Vegas's best show & a scenic route!
Always Take The Scenic Route!
If you got click baited into this, Sorry! FWIW, I do think one of the best shows in Vegas is the Consumer Electronics Show!
Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
CES has been a great showcase of all the latest, greatest and also the most weirdest tech that various companies have to showcase! Most of the showcases are more “attractive prototypes” than real world ready products, but that’s what makes it so interesting, as the technology and the design portrays what the future holds for us!
This year the big ticket items were Matter - the “smart” smart-home protocol (which promises inter-operability and reduced pairing discomfort), Sony (the playstation) company partnered Honda to launch Afeela brand,to have an EV by 2026, hopefully with a better name that sounds like a car brand and less like a-feela-ing! Lastly, Lenovo plans to make a Thinkpad phone (which is MIL-STD 810H certified and IP68 rated) which pairs well with a ThinkPad (BEST LAPTOP EVER!)
However, these were standard big tech releases, what I really love about CES, is the chance it gives to release some totally unique and funky consumer electronics like :
Withing’s Toilet Bowl Urine Analyzer - Super interesting place to put a passive health monitoring device. The kit stays on your toilet bowl like a cleaner and can detect pH and specific gravity for nutrition and menstrual health indicators.
L’oreal debuted some great accessibility tech - a lipstick stabilizer applicator, which is essentially a smart system composed of a gimbal and a lipstick, that helps folks with tremors or limited motion abilities! To top it off, the entire kit looks pretty great too!
What if your stand mixer connected to Wifi, had voice control and an integrated scale? Introducing GE Smart Mixer series, that has it all coupled with a mobile app to help you get that cake recipe just right, all for $999!
Releases like these are what’s exciting about consumer electronics, despite my apparent cynicism about some of them, products like these are what propagate these technology in different spheres of our lives and eventually make it better!
What were your favorite showcases this year? Drop a comment to let me know!
Santa Barbara
On a completely different note, I was able to drive up to Solvang & Santa Barbara to spend a very wet and cold New Year’s Eve as California has been rattled with two atmospheric rivers this month.
Despite this, we are not really out of the great California drought yet, since most of the rainfall ended up washing into the sea, and the water catchment has been low. However, here’s a NYT article linking policies and ideas, like building water tunnels, buying back settling land, and reducing dependance on the Colorado river ideas that might help prevent this!
However, we did get a beautiful New Year’s Day where there was enough sunshine to tourist around Santa Barbara which is a beautifully built town. Visiting their courthouse was especially interesting, as the its a Spanish style mansion, complete with a beautiful clock tower, seemingly infinite murals, and decorative tiles, which were exported from Tunisia in early 1900s.
You can totally book it for your next wedding!
In closing, would like to share this beautiful route we drove through the scenic mountains of Santa Barbara surrounded by some dollar houses and amazingly epic views of Santa Barbara and the ocean.
Thanks for reaching till here! Feel free to share your favorite scenic route with me too!