All posts tagged: Collecting

Carry on collecting: why old British shopping bags are suddenly in demand | Life and style

Carry on collecting: why old British shopping bags are suddenly in demand | Life and style

Published by Sam Flores

When it comes to everyday objects, a supermarket carrier bag could be the ultimate one – a thing we’re more accustomed to squeezing into a drawer or using until it falls apart than giving any special treatment. But these most mundane items are now enjoying something of a new life. On secondhand sites including eBay, Vinted and Depop, old Marks & Spencer carrier bags and those for other supermarkets such as Tesco, Netto and Waitrose are being sold for about £10 – a big mark-up considering they were originally given away for free. Vinted reports that searches in 2026 have risen by 35% since last year. Once a deeply unremarkable receptacle for the weekly shop, the humble carrier bag has become a bona fide collectors’ item. There’s even an Instagram account dedicated to them – Carry a Bag Man has more than 15,000 followers. Jeremy Leslie, the founder of MagCulture, a magazine shop in London, sees this as part of a wider trend toward the tangible. “We see it with magazines,” he says, “people want …

R&B Star Usher Reveals the Blue-Chip Art That Fills His Atlanta Home

R&B Star Usher Reveals the Blue-Chip Art That Fills His Atlanta Home

Published by Jenni Sidey

Did you know that multiplatinum and Grammy award-winning R&B superstar Usher is a devoted art collector? Now you do. For Architectural Digest, the singer opened the doors to his Atlanta home to show off his surprisingly deep collection of contemporary art. Among the works hanging on the walls or installed on the grounds are pieces by Rashid Johnson, Gordon Parks, Sterling Ruby, Fabiola Jean-Louis, Anthony James, Daniel Arsham, Jammie Holmes, Yoshitomo Nara, Michael Stipe, Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, George Condo, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and more. Related Articles In particular pride of place is Parks’s famous 1956 color photo of a Black woman and her child outside the “colored entrance” of a department store in Mobile, Alabama. Usher told AD that the photo resides at the entrance to the house in a gesture of both recontextualization and remembrance of the past. Nicole Fuller, Usher’s friend and collaborator on the house, said that the photo served as “inspiration—in palette, in feeling, in moodiness, in tone and texture” for what they wanted to achieve with the design. Also …

My 3DS XL was collecting dust until I hacked it — now I use it more than my Switch

My 3DS XL was collecting dust until I hacked it — now I use it more than my Switch

Published by skeptic

I spent an entire afternoon hacking my Nintendo New 3DS XL the other day, all to be able to use Homebrew on the old portable console. Was it worth the hours spent moving files back and forth on a tiny SD card, hitting dead ends, and digging into forums and Discords for assistance? Yes, yes it was, and here’s why. Related What Should You Do With Old Consoles? They may be old, but they can still serve a purpose. How I hacked my New 3DS XL It took some doing I opened up my little Nintendo dual-screened handheld a week or so ago, looking to see what there was left to play on the device. The eShop closed a few years back, so I wanted to see what I had left between my physical cartridges and the games I had downloaded to the console previously. Turns out, it wasn’t a whole lot, and what was left on my list didn’t really draw me in. So I went looking to see what I could do with …

16 Good Reasons to Start Collecting Timex

16 Good Reasons to Start Collecting Timex

Published by Jenni Sidey

This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. Sign up here. They’re laughing at us on the Timex forums. Given the collecting communities that have formed around other affordable watchmakers, deep fans of the brand can hardly believe they’re able to find rare, vintage pieces from a storied watch manufacturer without the absurd prices associated with, say, vintage Seiko. In a moment where watch fiends have turned over every single stone in search of well-kept secrets, Timex somehow remains underrated. Particularly for a brand that has sold millions and millions and millions of watches. Timex has history as both a pop-culture giant and a brand once made in America. Founded all the way back in 1854 as the Waterbury Clock Company, the company created inexpensive pocket watches, setting itself up as an affordable brand from the very start. In fact, after partnering with Ingersoll in 1892, the newly formed company released the Yankee “Dollar Watch.” The piece was so popular it became known …

Daniel Dae Kim: “Watch Collecting Doesn’t Have to Be Only For the Super Rich”

Daniel Dae Kim: “Watch Collecting Doesn’t Have to Be Only For the Super Rich”

Published by Jenni Sidey

Aside from the Seiko, have you picked up anything recently that you’ve been really enjoying? I picked up a Steve McQueen [the Rolex Submariner Ref. 5512]. I’ve really grown to love that piece because it’s not a typical Sub and there’s not really a Rolex like it in production today. It gives me a sense of history, it gives me a sense of place, but it has a uniqueness to it that appeals to me. Are you mostly collecting vintage or modern? I probably do more vintage than modern, but if I see something that is new in the collection that makes me say, “Whoa,” I’ll look for that piece too. One piece that I have not been able to get that I would love is a Rolex “Le Mans” Daytona. Of course. Yeah, that piece really appeals to me, because there’s a uniqueness that separates it from all other Daytonas. That’s the kind of thing I look for. Courtesy of Rowing Blazers Come on, Rolex! I’m in a bunch of watch group chats, and …

Collecting robot training data is dirty, unglamorous work. Some AI labs are already paying XDOF to do it

Collecting robot training data is dirty, unglamorous work. Some AI labs are already paying XDOF to do it

Published by skeptic

Two weeks ago, OpenAI said it would relaunch the robotics program it shuttered in 2021 — the latest signal that the biggest AI labs are racing to teach machines to operate in the physical world. But building capable robots requires something the AI industry doesn’t yet have, which is the training data to match that used for language models. That gap is creating a new kind of infrastructure business. Unlike LLMs that were trained on a vast sea of publicly available text, robots need data that captures physical interaction, and that kind of data barely exists. YouTube videos and footage captured by gig workers are low-fidelity and hard to reconcile with the physical world. XDOF (pronounced “ecks-doff”), emerging from stealth today, is betting that the next great bottleneck in AI isn’t models or chips, but the data feedback loop needed to teach robots how to interact with the physical world. The startup aims to build the data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems that frontier labs and robotics companies can’t easily build themselves — and …

Voting Rights Groups Sue To Stop DOJ From Collecting State Voter Lists

Voting Rights Groups Sue To Stop DOJ From Collecting State Voter Lists

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times, Voting rights groups filed a lawsuit on April 21 seeking to block the Department of Justice (DOJ) from collecting, compiling, and analyzing state voter registration lists. As of April 1, the DOJ has sued 30 states, including Washington, for failing to turn over voter rolls. The department has said the U.S. attorney general has congressional authority under the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to seek election records from states to check for improper voter registrations. The groups filed a complaint on April 21, accusing the DOJ of seeking to use the sensitive data to build what they described as a “sprawling new voter surveillance and purging apparatus” without congressional authorization. The complaint alleges that the department attempted to usurp states’ authority to oversee election administration and impose its own “secretive ’verification procedures’” to identify ineligible voters. “Never before has a federal agency centralized this volume of Americans’ voting data in a single system of records,” it stated. “And in doing so, DOJ has flouted statutory safeguards designed …

Experience: I’ve spent decades collecting over 260 postboxes | Life and style

Experience: I’ve spent decades collecting over 260 postboxes | Life and style

Published by Sam Flores

Back in 1994, I went to north Wales to see the miniature steam trains – I was a fan of railways. On a platform at Rhyl station, I noticed the painted outline of a postbox – it was all that remained of one that had stood there since the late 1800s. It turns out it had been vandalised, set alight and chucked in a skip. I asked the station manager if I could see it and he jokingly said: “Give me 20 quid and you can take it away with you.” I replied, “I’ll give you 20 quid, if you can give me a receipt for it.” That’s how it all started. Now, I’ve got postboxes from all over the place, which I keep in my postal museum on the Isle of Wight. With 260, it’s one of the biggest collections in this country. I’ve got boxes from East Mey in Scotland, Truro in Cornwall, Cork in Ireland and even one from Hong Kong. I’m not allowed to have a favourite, that would be like having a …

US to Stop Collecting Tariffs Deemed Illegal by Supreme Court on Tuesday

US to Stop Collecting Tariffs Deemed Illegal by Supreme Court on Tuesday

Published by Sam Flores

WASHINGTON, Feb 23 (Reuters) – The ⁠U.S. ⁠Customs and Border Protection ⁠agency said it will halt collections of tariffs ​imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act at 12:01 a.m. EST (0501 ‌GMT) on Tuesday, more ‌than three days after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the ⁠duties ⁠illegal. The agency said in a message to shippers on its ​Cargo Systems Messaging Service (CSMS) that it will de-activate all tariff codes associated with President Donald Trump’s prior IEEPA-related orders as of Tuesday. The IEEPA ​tariff collection halt coincides with Trump’s imposition of a new, 15% ⁠global ⁠tariff under a different ⁠legal ​authority to replace the ones struck down by the Supreme Court on ​Friday. CBP gave no ⁠reason why it was continuing to collect the tariffs at ports of entry days after the Supreme Court’s ruling, and its message offered no information about possible refunds for importers. The message noted ⁠that the collection halt does not affect any other tariffs imposed ⁠by Trump, including those under the Section 232 national security statute and the Section 301 …

TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes

TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes

Published by skeptic

When TikTok users in the US opened the app today, they were greeted with a pop-up asking them to agree to the social media platform’s new terms of service and privacy policy before they could resume scrolling. These changes are part of TikTok’s transition to new ownership. In order to continue operating in the US, TikTok was compelled by the US government to transition from Chinese control to a new, American-majority corporate entity. Called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, the new entity is made up of a group of investors that includes the software company Oracle. It’s easy to tap “agree” and keep on scrolling through videos on TikTok, so users might not fully understand the extent of changes they are agreeing to with this pop-up. Now that it’s under US-based ownership, TikTok potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data. A spokesperson for TikTok USDS declined to comment. Here are the three biggest changes to TikTok’s privacy policy that users should know about. TikTok Adds Precise Location Tracking TikTok’s change …