Product Designers – the Curse of the Hermit
I have hermit-like tendencies, or more accurately, I want to. I spend most of my life just wishing that I could be left alone but thanks to product designers coming up with new shiny toys that keep me in touch with the world I don’t think I’m ever going to get there.
See, I really want to be left alone, but I seem to have some kind of genetic defect that makes me go ‘Ooooh, shiny’ whenever I see gadgetry and I instantly cannot live without it; iPods, laptops, netbooks, BlackBerry’s, Xbox’s, Sky HD, you name it. Pretty much everything has WiFi on it these days too, meaning that I’m always connected.
Not my stuff
Essentially, until product designers stop making shiny things that I want, it looks like I’m going to be stuck in the real world surrounded by people and not in my glorious hermit republic. Ah well, it’s still the dream.
Gadget Lust: Underfloor Heating
It’s official – I’ve run out of gadgets to buy. I’ve got them all, from the looks of things – video camera, DSLR camera, plasma TV and pretty much everything else I can fit into my room, but after visiting my friends’ new place last night, I’ve come up with something else: underfloor heating.
It’s not really a gadget in the best sense of the word as it’s more of an investment than say a camera or video games console which I can upgrade in a couple of years time when something better comes out, but it’s still cool as hell.
When Products Become Brands
I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of days, especially while I’ve been reorganising my room. While moving the ton of books, video games and gadgets around, I’ve got to thinking about how product design integrates with branding: particularly the way in which some things get called by their brand name rather than what they are.
I’m one of those people that deliberately avoids being ‘cool;’ I wear very few branded clothes, I wouldn’t have a clue who’s in the top fifty in the music charts at the moment, I will very rarely watch TV or a film because everyone’s talking about it and don’t even get me started on the bestsellers list for books. Dan Flippin’ Brown?! Really?
Keeping Up Appearances
Lots of people do it; they invest lots of time, money and effort into looking like they’ve got more time and money than they really do. I suppose I’m guilty of it too – I wear Oakley sunglasses, use an iPod Touch and a new BlackBerry Curve, but I put that down to just liking nice things and being lucky that I have friends who work in retail and can get me good deals, and I’ll always admit that if someone asks. You’d certainly never catch me buying a used BMW, grabbing a custom number plate and trying to pass it off as new the way my neighbour has, just to make myself look richer than I am.
TechThursday Reviews: The Elonex eReader
The postman has finally turned up with the gadget we were supposed to be reviewing last TechThursday, so apologies for this one being a little late, but today we’re going to be reviewing the
Elonex eReader.
Sneak Photography
I’m not one of those people that always has a camera to hand. I’ve got a digital camera of course, it’s quite a good one too, but I almost never take it on nights out, because I’m just not that kind of person. My flatmates and most of my friends are though. We recently did a sort of team building meal for the club night we organise and run and so the team (the main organiser, the DJs, the techie – that’s me – and the helper monkeys) went out to dinner, followed by a few drinks at our local. We all dressed up smart, had a great meal and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, but with about five cameras between us, the amount of photos which ended up doing the rounds was staggering. Suffice to say, some of those pictures were horrors.
TechThursday Reviews – Sony PSP Go!
We’re going to be attempting to bring some kind of structure to this crazy blog in the next couple of weeks; we’ve got a lots of ranting to do, lots of Coke Zero induced panicking about CCTV and then we’ve got our ongoing tech reviews and rediscovering great pieces of music that you may have missed the first time around, and just throwing these at you whenever we feel like doing one makes us at Caffeine Overdose feel a little mean, to be honest. So here’s how we’re going to try and make things work: Monday will be Unappreciated Gems and Thursday will now be known as TechThursday and we’re going to try and get a Twitter Trending Topic out of it because they wind Ben up so much – #TechThursday, you know you want to!
Reviews – Acer Revo R3600 Media PC
Aimed at the user who wants to centralise all their media players on a budget, the Acer Revo is one of the handy new range of ‘Nettop’ PC’s, but is it as useful as the idea suggests?
Reviews – Klipsch Image X5 Earphones
At Caffeine Overdose, we love all kinds of technology; from phones to cars, and that’s what this category is all about. We’ll review almost anything we can get our hands on (mostly from Ben’s extensive and ongoing collection of stuff he doesn’t need but can manage to convince himself he does), but if you’ve got a product you’d like reviewed, send one to us* and we’ll do our best to give it a fair unbiased hearing.
* You will not get it back!
With that out of the way, here’s our first review: Ben’s Klipsch Image X5 Earphones.