Talk about desperation. LG obviously had to really go low this time to get noticed. What is the message here? LG - the phone for peeping toms?

Yet another example of “ground breaking creativity” by some ad agency no doubt.

Fail.

Here is an example of a design solution to a non-problem:

It is an electronic version of the white stick used by the blind. It senses obstacles and provides feedback to the user through buzzing.

It is a worthy exploration of an idea for sure. But is it viable? Is it really an improvement over the existing solution? The comments on Gizmodo (where I spotted …

I recently walked pass a whole section in a shopping centre in Singapore selling humidifiers. This is just so “wrong”!

In case you have not been through Singapore, the temperature tends to be around the 30s (Celsius) with very high humidity. Everywhere is heavily air-conditioned. Cooled air tends to be drier, hence the humidifiers I am guessing. So strange, so illogical, and oh so human.

Air conditioners do dry out …

Thoughts sparked by Stilgherrian’s post of the same title:

Much conventional business practice is simply incompatible with humanity. The less human we can be, the more successful we will be in business.

For too long now there is only one way to do business, and one definition of success, and one goal. The domain of business has long been dominated by the uncreative, the greedy, the exploitative, the …

I put some extra RAM into a friend’s laptop over the weekend. A lame dog with 256Mb, it now runs like a dream with 1.2Gb.

I am flabbergasted that Dell would sell a Windows XP laptop with only 256Mb of RAM. Sure, that is Microsoft’s published minimum requirement for XP; which of course, is the barest minimum it will take for the operating system to …

Artist Chris Jordan has created some amazing prints that really rubs home the consumerist madness that is the US, with us in Australia likely not that far behind.

If you have children, be very very scared for their future.

Spotted by way of this post by John Maeda.

When you have no real differentiation, and you are selling a commodity product, and you don’t really give a damn about doing any better; you resort to gimmickry.

I had a case of deodorant can failure this morning. I pressed down on the trigger of a new can and no freshness came out. I looked closer at the can and saw this:

WTF?!! Someone invested effort, brain …

In the mad dash to make yet-more-money before Christmas, the pet shop chain Pets Paradise and Pet Goods Direct are selling the latest in throwaway crass pet torture chambers in the form of the iPond (no relation to Apple).

Essentially it is a little speaker with a fish “cup” stuck on top of it. You fill the “cup” with just over two cups of water, …

“[America has] two values: How much can a man consume for the highest possible price, and how much can he produce for the possible pay?” said the character Chambord in Robert Ludlum’s The Paris Option (by Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lynds).

This is likely true of all Western civilisations, including Australia.

We get paid less and less to do more and more work. And yet at the same time, we …

There’s been quite a few stories in the media lately about dodgy Chinese manufacturers. Lead paint on toys, bad pet food and so forth. Without endorsing these bad practices, what I want to know is, how much of this is actually our own fault?

We sit in our safe, clean and large homes well away from the factories of China. Our consumption-mad society demands ever more stuff at ever …