If you chew on your nails, don't bother reading this.
A nail cutter is the last thing you need because your teeth do the job just as effectively.
The humble nail cutter is standard in households.
Stainless steel with concave clipper blades and a functional design. It's a lot like the office clip. The look hasn't been updated in decades.
The slightly rough pattern on the back to smooth out the snipped nail edges is also standard.
But have you noticed how it is always easier to cut the nails on your left hand? If you're naturally right-handed, that is.
Left handed, when cutting the nails on your right, is awkward. It's like you're back to being a novice
Much like trying to write with your left hand.
The first time I saw a nail cutter with scissor handles on an online store, I laughed.
It looked like a freak.
A design experiment gone wrong.
Then, I went ahead and ordered them, because I wondered who would go so far as to manufacture something as ridiculous as this.
I'm a fan now. It gives you a grip that the earlier design never could.
But it still looks funny.
Stuff some cotton into your ears
Has your hearing reduced by about 70% or more?
Does it feel disorienting?
The Sound of Metal explores what it means to go deaf.
The premise is that a drummer loses his hearing practically overnight.
Riz Ahmed plays the lead and his performance forces you to confront what he's facing - a world going silent.
It's terrifying and the scenes where a garbled set of distant sounds confuse, then mystify him, drive home what he's going through
One of the crucial aspects of making the film work is the sound design by Nicholas Becker
He had to imagine what is was like to live through the journey
At a musical research center IRCAM, he went into a sound studio where every trace of sound can be banished. With the lights turned off, he wanted to understand the experience of a complete absence of sound.
Close your eyes and concentrate on the world around you.
It's never silent. The ear has a remarkable capacity for depth we don't appreciate.
That's what the film does to you.
It brings you up close to living in total, unending silence.
Maybe we'll give our senses the respect they deserve.
Can you replace bits of your laptop?
Let's say, your display goes blank
Most of the time, that's a sign of a deeper problem and buying a replacement is expensive.
A new brand of laptops is being launched to tackle precisely this problem.
The laptops we discard every year because they aren't fast enough, sleek enough or because repairs are simply too time-consuming could be a thing of the past if the idea works.
Hardware replacements are a lot tougher because they come from diverse sources and optimising every part of the supply chain is a sticky problem to solve.
Framework has created laptops we can customize - how many ports we want or add memory slots and other specific bits to keep them running longer.
It goes against existing business models where you simply dispose of it and don't really care where it goes.
In most cases, they go to landfills creating a bigger problem.
It's not as if our new laptops work very differently from the ones we already have. Delaying an upgrade cuts those e-waste figures
And Framework has thought through the entire process of manufacture, replacement and repairs.
The modular laptop has arrived.
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