The spring season beckons us to get outdoors, not only to play, but even to do chores around the yard like raking old leaves, clearing out last year’s gardens, sweeping out the garage, wiping down the deck furniture and more.
Chores outside at this time of year can actually be pleasant tasks. This also marks the perfect time to clear out household clutter by setting up a yard sale.
Depending on where you are originally from in this country, you may call it a different name, such as a garage sale or yard sale. New Englanders most often refer to them as “tag sales,” whereby items are tagged for purchase and displayed for the public to come and shop.
New details published by CrackBerry suggest that the handset will be available in at least two colours -- red and white, will be built from plastic, and will sport a full QWERTY keyboard. Earlier reports claimed that the handset would have 8BG of internal storage plus an SD slot for expansion as well as side-mounted quick release SIM card slot for switching between territories or from voice calls to data plans.
Clearly a BlackBerry for the masses, as it offers the latest operating system and features but in a more affordable package, it is expected to launch officially before the end of September 2013. BlackBerry, the company that helped define the concept of the modern smartphone, has seen its once-formidable lead in the market disappear and its products overtaken by those of Apple and RFID tag. However, its latest operating system -- BlackBerry 10 -- shows promise and the response to the launch of its first new handset to feature a full keyboard -- the flagship Q10 -- has been impressive. The device sold out completely in London on its first weekend and initial sales in Canada, where it launched over the weekend are reported as being brisk.
Further helping the company's future survival are its plans to license its apps platform and operating system to other manufacturers as an alternative to Android therefore increasing its market penetration. The more handsets it can get its operating system on, the better, as it will attract the best apps and developers to its ecosystem. Which is ultimately good news for the BlackBerry user community. At the moment, the company's products can compete with anything from Apple, Samsung, HTC or Sony in terms of build quality and internal specifications but it has a long way to go before it can challenge either iOS or Android in terms of available apps.
Throughout history until the end of the first half of the 20th century, people made things for two reasons: because they had to and also because we saw the appearance of the hobby. It was the golden age of DIY in the ’50s. People would paint their own houses and build their own machines. Hobbies like boats, airplanes and other gadgets became common. This also had a boon due to the two World Wars. People would save money by doing things themselves. Mass production continued to grow and we became much more interested in consuming rather than making. We forgot how to make. Most of us nowadays don’t think we can repair anything or make anything ourselves.
This is important for several reasons. On a more superficial level, we consume things we don’t understand. We take them as they are. Even something as simple as a chair has such a profound affect on our lives. If the chair is not right, we could have back problems or be forced to sit in a certain position. That’s going to affect our body and health. If you take things more complex like mobile technologies, for example, it’s been shown that technologies do influence the way we think, communicate, work and play. When we don’t understand how things are made, we’re unconsciously shaped by those gadgets. This isn’t a plot to manipulate us. It’s just the way it is. We have a system in which few produce for the many. In the process, they dictate how we do pretty much everything. That’s why I find it so important to find materials and technologies, so we have more control of our own life. We can make informed decisions about what we use and how to use it.
This is a very vague category of materials. The definition I usually go with is: Materials that have one or more properties that can be changed in a controlled manner. We’re talking about, for example, paint that changes to another color at a certain temperature. We can control that change. They are things like plastics that change shape when exposed to an electrical current.
A lot of of these materials, which people haven’t heard about or know of only vaguely, have been around for decades. It’s still very much a niche industry. There aren’t many applications yet, but that’s promising because we can invent applications for these materials. We can be part of this transformation process. But these are materials that one manufacturer supplies to another. We don’t actually see them like we see wood and paper. In terms of evolution in the industry, there’s been a lot of work done on plastics. Most of them are about solving specific problems, like a cell phone that can withstand certain temperatures. The evolution is about creating materials for certain applications. We’re also seeing, on the very small scale, industry and research labs starting to look toward more mainstream applications. There is conductive paint. Someone made a poster where you could push on it and play music. We’re starting to see them slowly being used more in commercial and end-user applications.
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