journeyman

For those nomadic souls that could set up shop and work from anywhere or need to be at hand for a particular gig or assignment one automotive company with a significant manufacturing presence in the UK has created a fully electric mobile office space, housed in a minivan. Although not as impressive or committed, in my opinion, as the gentleman that shared his custom project to live on the road, the portable, pop-up office looks really clever and conducive to productivity. Designing the interior to look like a coffee shop is also a nice touch. Click on the link up top to get a full tour of the features and watch a demonstration video.

oppdemmingspolitikk

I was a bit floored by the by posturing and threats that Russia had for Norway over plans to host a rotational detachment of some three hundred US Marines in Værnes near Trondheim, not so much for the way plenipotentiaries are want to escalate anything to do with the perception of NATO expansion, but that Norway wasn’t already host—or considered host to US troops. I didn’t think the small but continued presence at Stavanger was a secret (or had closed shop)—we even passed by it, and maybe the locations are secret but the US is known also to store vast amounts of materiel and munitions in tunnels and bunkers in the fjords and mountains as forward supply in case tensions were to rise. Who would have guessed that policies and plans implemented back during the Cold War era, and sustained out of inertia, would now be the object of scrutiny and contention?

macguffin

Not to diminish the acclaim or original nature of Black Mirror, which makes us confront our relations to technology and convenience in the same way shows like the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits made us question our tenuous hold on reality and moral uprightness, I think I’d like to preview this adaptation inspired by Roald Dahl’s collection of short stories, thrillers for adults. Despite running for eleven seasons, I have no recollection of Tales of the Unexpected—the plot summaries of the episodes do sound archetypal, not formulaic, and leave the view challenged and draw his or her own conclusions.

phreaking

Lately the term “dog-whistle” has taken on a purely figurative meaning for veiled code words that a signals a political response to those in the know, however, apparently marketers are adopting a very literal feature outside of the human range of hearing to gather and spread demographic information about potential consumers without their knowledge—with potential for much more invasive acts.
Though the method is comparatively an indirect one, it made me think of the subliminal messages embedded in movies to make people salivate and seek refreshment—and then perhaps as a closer parallel was the earlier experimental techniques of phreakers, playing a sequence of tones into headsets to commandeer telephone networks and make free long-distance calls. There’s surely nothing savoury in ultrasonic hacking and while the big telecoms may have seen nothing redeeming in “toll fraud” that undercut their profits, the founders of Apple and other industry luminaries got their start in this community.