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Tag: design
Pick Up The Smartest Clock In The World — For $30 Off

Pick Up The Smartest Clock In The World — For $30 Off

With smart devices everywhere, smartwatches and other tech-enabled timepieces have become the standard. But why settle for smart when you could just go ahead and get the smartest…as in, the smartest clock in the world?

The LaMetric Time programmable clock just may hold that title, so when the opportunity arises to get this aggressively power-packed timekeeper at 15 percent off — just $169 — you may just want to pay close attention.

Yes, you can plug The LaMetric Time in and it’ll tell you the time. But like the best smart devices of this age, this multi-functional package links via WiFi to literally dozens of partner apps, feeding you virtually any information you want whenever you want it.

Along with the time, you can get current weather conditions, Google email notifications, stock quotes and a whole armada of social media alerts and stats for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more (including this huge list of apps listed on LaMetric Time’s website).

Since we’re all already assembling a home full of smart products, LaMetric Time can also serve as your control center for all that smart tech. You can control objects like Philips Hue lightbulbs and a Nest thermostat right from this unit.

It’s even got a Bluetooth speaker built-in to stream music, all in a slick, compact package that won the LaMetric Time team a 2016 Red Dot Design Award.

Right now you can turn LaMetric Time into the indispensable housemate you’re looking for at 15 percent of its retail price, only $169 while this offer lasts.

This sponsored post is brought to you by StackCommerce. 

10 Ways Trump’s Taste In Interior Decor Would Fit Right Into A Third World Dictator’s Palace

10 Ways Trump’s Taste In Interior Decor Would Fit Right Into A Third World Dictator’s Palace

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Gold, mirrors, marble: These huge-scale, opulent interior design elements have become so effectively branded by Donald Trump that “Saturday Night Live” would have no trouble evoking a chuckle of recognition from over-the-top Trumpian set design, before a comedian’s first line is uttered. In a recent Politico article titled “Trump’s Dictator Chic,” Peter York puts Trump’s style in gruesome context.

York describes looking at photos of an unidentified home in late 2015 whose description today couldn’t be mistaken for anything but that of Donald Trump. But at the time, faced with a veritable checklist of what York calls “dictator chic” design, he thought it bore more similarity to some of the 16 case studies (“strongmen from Mexico’s Porfirio Díaz to Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic,” in York’s words) he researched for his 2006 book, Dictator Style.

Here are 10 features of “dictator chic” York identifies in his Politico piece:

1. When it comes to size, York advises dictator designers to “Go big.”

2. Use “brand spanking new” materials even when imitating antiques.

3. “Think French,” says York, because “French [design] can always be counted on to say ‘money.’”

4. Don’t skimp on the gold, as York explains: “‘If I’ve only got one life,’ most dictators seem to think, ‘let me live it surrounded by gold.’”

5. Perhaps most relevant to the 45th U.S. president is this weird rule: Use hotels as design inspiration.

6. Glass is good: “the better to reflect one’s abundant opulence,” says York with tongue in cheek.

7. Not just any marble will do for a dictator, writes York: “New, shiny marble, of course, not the worn, old stuff.”

8. When it comes to art, dictators “prefer big and bright 19th-century potboilers, or their modern equivalents, to Old Masters (too dark and grim) and to contemporary or abstract art (too ugly and pointless).”

9. Branding is key, as York points out: “Dictators also like known-value items—things that people will understand instantly, aka brands. If you’ve got Lamborghinis and Ferraris out front, you want the equivalent inside: Aubusson carpets (new copies, of course), Chinese Ming vases (ditto) and bright Versace-style fabrics.”

10. The most important brand is oneself, of course, so a life-size portrait of the dictator is apparently necessary. As York explains:

“A trick that dictators have pinched from the old aristocratic world is getting themselves painted, life-size or bigger, in grandiose situations, imperial get-ups or heroic endeavors, and hanging these pictorial hagiographies so that they dominate entryways or key rooms.”

Anticipating those who might scoff at dissecting interior design to any meaningful conclusions about a homeowner—as if the room were The Great Gatsby left to the divinations of a middle school English class—York offers this defense: “Domestic interiors reveal how people want to be seen. But they also reveal something about the owners’ inner lives, their cultural reference points and how they relate to other people.”

York examines some of the possible psychology conveyed by interior design choices: “No matter how you looked at it, the main thing this apartment said was, ‘I am tremendously rich and unthinkably powerful.’ This was the visual language of public, not private, space.” Rule #5 on hotels may be linked, according to York, to “the grandest ones” seen by young “would-be dictators who came from modest backgrounds as rebels or soldiers.”

When there’s such a dizzying abundance of White House tradition-breaking detail surrounding this administration to be analyzed, though, perhaps it’s better to start with cabinets than with chairs.

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

In A Tehran Without Nightlife, A Bridge Becomes A Gathering Place

In A Tehran Without Nightlife, A Bridge Becomes A Gathering Place

By Roy Gutman, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

TEHRAN, Iran – In a city ruled by the automobile, where crossing the street entails risking your life and a real downtown doesn’t exist, there could hardly be a more unusual weekend destination than the newly built Tabiat Bridge – perched over a busy expressway.

Not quite a year after opening to the public, this undulating, multilevel pedestrian bridge, with its curving walkways and sloping ramps, benches and cafes, has become the go-to place for young people on Friday or Saturday evenings. They stroll about with their friends, listening to music and showing the sort the intimacy between the sexes that the Islamic Republic frowns on in public places.

With well-tended parks at either end, the city lights twinkling to the south and traffic moving slowly on the Modarres highway below, the 890-foot-long bridge has become a gathering point for people from all over the city of 8.3 million.

It’s a new symbol for the Iranian capital, its popularity due in no small part to the fact that, in Tehran, there’s nowhere else to go.

“If I had a choice, I’d rather be at a rock concert,” said Soheil, a 20-year-old basketball coach who is getting a bachelor’s degree in physical education and asked to be identified only by his first name. “But the government always bans them.”

Soheil was among the crowd of people who packed the bridge on a Friday evening. In Aab-o-Atash Park, at the bridge’s eastern end, children frolicked in dancing water fountains as families played no-net badminton. In hilly, wooded Taleghani Park at the bridge’s western end, strollers walked along well-landscaped paths.

Gholamhassein Karbaschi, the former Tehran mayor renowned as the master builder of the city’s burgeoning park system, had Iran’s social constraints in mind when he launched the growth of the system, as did the young architect who designed the bridge at age 21.

“We don’t have dance clubs and nightclubs,” said Karabaschi, a reformist who served as mayor from 1991 to 1999 and might have been a candidate for national president until he was jailed on corruption charges in what appeared to be a political frame-up. Parks are “the only place people can go.”

With support from Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the centrist president who recruited him, and from his successor, reformist President Mohammad Khatami, Karabaschi built on a comprehensive urban plan designed before the Islamic revolution. He insisted on the best experts and architects available and rode herd during construction.

“I supervised all the details,” he told McClatchy.

It was thanks to a contest that Leila Araghian, then 26, was able to design the Tabiat Bridge. “They wanted something complex, to give an identity to those areas and become a symbol of Tehran,” she said. But Araghian wanted “something modest, but that has character and is interesting enough to have an identity.”

The result is not a utilitarian passage from one point to another, but a path full of unexpected turns, features and vistas. The bridge curves, blurring the destination, “so you won’t know where it is taking you.”

Having won the competition in 2008, Araghian then went to the University of British Colombia in Vancouver, where she wrote her thesis analyzing her own project. Her theme was “Modesty, Serendipity and Silence.”

It’s a very Iranian approach to design, she said. In Kashan, a city in central Iran, houses all have mud walls and a simple door as the entrance, and the way into the house is through a corridor, which then opens onto a huge garden. But there may also be a hidden private garden, where strangers are not welcome.

“It’s a labyrinthine style of building. You discover it through a continuous journey.” And she discovered that that is what drove her design. “I was not aware that that is how I think,” she said.

“The bridge is a serendipitous space,” she said. “When you hide things, there is a chance of discovering. And the excitement you have when you discover it by yourself is a better feeling than when you are expecting it.”

Photo: Blondinrikard Fröberg via Flickr 

Apple Unveils Two Big-Screen iPhones

Apple Unveils Two Big-Screen iPhones

San Francisco (AFP) — Apple on Tuesday unveiled two new versions of the iPhone, boosting the screen size of the iconic smartphone to 4.7 and 5.5 inches.

Unveiling the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple chief Tim Cook said the company was launching “the biggest advancement in the history of iPhones.”

Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller, speaking in Cupertino, California, said the new iPhones were “simply stunning” with polarized glass displays and bodies that are “thinner than ever before.”

“These are the best phones ever made,” Schiller said, as he described the new devices at a major set-piece event streamed live online.

The new iPhone 6 will start at the same price of existing iPhones at $199 for U.S. customers while the iPhone 6 Plus will be at $299 with a two-year contract.

Schiller said the devices would be available in at least 115 countries by the end of the year.

Apple will cut the price of existing iPhone 5S and 5C with the launch.

Apple’s move, expanding the latest iPhone with a four-inch screen, comes as consumers are switching to handsets with bigger displays to watch videos and browse the Internet.

Observers say the timing is right for Apple to introduce a generation of iPhone 6 models with screen sizes stretched to tap into users’ love for “phablets” that combine the features of smartphones and tablets.

AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan

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