about that in the works.) Toronto, like most major cities, is definitely under-supplied with bricks & … [read more]

Facebook privacy & digital NIMBY

The more you ‘live life transparently,’ the more you post to your social networking life stream, the more ‘friends’ and acquaintances you pick up along the way, the more you invite trouble. Well — that may be stating it strongly. … [read more]

What we can learn from gear porn

  Nerds get a bad rap. We are being made fun of for our love of, and intimate ways with, our gear. When I say ‘gear,’ I mean computers, musical instruments, stereo equipment, cameras… anything that only reveals its depth … [read more]

Smartphones! by Vincent Diamante Creative Commons via Flickr

Corporate applications and content on smartphones

Barack Obama’s former BlackBerry, and the highly secure clunker it was allegedly replaced with, seem like an apt encapsulation of what enterprises are facing with the glut of new smartphones their users are connecting to corporate networks everywhere. As we … [read more]

Don Norman

Complexity and emotion in design

  I like some of Don Norman‘s (now slightly older) theses about complexity and emotion in design. In an online essay entitled Emotional Design: People and Things he writes, Products differ in their appeal on the three design dimensions, but … [read more]

Why Apple’s iPad will be very, very successful

Sometimes, the prevailing discourse on the Internet makes one want to despair. Blog post after blog post of the same drivel. It often feels as though the ‘blogosphere’ is a little like The Island, a 2005 movie where Ewan McGregor … [read more]