They say that technology is lifeless silicon and plastic. And yet the piles of it around my desk—the creeping kipple that surrounds every tech writer—seem to fester like a mountain of meat. This is the stuff that comes unsolicited to our door, with a covering letter addressed to "Hi."
This is not how quality gadgets turn up. Laptops, DSLR cameras, audio components and the like are pitched; we are either convinced to cover them, or solicit review units ourselves. Sony Vaios and $1,000 Yamaha keyboards don't get dumped in the lobby with a "please review me" note.
No, this stuff is the junk. It's the gear one feels may warrant a blog post, perhaps, but which one never gets around to writing because it's junk. Digital thermometers, $5 Skype handsets, CD polishing trays, USB decorations...
A mysterious curl of cheap black plastic may appear one day at the base of the pile, having fallen from something within it during the night. Loaded with the cheapest, nastiest double-AAs on Earth, a toy that's been in the pile a long while may froth at the battery compartment with a curious rusty bloom. When all is quiet, a murmur of subsidence inside the pile may result in a single, unnerving beep from deep within. It decays but it grows—therefore, it must be alive.
Anyway, one day I'll get rid of all this crap in a competition, or something. Until then, I need somewhere to store it, and I would like to be able to store it in a set of Magnetique Shelves, created by Andrew Liszewski, which Oh Gizmo! reports will free us from the organizational conformity imposed on us by IKEA. I don't fancy paying $1,230-$2,150 for them, however, so some old cardboard boxes will probably have to suffice.
Hey, anyone want a broken promotional wristwatch sporting the logo of a CES attendee from Shenzhen that you've never heard of?
Product Page [Magnetique via Oh Gizmo!]
Let's admit it: we all like to imagine the perfect workstation. Perhaps yours is a metal slab in a stone cellar packed with blinking hardware and writhing mountains of cable; maybe it's a Mason Verger-style bed surrounded by enormous LCD displays and stock tickers. BornRich's list of luxury workstations is food for thought, packed as it is with a wild variety of overpriced desks and computer racks.
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