R.L. Dane challenged me to answer some tech related questions, let's go!
I tried to avoid reading other peopleās replies, such as R.Lās, Rubenerdās or 82MHzās and the like, but in the end I did! This challenge had been around since a couple months ago, and I just hadnāt gotten around to it, so, here are my answers!
When did you first get interested in technology
Honestly, I have no idea, there are many times in my early life where I got interested in technology.
Probably one of the earliest examples would be phones. In my post about the phones Iāve owned, the first phone I had was a Nokia 3510, a device given to me as a kid, it was a phone locked to some US mobile carrier, and at the time it was impossible to unlock them to use with Mexican ones.
I remember playing Snake and Space Impact on it, and adding contact information, calendar events and stuff, simply amazed by what this cool brick of a phone could do.
However, that wasnāt the moment I got interested in tech. After some thought, I definitely know when.
Among the few forms of entertainment back in the early 2000s, there were VHS tapes. My mom loves to tell this story to people for some reason.
I was a weird 4 year old. You see, back in the day, I would invite my friends over to watch a movie on our TV, andāhear me out guysāit had robots on it!
They would be all lying in the floor in front of our not that huge CRT Television, waiting for me to rewind the VHS player. So, what was it? Terminator? RoboCop?
Nope. we are four years old come on guys š
About 20 minutes in, all of the kids in the neighborhood were outside doing something else, while I was glued to the TV, watching a documentary about robotics.
I loved documentaries. I had lots of different VHS tapes from Discovery channel and the like, I had one for sharks, one for helicopters, and one for robots.
This interest in robots sparked my interest in technology as a whole. I can still recall a lot of what I saw in that documentary, be it scenes from movies featuring animatronics with some voice-over explaining how reality could catch up to fiction; or robots that mimic the movement from animals like fish or crabs, robots that were sent to space, or disabled bombs, or walked on 2 feet! I found all of that incredibly interesting and entertaining, I watched that documentary so many times as a child.
So, yeah, I was four years old when my interest in technology begun.
Whatās Your Favorite Piece Of Technology All-Time?
I mean itās kinda obvious right? It has to be my PSP. Or maybe Iāll do what R.L did and select a category, which would be handheld gaming consoles!
Not only is the PSP a genuinely incredible product of its time, but it is also one of the most influential devices in my life.
Given to me at 12 years old, it was already 7 years āoldā since its release, and yet it was the most visually appealing device in the house. My computer running on Windows XP, the two CRT TVs, every phone in the house at the time, nothing compared.
The ease of modding and messing around with it, are probably one of the main reasons I got the confidence to attempt flashing a custom rom to my first Android device 3 or so years later.
I feel like a younger me would have picked āsmartphonesā as the answer for this. But even now, 20 years after its release, the PSP remains an incredible handheld that is a joy to play around with, while phones, while still being kinda cool, have mostly gotten more boring and less fun, so.
Oh right, and digital watches! Casio for the win.
Whatās Your Favorite Piece Of Technology Right Now?
This is a bit easier to settle, the clear answer is the Anbernic RG35XX SP. But I already said portable consoles in my previous question, so the second best option would beā¦ my Kobo e-reader!
E-ink displays are quite fun, I kinda wish there was an actually affordable phone I could use with this technology, it would be great for an even more portable reading experience. Stuff like the Boox Palma exist but they donāt fully work as a phone, so.
Then again, I prefer to have separate devices over a unified interface, to be honest.
Name One New Cool Piece Of Technology Weāll Have In 25 Years!
What I really want to see is a proper library or archive made possible by new laws regarding copyright and software distribution limiting copyright to like, 30 or so years instead of 70 or 100 years we got in some countries, and forcing software companies to let people own what they buy.
So, more books in the public domain, and more games available for everyone to borrow or acquire without DRM.
But the question says for something āweāll haveā and I donāt think such dreams are coming true anytime soon.
That doesnāt leave me with many options to be honest. I just wish that ārobots taking over human jobsā meant āhumans get to enjoy life doing things they likeā instead of āhumans become poor and homelessā. That would be nice, I think.
Except whatās probably something we wonāt have eitherā¦ hm.
Oh! I know! Affordable, non-proprietary smart devices would be neat. Smart watches, phones, and the like, running on free and open source software please.
Final thoughts
My favorite question to answer was the first one, so much nostalgia!
Deep down, I truly have hope that technology can remain something humanity uses for good. I really believe things will turn out well in the end. Itās probably naive of me to think that, but I still think itās true. Especially in regards to that last question, we are currently in difficult times, but I still think that technology could actually be helpful, without destroying the environment in the process, but I have no answers as to how, so, weāll see.
