carsten knoch - essays + ideas
A blog about technology, politics, business, anthropology and (occasionally) music written by Carsten Knoch.
At first glance, a home phone seems like a somewhat quaint, old-fashioned thing to have these days. With mobile phones everywhere, it seems unnecessary and perhaps a little wasteful. Call me nostalgic, then, but I really like to have one. I have a few […]
Three weeks ago, I bought a Jawbone UP. It’s a movement-tracking bracelet that can be plugged into your iPhone (or Android device) once or twice a day to transmit your activity to a mobile app. (You can also download your tracking data as a […]
I had read about the i-20 iPod dock a few months ago. It seemed like a very exciting proposition: a dock that could extract the digital signal of the music stored on an iPod without relying on the iPod’s own digital-to-analogue circuitry, and pass […]
In Part 2 of this post, I discuss my mobile tech (smartphones, tablets and such) as well as my music reproduction hardware. Part 1 (Hardware and Software) is here. On the mobile front, I’m a happy iPhone 3GS user and have been for a […]
“One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop.” — G. Weilacher “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” — Albert […]
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 when engaged with properly, […]
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 so too do people […]
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 and Scarlett Johannson wear […]
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