the radio I actually bought – #116

Also: hello to a bunch of new folks. Glad you found your way here.

I recommend five products a week and, most weeks, buy exactly none of them.

This is healthy. Scouting and shopping are different sports. Otherwise the newsletter would become a very expensive medical condition.

This week, though, one of the five actually lives in our apartment.

The Teenage Engineering OB-4 has been moving around here for the past few days. Kitchen. Terrace. Living room. Back to the kitchen. It is one of those rare portable objects that actually gets ported (and really fun to use).

Teenage engineering is also a fairly accurate description of how I spent the years 1998 to 2005.

Back then, wanting music meant developing certain skills. Shady-but-useful forums. Downloads that took hours and promised one thing, then delivered something legally or musically different.

You knew the sound of the modem. You knew the horror of someone picking up the landline at 87 percent. You knew that 4 KB/s could teach a person patience.

I miss that version of tech sometimes. Not because it was better, most of it was objectively worse. But it was easier to be excited about. You didn’t have to run every new thing through a small ethics committee in your head.

You just had to poke around, try things, break things, fix things, and read weird forum threads from strangers with usernames like “napsterking2001”.

That was probably useful. It made a lot of us less scared of new tools. We had already survived dial-up, Winamp skins, corrupted zip files, and installing things our parents definitely should not have let us install.

So, to my fellow late-80s kids: we may not have had Spotify or Netflix, but we did have patience, suspicious downloads, and the kind of misplaced technical confidence that still makes our parents call us when their devices do something “strange.”

On LinkedIn, I believe this is now called “high agency.”

If you’re new around here: Every week, I share 5 of the nicest products from Europe I’ve discovered in the past 7 days.

I scout, you explore.

With love 🌞
Jakob

P.S.: Missed the last edition? The departure board from T-Skylt was the most-clicked product. (Merel Karhof’s wind-knitted scarves missed the top spot by a handful of clicks, which feels unfair to a machine that knits with wind.)

P.P.S.: If you’ve found something from Europe that belongs here, send it my way.

I bought the OB-4, so assume this paragraph is not entirely neutral. Teenage Engineering’s portable speaker has Bluetooth, FM radio, and a handle that doubles as part of the antenna. Everything it plays lands on a rolling two-hour tape, so you can rewind live radio when the host mumbles the song title.

Manopoulos has been making chess and backgammon sets in Greece since 1970. This one removes most of the tiny medieval theater from chess: no horse heads, no carved crowns, no decorative battlefield energy. A chess set for people who like the game but do not need a little monarchy on the table.

Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen’s Standing Lamp N°1 for valerie_objects is basically one curved line. Bent lacquered steel, a marble foot and one bulb at the end. It feels like something you’d find in the corner of a very relaxed apartment.

Florentine Kitchen Knives makes knives by hand in Barcelona, which already puts it in a better mood than most kitchen tools. This butter knife is laser-cut from 1.5 mm stainless spring steel, hand-ground, satin-finished, and etched with a crocodile by illustrator Oded Webman.

The Augment 360 is an electric moped that folds small enough to come inside with you, which is a pleasingly unreasonable sentence. It weighs 36 kilos with the battery, does around 50 km on one charge, and the battery comes out for normal wall-socket charging. Augment started in Pinzgau making World Cup skis.