Question: Obama’s muted, forgettable State of the Union

FORTUNE — Yes, President Obama’s State of the Union address was kind of a yawn. It reflected the trimmed ambitions of a chief executive protecting accomplishments already on the books while implicitly acknowledging shrinking bandwidth to add significant new ones.

As such, the speech may have been as notable for what it didn’t include as what it did. Gone was the sharper populist edge that characterized Obama on the stump as he sought reelection in 2012. In place of rhetoric about “inequality,” he deliberately substituted talk about “opportunity,” a Clintonian buzzword aimed at jamming GOP counterattacks on Democratic class warfare.

MORE: Inequality: America’s great destroyer

In truth, Obama has been worrying over wage stagnation for a decade. In The Audacity of Hope, he writes of two trips he took back in 2004 — one to the gleaming Google GOOG campus in Mountain View, another shortly thereafter to a downsizing Maytag plant in western Illinois — that brought the challenge into stark relief. Our technological revolution has been accelerating wealth concentration at the top while hollowing out the middle class. A hands-off response from policymakers, he wrote, wouldn’t doom us to collapse. But it would give us a country “in which an increasingly prosperous knowledge class, living in exclusive enclaves, will be able to purchase whatever they want on the marketplace — private schools, private health care, private security, and private jets — while a growing number of their fellow citizens are consigned to low-paying service jobs, vulnerable to dislocation, pressed to work longer hours, dependent on an underfunded, overburdened, and underperforming public sector for their health care, their retirement, and their children’s education … It will mean an America that’s more politically polarized and more politically unstable, as economic frustration boils over and leads people to turn on each other.”

Heavy stuff! Sounds almost like an early treatment for Elysium. In fact, there’s an open debate among economists about how severe our economic immobility actually is and whether it’s getting worse. But five years into his presidency, it’s tough to identify anything Obama’s done that qualifies as the kind of radical corrective that surely stalks Tom Perkins through his nightmares. It’s true, for example, that the Affordable Care Act is redistributive, though to precisely what end we don’t yet know (and in the meantime, the White House regards the characterization as politically toxic and shuns it).

There is one significant policy change Obama accomplished between winning a second term and Tuesday night’s address that might help explain the shift in tone. In the fiscal cliff debate that immediately followed his reelection, the President wrested from Republicans a tax increase on the personal incomes of families taking home $450,000 or more, restoring Clinton-era rates for the wealthiest. Many in his party believe he could’ve gotten more — he’d just won the election pledging to oppose anything that didn’t apply the same rates down to $250,000 incomes. But the White House declared victory.

At a roundtable with reporters Wednesday morning, Obama pollster Joel Benenson planted a flag in that accomplishment to explain why the President’s rhetoric shed its harder corners in his speech. “We corrected the tax code and got rid of the Bush tax cuts, which was one of the fundamental pillars of getting people to pay their fair share,” Benenson said at the event, hosted by the moderate Democratic think tank Third Way. He noted Obama also talked up corporate tax reform and closing loopholes to fund lower rates — an idea with strong notional support from Democrats, Republicans, and corporate leaders. Stiffer partisan winds await his promised push to raise the federal minimum wage and restore expired jobless benefits.

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It may be that Obama’s emphasis on expanding opportunity for the working and middle class is simply a new framing device, steering the debate away from the zero-sum formulation that jangles nerves on the income ladder’s upper ends. But his substantively moderated appeal — along with Benenson’s assertion that the administration already tackled the problem in the tax fight — signals the President will be happy enough working at inequality’s margins for the remainder of his term.

summary: Tuesday evening's address reflected the trimmed ambitions of a chief executive protecting accomplishments already on the books.

Up Close and Personal With the Esquire e-Ink Cover (Video)

I took some time out last night before I went to bed to go ahead and take apart the Esquire magazine cover that famously has an e-Ink segmented display. As I mentioned the other morning, I have a bit of experience in working with the e-Ink displays, though my experience was in the programming side (working with the prototyping kit) on the matrix style display, not the segmented display that’s present in the current issue of Esquire magazine.

The video is 20 minutes long, which is a bit much for one of our typical videos, but I give you an up close and personal look at each piece as I take it out, and try to keep you from falling asleep by relating what I know about how the technology functions and what makes it special (and how it can be applied to publications looking to go digital from either side of the divide).

Watch the video via the embed below or download the MP4.

I found a few technical resources around the Web that were particularly interesting – and in these cases it’s a good idea to read the comments and discussion following the blog post.

MAKE Magazine – It’s important you read the comments there if you in any way want to tinker with the cover. A lot of your work may be done for you. As I stated once I got my hands on this, from a hardware geek perspective, I was a little disappointed they chose to go with segmented rather than matrix display. You’ll see this reflected in the reaction there. Also from MAKE: some hardware hacking tips for the board.

Esquire Magazine – Don’t bother with the video from Esquire, but the infographics here that talk about how it was made are pretty informative. If you’re looking to do some work with this medium (either as a designer, publisher or ad agency) these are some good crib notes to start with once your prototyping stage is done. When I was working with the prototyping kits, they hadn’t quite worked out the manufacturing chain to a science (and I haven’t talked to e-Ink in about three years). If you’re serious about using this material, you should take any tips you can get on how this is done before you start the prototyping process.

e-Ink Prototyping Kit Store – As I said in the video, not a lot of creative agencies are working with this material yet for a couple of reasons. For one, it requires some serious technical and programming chops. For another, the prototyping kits are expensive. To work with segmented systems, get ready to drop $1,500 per kit. On the matrix display systems, it’s $3,000 (an explanation of what the difference is available in the video). That said, this is a wide open market, and I for one am ready for some folks to start doing cool things with this stuff.

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summary:
Answer: I took some time out last night before I went to bed to go ahead and take apart the Esquire magazine cover that famously has an e-Ink segmented display. As