A marvellous, solid, heavy and slightly mysterious telephone with a big loudspeaker on the front and connections on the back that look like something from a battleship (what is it?). One of my favourite old gadgets (bought, like all the others, from the place old things go to die: Brick Lane market).
Tag: Storage
From the storage unit
It’s 1980. Malcolm McLaren’s making his first, difficult post-punk career change. Lots of fuss in the tabloids (and in the NME) about under-age singer Annabella Lwin. Brief Walkman frenzy (do you remember there was an effort to name them ‘stowaways’?) – lots of cassette-only releases. ‘Cassette culture’, which was a bit like podcasting, I suppose – DIY media plus cheap, accessible distribution. Bow Wow Wow‘s very knowing, very Pop Art concept – distinctly PoMo. Cool, pointless flip-top packaging. Funny to think that an audio cassette could be the very limit of cool 25 years ago. Wish I had a cassette player to play it on now…
You want me to provide my own firewall?
I guess my main problem with Danny O’Brien’s thinking about running web-based services from home is a kind of category uneasiness. The kind of services Danny wants us to run belong, for me, to the same category as electricity, a working phone line, gas supply. They’re utilities and they need to work all the time. I don’t trust myself to provide a stable power supply, a properly installed mail server, enough redundant hard disk for all my files. Some services just need to be nearer the centre. The extreme fringes (my kitchen, for instance) are not the best place to provide guaranteed or high-availability services. I want someone else to worry about all that. And besides, who would I complain to?