SteelSkin.net – The Ramblings of Chris Nutt

I guess wood and electronics have a shaky history, with the likes of fake wood effect as seen on the Atari 2600. However I really like natural materials. iWood from Miniot is a great example of wood in a modern and attractive design. Also love WoodStation by Sebastian Wallet. I can really see me owning both, although I am no iPod lover to the iWood is less likely. I love hi-tech futurist devices, but tactile feed back has always pushed my buttons and a nice material like wood gives that.

I recently purchased an Aiwa AM-NX9 from Ebay. It’s a Net MiniDisc from the brief period that Aiwa was branch of Sony before being shut down.

Sony had hoped that AIWA could become their new youth orientated brand to combat Apple and its own fading brand name. Sony at this time was serious limited by its music and movie departments demands. They couldn’t easily get MP3 support for MiniDisc let alone launch their own. Aiwa seemed to be a nice backdoor around this. So by launching some re-branded Sony kit with some funky designs they could get the ball rolling. Unfortunately AIWA was much more of an budget and older person’s brand far from the young and luxurious Apple brand they were hoping to compete with. For example my parents own a lovely dark green AIWA Mini HiFi the same colour as the oldies’ favourite the Nissan Micra.

It is a shame as I think the styling on the AIWA youth MDs were very nice. I purchased the mass market AM-NX9, although in nice Black and Red combo instead of the more common Silver and Green. Rarer models are even more impressive looking like the AM-NX1. The NX9 is a very feature starved unit, next to the MZ-N710 it looks particularly weak and no amount of styling can hide this. It is a shame that Sony didn’t keep up a AIWA or another youth brand as some of their later designs look incredibly bland and stodgy being neither the Minimalistic Apple or Maximalistic AIWA.

You may or may not know that I am a big fan of Opera for Windows. I find it personally to be the best browser on the system. I am free tech support to my parents, so after some nasty spyware problems I shifted them over to it. I work day to day for a large firm doing web and graphic design and Internet Explorer is always a pain. I would say however that IE7 combined with Maxthon 2 is a magic combination and really the only way you should use IE at all. I don’t like Firefox much, but it is so much better than IE6 I am compelled to recommend it if Opera or IE7 doesn’t tickle your fancy.

I recently used a Mac for testing purposes and found the multi platform browsers to be seriously wanting. After a bit of testing I decided that I liked Shiira, it is the nearest thing to Opera or Maxthon I could find that ran like a real Mac app. Safari is too light for me and few people will pay for Omniweb. Shiira uses the same webkit engine as Safari, but with a vastly better interface.

IE6 or below is not supported by this website, MS promised PNG Alpha support for years and only IE7 now supports it so if you see my banner with a gray background you have a duff browser.