The first video game not pong was a duck-hunting thing. Crappy and stupid as hell. But if you hit some damn bird and it fell to earth, a loopy dog trotted out, gently picked up the hapless carrion and exited the screen. This to me was so delightful.
I found the Black Knight in Beyond Dark Castle (who at a steady tempo chugged a beer, belched, and threw the can at the protagonist) similarly amusing.
I guess there's one thing that stands out from ~early 2000s. Google Earth was a fun toy, but when Pro first came available for free to nonprofits I grabbed it hard. Was the whiz of the org for awhile as I flew the board around our trail project, zooming in/out with the amazing details visible.
Then I started using it to find colorful places and that led me to the thousands of salt pond images. Like Thibaut crossed with Rothko.
I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to SPEED around the city, keeping its SPEED over 50, and if its SPEED dropped, the bus would explode! I think it was called "The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down."
Funny: the first (and, so far, only) video game I played was Pong. They had one in the student union at SJSU, and I remember thinking something along the lines of "Holy shit, this thing is *so* fast!" How can anyone keep up?" Of course, now I look at it and it is incredibly slow.
That my phone's camera can see a shit ton of stars at night invisible to my eyes (also did a delightfully trippy job on a surprise showing of the Northern Lights a few weeks ago);
EZ access to movies and TV shows in my hand; and
Tens of millions of music tracks at my fingertips.
I think it might be mandatory here to add the existence of sites/services of Substack, yeah?
Shazam, yes, is far out. One interesting thing-- I spent a whole lot of time in the last two years listening to far flung stations on Radio Garden, and Shazam was a great help in identifying tracks. Some West African stations it did not do well, one Malagasy station it could not catch a thing; but generally... The weirdest miss was the fantastic Spanish station https://gladyspalmera.com/ -- Shazam can hardly recognize a thing, I'm pretty sure it's because they are playing rips of Palmera's own vinyl/wax/whatever collection.
Another audio thing: spleeter and similar AI software that can extract individual instruments from a record. I've heard it likened it to "unbaking a cake." It's not perfect, but it's great for analyzing individual parts, making remixes, etc.
Agreed, I have desktop app that will separate lead vocals from instrumental in two minutes with a minimum of distortion, useful for rigging karaoke versions of tracks to perform/record at home.
Shazam is amazing — I listen mostly to the Princeton college radio station, and it’s pretty much given that no amateur DJ plays 1) music you’ve heard of; and 2) plays sets of less than 30 minutes. Enter Shazam & I’m now the cool gramma again.
WPRB does as well & its great. WXPN makes me feel like I'm in a high-end assisted-living facility. The music is quality & not always retro, but it feels unchallenging & unexciting to me.
Funny: our local college radio station is KFJC, and for a long time they played a lot of great stuff. Then it slowly morphed into "if it has a melody or rhythm, it doesn't get played. Bah.
I haven't listened in ages, so I don't know. He's kind of an intense guy. Does the show standing, with his arms spread out and fingers touching the board. As I recall, he does not bring notes - it's all off the cuff. A friend had a show just after Emmett, and was silently walking from one part of the station to another past the door of the studio, and he said the look he got from Emmett: "I though he was going to throttle me on the spot."
I almost googled "Skillet Lickers" but then I thought better . That whole "euphemism" 'thing you know? That can get scary really quick!
I'm amazed at the pictures I can take with my phone. I did get a high-end phone just for the camera. I haven't been disappointed.
Is there a flip side to this? Social networking seems like a bad magic spell and if we can't figure out how to break that spell, we'll never have a safe, sane world again. It's like we're living in a James Bond world with no James Bond, just super villains. Let's be honest, James was a murdering sadistic rapist , but he got shit done.
Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, a great Old Timey band. Gid’s partner was Riley Puckett, a blind guitar player (there are no “guitarists” in Old Timey music). In the ‘70s, when I was in residency training in North Carolina, I rented a little farmhouse from Riley’s cousin Elaine.
The first one I can think of is 1986 when my non-computerized office got an IBM Wheelwriter 3 electronic typewriter for me to use. I had up until then used the old fashioned Selectric. The Wheelwriter 3 was a real game changer and I remember thinking it was hot shit. I had gone through secretarial school in 1984 learning what word processing I did learn on a Radio Shack TRS 80 model personal computer. But then my first few office jobs were in old fashioned places where I just had a typewriter.
How my old Royal manual typewriter changed my life:
In the early 1990s, the publisher I was working for hired the industry's stupidest man to be the overall editorial overseer. The quality of my job went rapidly downhill, so Mrs. Derelict and I started our own magazine off our kitchen table. In the process of doing so, I wrote a letter to the editor of one of the national fishing magazines and enclosed a copy of my new venture. The letter was written on my old Royal.
A week later, I got a letter from that guy--written on HIS old Royal typewriter. That sparked a friendship that eventually led to me quitting Bob's House of Widget and Stupid, and moving to Vermont to edit fishing magazines. Gotta love the magic in some of that old tech!
Back in the late '70s, I had a portable typewriter that I used to write up the fanzine I had. What made it nice was the 1/2 space feature, which I'd never seen before (or, for that matter, since). That made it a lot easier to justify a line so it fit in the space I was aiming for without hyphenating a word. I have no idea what that machine was now.
I started as a Mac chauvinist. Got the original Mac and steadily upgraded through every variation to the iMac series. Loved them.
But then I started editing doctoral dissertations and had clients who demanded work be done on PC platforms. So I bought the cheapest Toshiba Satellite Staples offered---$400 with Windows and MS Word. I've never looked back. I still have all my old Macs, and Mrs. Derelict is still a Mac devotee. But I have definitely come to like WinDoze better.
Bought an iMac a few years ago for home and I'll never go back to pc again. There were growing pains and there are still some things I don't like (Mac folder system, shitty built-in camera), but out of the box was the easiest computer I've ever had to get going.
I, too, loved the ease of setup that Apple builds in. But I came to loathe the brick-wall obsolescence that turned perfectly good computers into scrap because the operating system could no longer be upgraded to keep up with software development--and Apple does this with tragically short time horizons. Couple that with the dearth of programs available and the Mac world just doesn't work for me any more.
My original Toshiba is still going strong--I gave it to Mrs. Derelict because she has one particular program that she MUST use for one particular task, and that program will only run on Windows. That Toshiba is now 12 years old. Still runs, still supported.
Th iMac I bought at about the same time is junk. It still works--I can turn it on and it boots up--but there is no support for the system, no software available that will run on it, and even the browser version it has will no longer load many modern Web pages.
I'm almost 4 years into my first iMac (I refuse to shell out the $$ on a Mac laptop), and have had zero issues. If I can get another couple years out of it, it will have exceeded my expectations (I've never had a pc that lasted more than 5 years, most started dying after 2, but that's just my personal experience).
Premature PC death is what I fear because both of my Toshibas are now very old in computer years, and Toshiba discontinued the Satellite line. So I'm looking at a Lenovo or maybe an HP.
I think it's fair to expect a desktop computer to last a few years. For me, laptops are disposable (I'd only buy one if I had to, and I'd buy the cheapest one--one that's a LOT cheaper than my phone!).
We got my partner an Asus a few years ago, and it's very nice. That was to replace the Samsung that was to replace the Toshiba (which had lasted a very long time).
My fourteen year-old Mac Pro “cheesegrater,” purchased used seven years ago, keeps chugging along. Without some under the hood jiggery-pokery I’m unwilling to undertake, its OS is stalled at “High Sierra” (which itself broke a couple of apps), but it’s still a solid production machine. Safari’s performance is increasingly dodgy. but Chrome still loads the pages that Safari chokes on. Best of all, though, is that the machine arrived loaded with—I am going to employ some artful circumlocutions—a suite of essential software I had used for years, purchasing each iteration, until the parent company, founded by engineers, fell into the hands of marketers who imposed a subscription model.
To my surprise, these applications (let’s refer to them, collectively, as the “Fetid Fog”) have never phoned home, and so, month in and month out since 2017 I have had the use of them without the necessity of shelling out US $50/month for the privilege. It’s true that I’ve no access to the latest and greatest bells & whistles that emerge from the fog, but for what I need the hardware and software to do, the package has been one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.
I switched from Mac laptops to a Mac Mini, which is just an incredibly powerful, very small HD & everything else is modular. Use a good flatscreen as a monitor, whatever keyboard, mouse, & webcam you like, whatever suits your needs & is in your price range. It’s great — and I laugh at myself because it acts just like PCs did from the jump. Took ‘em long enough to catch up. XD
Your mileage will always vary, of course, but I work in mutliple development environments, and an operating system in which the main file system display hides file extensions BY DEFAULT, and sorts files and folders seprately, is a human rights violation. (Had to dal with that on a new machine just today.)
For me it was the Walkman. Those little headphones sounded as good as my Pioneer with the JBL speakers I bought with my paper route money. I actually took up jogging.
Something rather niche: Aircraft navigation systems. When I started flying back in the 1970s, navigation systems for general aviation were based on 1950s technology. The "advances" were just incremental crap that actually made navigation more difficult.
Today, I have GPS units in the cockpit that have incredibly simple touch-screen moving maps, offer plain-language navigation on a direct course between any two point on Earth, provide me with weather and in-flight traffic advisories that are more accurate than ground-based radar, and can determine my position to within 18 inches. Miraculous for old-timers like me!
That sounds like it works pretty well. I'm often unimpressed with GPS, as it does some kind of lame things at times. We were in LA a few years ago, and had just gotten on the freeway, following a route the GPS had suggested. It told me to get off at some exit, then a series of right turns, and enter the freeway. Well, we got on the freeway at the same exit it had us get off at. We just made a loop around a block. I was irritated, to say the least.
Shazam is great, but can't seem to lock on to me just humming a tune. Anyone else tried this? Or were all those mean comments ("stick to the drums, shithead!") true? Maybe if I tapped out a beat...
I was an early skeptic of all this new-fangled crap, but I couldn't live without my phone. I don't use it like the youngins (my face is not constantly glued to it, I hate texting, etc.). But, I can watch any NHL game anywhere at any time on any device (this alone has kept me in Japan, a hockey wasteland, all these years), I've pretty much ditched expensive camera gear, and no matter where I wake up (and how fucked up I might be) I just click "HOME" and know exactly where to go and how to get there (that, friends, is an under-appreciated miracle).
At one point about 15 years ago we were searching the web for photos of friend and colleague. We entered her photo and it immediately came back with more photos, but not of her. They were family. Blew me away. Realized later that the photos had captions with names and the whole thing was a word match scam.
Having a good camera with you in your pocket is just amazing. Aside from how handy it can be if you stumble across some cops beating up a guy, my regular walks in the woods have given me a whole gallery of cool mushroom photos. And most walks the camera stays in my pocket, but I swear I look at things more closely now, knowing something COULD be a picture.
Computer memory sometimes blows my mind. When I first started fooling with computers, a one gig drive was selling for $1200. Now I can get a 512 gig thumbdrive for about $15. And it's *way* faster, in both search times and upload times. At the machine shop I work at, most of the machines are fed programs through phone lines and an RS232, at a baud rate of 960. We have some newer machines that have USB, and I can load a program off a thumbdrive into those machines in about 2 seconds that would take four or five minutes the old way.
Speaking of Shazam, my partner keeps dreaming of a Shazam for scents. You smell a nice perfume while out somewhere, you hold your phone up, and it tells you what it is and where to get it.
Re: Shazam for scents. I see that being weaponized by police pretty quickly (if it worked!). "So, not only were you listening (Shazam) to "Dopesmoker," there's this funny smell (Shazam)"
Ha! Well, she was thinking it would be set up to work only with perfumes, but the people who come up with stuff like that are always willing to take law enforcement bucks too. Now, if the cops used it strictly to find out who is wearing too much AXE, that'd be fine! (Though it would probably be themselves.)
Sketchy tho. I watched a mockingbird mimicking several other birdcalls and Merlin had no idea it was a mockingbird. Also, if you are trying to enter data to Cornell's ebird web data system, and you claim a rare bird by how Merlin heard it, you WILL be challenged by the minders.
I used to know a man—he and his wife were Manhattan Project alumnæ, he a chemical engineer and she a typist—who had an Apple ][ (I employ the strange typographical convention of the day) with a green phosphor monitor and a cassette drive (what, me floppy? Not, at least in that household, in 1980). At their home he demonstrated the first version of what eventually evolved into Microsoft’s “Flight Simulator.” This one was, by today’s standards…primitive. Wireframe graphics, a grid of thirty-six squares floating in space, with a jagged range of “mountains” at the far end. Interestingly, it proved possible to fly past the mountains, leaving the grid behind, traversing empty “space” until, by and by, the grid reappeared in the distance. My wife was entranced. A couple of years later she prevailed upon me to purchase one of these enchanted Apples, which I did for an outlay (financed through her credit union) we could scarcely then afford. Within a short time, I came to hate this underpowered machine. Not so the wife: using the 16-pin Epson dot-matrix printer that was part of the package, she volunteered to “typeset” about half of issue number three of Tim Yohannon’s zine “Maximum Rocknroll.” (Some of you, if you’ve ever heard of the man, may have formed the impression that he was personally unpleasant. Nothing could be closer to the truth.)
Fast forward two years and I’m still making payments to the credit union on the goddamn ][ when the wife, now working for a software house in Berkeley, began to agitate for the purchase of a Macintosh, the original 128K model with the nine-inch monitor. “Never!” I roared, putting my foot down with a thump that could probably be felt in San Leandro. “I will never have a machine from that loathsome company on my premises again.” And there the matter rested for a few weeks until one evening when, working late, she called to ask if I would retrieve her in downtown Berkeley. I duly arrived. “Meeting’s running overtime,” she explained apologetically. “Shouldn’t be much longer. You can wait in here,” ushering me into a room in which a lone Mac sat, running “MacPaint.”
Presently she returned. “Where do I sign?” I sighed.
Two years later she ran off with a colleague—they were still living together when he co-founded the “FreeBSD project,” and it still rankles that the guy who nicked my wife has a Wikipedia entry whereas I will die in obscurity—but kindly left the Mac behind as she cleared out her goods and chattels. A year after that my own employer, the venerable San Francisco firm of Flatline, Comatose, Torpor & Drowse, offered me, on the basis of the redesigns I’d done on some crude in-house forms, a two-year TDY that involved editing and graphics, and offered in effect a blank check for my equipment needs. The two years turned into thirty, and I made my living on a succession of more powerful iterations of the platform, although following FCT&D’s ill-considered merger with Senescent Technologies and the Dotard Group the new outfit, BrainDead Systems, thereafter declined to purchase any more equipment or software, so I self-financed my little art department (easily five figures over the years) for the remainder of my alleged career.
Sorry to run on so. The magic? That first, ænemic, tombstone-shaped Mac. Forty years have elapsed since I set it up on my desk, but I’ve never had as much sheer fun with a computer as I did with that old toy before its descendants became my livelihood.
At the start of my writing/editing career, we got those first 128k Macs. They were a major step up from the Compugraphic typesetting "computers" we were working with (you had to save you work to a disk after every 100 characters--go 1 character over and the whole thing dumped). Suddenly, writing a feature article of 10,000 words became, well, almost a breeze since I could not save my work to a diskette! Of course, you had to swap the diskette that had MicroSoft Word 1.0 with the diskette you were saving your work to since the 100K Word disk only had 36k free for storage. But it was a miracle for us word slaves!
Old tech:
The first video game not pong was a duck-hunting thing. Crappy and stupid as hell. But if you hit some damn bird and it fell to earth, a loopy dog trotted out, gently picked up the hapless carrion and exited the screen. This to me was so delightful.
New tech:
Nope. Nothin' as good as that good ol' dawg.
Alfred E. Newman: “Old tech, new blecch.”
I found the Black Knight in Beyond Dark Castle (who at a steady tempo chugged a beer, belched, and threw the can at the protagonist) similarly amusing.
Pong was the pinnacle of video games. Tetris was pretty cool too.
I can't meditate, but Tetris allowed me to enter a Zen state.
I guess there's one thing that stands out from ~early 2000s. Google Earth was a fun toy, but when Pro first came available for free to nonprofits I grabbed it hard. Was the whiz of the org for awhile as I flew the board around our trail project, zooming in/out with the amazing details visible.
Then I started using it to find colorful places and that led me to the thousands of salt pond images. Like Thibaut crossed with Rothko.
"duck-hunting thing"
I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to SPEED around the city, keeping its SPEED over 50, and if its SPEED dropped, the bus would explode! I think it was called "The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down."
Duck Hunting: The Thing
Funny: the first (and, so far, only) video game I played was Pong. They had one in the student union at SJSU, and I remember thinking something along the lines of "Holy shit, this thing is *so* fast!" How can anyone keep up?" Of course, now I look at it and it is incredibly slow.
Yeah. Duck Hunting: The Thing was the only vidgame I ever played. Like pinball – couldn't be bothered.
That one game of Pong was it for me, too.
Gah, how about Ping Pong after a few hits of marijuana. LOL. The black screen, the green lines...insanity.
Oh, oh! One I can answer!
A few things:
The inter-webs in my hand;
That my phone's camera can see a shit ton of stars at night invisible to my eyes (also did a delightfully trippy job on a surprise showing of the Northern Lights a few weeks ago);
EZ access to movies and TV shows in my hand; and
Tens of millions of music tracks at my fingertips.
I think it might be mandatory here to add the existence of sites/services of Substack, yeah?
Shazam, yes, is far out. One interesting thing-- I spent a whole lot of time in the last two years listening to far flung stations on Radio Garden, and Shazam was a great help in identifying tracks. Some West African stations it did not do well, one Malagasy station it could not catch a thing; but generally... The weirdest miss was the fantastic Spanish station https://gladyspalmera.com/ -- Shazam can hardly recognize a thing, I'm pretty sure it's because they are playing rips of Palmera's own vinyl/wax/whatever collection.
Another audio thing: spleeter and similar AI software that can extract individual instruments from a record. I've heard it likened it to "unbaking a cake." It's not perfect, but it's great for analyzing individual parts, making remixes, etc.
Agreed, I have desktop app that will separate lead vocals from instrumental in two minutes with a minimum of distortion, useful for rigging karaoke versions of tracks to perform/record at home.
Hmm, that sounds interesting. Could maybe make it so we can bring the songs we want to do to the place. Which app is it you have, if I may ask?
x-minus.pro
The website allows u to use the basic functions — free users have a daily limit, like 20 minutes of music.
Thanks!
Shazam is amazing — I listen mostly to the Princeton college radio station, and it’s pretty much given that no amateur DJ plays 1) music you’ve heard of; and 2) plays sets of less than 30 minutes. Enter Shazam & I’m now the cool gramma again.
Everybody comes to Rick's. Loose associations are magical!
What I enjoy about WXPN (Philly area radio station) is that they put their entire lists for all 24 hours online.
https://xpn.org/wxpn-playlists/
WPRB does as well & its great. WXPN makes me feel like I'm in a high-end assisted-living facility. The music is quality & not always retro, but it feels unchallenging & unexciting to me.
Funny: our local college radio station is KFJC, and for a long time they played a lot of great stuff. Then it slowly morphed into "if it has a melody or rhythm, it doesn't get played. Bah.
(edit: typo fixed)
They still have Robert Emmett on Saturdays?
I haven't listened in ages, so I don't know. He's kind of an intense guy. Does the show standing, with his arms spread out and fingers touching the board. As I recall, he does not bring notes - it's all off the cuff. A friend had a show just after Emmett, and was silently walking from one part of the station to another past the door of the studio, and he said the look he got from Emmett: "I though he was going to throttle me on the spot."
"The Reinhard Gehlen Organization..."
Yeah, I know about Dave...
I almost googled "Skillet Lickers" but then I thought better . That whole "euphemism" 'thing you know? That can get scary really quick!
I'm amazed at the pictures I can take with my phone. I did get a high-end phone just for the camera. I haven't been disappointed.
Is there a flip side to this? Social networking seems like a bad magic spell and if we can't figure out how to break that spell, we'll never have a safe, sane world again. It's like we're living in a James Bond world with no James Bond, just super villains. Let's be honest, James was a murdering sadistic rapist , but he got shit done.
Come on, WM — lick the skillet! You know you want to…
Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, a great Old Timey band. Gid’s partner was Riley Puckett, a blind guitar player (there are no “guitarists” in Old Timey music). In the ‘70s, when I was in residency training in North Carolina, I rented a little farmhouse from Riley’s cousin Elaine.
Along with the Hoosier Hotshots, they produced the Saturday Night corn squeezins soundtracks.
Now I think you're just makin' shit up.
Not at all! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UZyI5NP_YqM
C'mon, Boss – Throw a minion a bone!
I'da preferred you just let it lay so Steve could stew awhile in his new paranoia about my veracity.
The first one I can think of is 1986 when my non-computerized office got an IBM Wheelwriter 3 electronic typewriter for me to use. I had up until then used the old fashioned Selectric. The Wheelwriter 3 was a real game changer and I remember thinking it was hot shit. I had gone through secretarial school in 1984 learning what word processing I did learn on a Radio Shack TRS 80 model personal computer. But then my first few office jobs were in old fashioned places where I just had a typewriter.
Hey, I'm clinging to my old Selectric (on which I address envelopes), and the 85 year-old man who just gave it a tune-up told me it's a rare model.
How my old Royal manual typewriter changed my life:
In the early 1990s, the publisher I was working for hired the industry's stupidest man to be the overall editorial overseer. The quality of my job went rapidly downhill, so Mrs. Derelict and I started our own magazine off our kitchen table. In the process of doing so, I wrote a letter to the editor of one of the national fishing magazines and enclosed a copy of my new venture. The letter was written on my old Royal.
A week later, I got a letter from that guy--written on HIS old Royal typewriter. That sparked a friendship that eventually led to me quitting Bob's House of Widget and Stupid, and moving to Vermont to edit fishing magazines. Gotta love the magic in some of that old tech!
Back in the late '70s, I had a portable typewriter that I used to write up the fanzine I had. What made it nice was the 1/2 space feature, which I'd never seen before (or, for that matter, since). That made it a lot easier to justify a line so it fit in the space I was aiming for without hyphenating a word. I have no idea what that machine was now.
Cue my memory of actually seeing Charlie Rose, as a CBS news anchor, intro a piece on word processing by saying--I swear this is true--this:
"If you work in an office, and especially if you are a secretary, you know what a Wang is."
Legend!
Biggest laugh I've had all week. Thanks!
And every woman who had worked with Charlie Rose thought "Well, I know a dick when I meet one."
Ha, you just reminded me of something my partner told. Her boss had had to deal with a property manager named Wang.
Plato Wang.
No odd connotations there.
As my techie son said when he let me play with his first iPhone, "We're living in the future!"
Big picture stuff like moving from MS-DOS to Windows to realizing that Mac was just way cooler and less clunky than anything else.
I started as a Mac chauvinist. Got the original Mac and steadily upgraded through every variation to the iMac series. Loved them.
But then I started editing doctoral dissertations and had clients who demanded work be done on PC platforms. So I bought the cheapest Toshiba Satellite Staples offered---$400 with Windows and MS Word. I've never looked back. I still have all my old Macs, and Mrs. Derelict is still a Mac devotee. But I have definitely come to like WinDoze better.
Bought an iMac a few years ago for home and I'll never go back to pc again. There were growing pains and there are still some things I don't like (Mac folder system, shitty built-in camera), but out of the box was the easiest computer I've ever had to get going.
I, too, loved the ease of setup that Apple builds in. But I came to loathe the brick-wall obsolescence that turned perfectly good computers into scrap because the operating system could no longer be upgraded to keep up with software development--and Apple does this with tragically short time horizons. Couple that with the dearth of programs available and the Mac world just doesn't work for me any more.
My original Toshiba is still going strong--I gave it to Mrs. Derelict because she has one particular program that she MUST use for one particular task, and that program will only run on Windows. That Toshiba is now 12 years old. Still runs, still supported.
Th iMac I bought at about the same time is junk. It still works--I can turn it on and it boots up--but there is no support for the system, no software available that will run on it, and even the browser version it has will no longer load many modern Web pages.
I'm almost 4 years into my first iMac (I refuse to shell out the $$ on a Mac laptop), and have had zero issues. If I can get another couple years out of it, it will have exceeded my expectations (I've never had a pc that lasted more than 5 years, most started dying after 2, but that's just my personal experience).
Premature PC death is what I fear because both of my Toshibas are now very old in computer years, and Toshiba discontinued the Satellite line. So I'm looking at a Lenovo or maybe an HP.
I think it's fair to expect a desktop computer to last a few years. For me, laptops are disposable (I'd only buy one if I had to, and I'd buy the cheapest one--one that's a LOT cheaper than my phone!).
She drove a Toshiba Satellite
Oh, faster than the speed of light
We got my partner an Asus a few years ago, and it's very nice. That was to replace the Samsung that was to replace the Toshiba (which had lasted a very long time).
I admired the total "backwards compatibility" of Macs and while I sorta understand why it went away, I thought much less of Apple after that.
My fourteen year-old Mac Pro “cheesegrater,” purchased used seven years ago, keeps chugging along. Without some under the hood jiggery-pokery I’m unwilling to undertake, its OS is stalled at “High Sierra” (which itself broke a couple of apps), but it’s still a solid production machine. Safari’s performance is increasingly dodgy. but Chrome still loads the pages that Safari chokes on. Best of all, though, is that the machine arrived loaded with—I am going to employ some artful circumlocutions—a suite of essential software I had used for years, purchasing each iteration, until the parent company, founded by engineers, fell into the hands of marketers who imposed a subscription model.
To my surprise, these applications (let’s refer to them, collectively, as the “Fetid Fog”) have never phoned home, and so, month in and month out since 2017 I have had the use of them without the necessity of shelling out US $50/month for the privilege. It’s true that I’ve no access to the latest and greatest bells & whistles that emerge from the fog, but for what I need the hardware and software to do, the package has been one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.
I switched from Mac laptops to a Mac Mini, which is just an incredibly powerful, very small HD & everything else is modular. Use a good flatscreen as a monitor, whatever keyboard, mouse, & webcam you like, whatever suits your needs & is in your price range. It’s great — and I laugh at myself because it acts just like PCs did from the jump. Took ‘em long enough to catch up. XD
Your mileage will always vary, of course, but I work in mutliple development environments, and an operating system in which the main file system display hides file extensions BY DEFAULT, and sorts files and folders seprately, is a human rights violation. (Had to dal with that on a new machine just today.)
LOOKIN‘ AT YOU, WINDOWS
For me it was the Walkman. Those little headphones sounded as good as my Pioneer with the JBL speakers I bought with my paper route money. I actually took up jogging.
Something rather niche: Aircraft navigation systems. When I started flying back in the 1970s, navigation systems for general aviation were based on 1950s technology. The "advances" were just incremental crap that actually made navigation more difficult.
Today, I have GPS units in the cockpit that have incredibly simple touch-screen moving maps, offer plain-language navigation on a direct course between any two point on Earth, provide me with weather and in-flight traffic advisories that are more accurate than ground-based radar, and can determine my position to within 18 inches. Miraculous for old-timers like me!
That sounds like it works pretty well. I'm often unimpressed with GPS, as it does some kind of lame things at times. We were in LA a few years ago, and had just gotten on the freeway, following a route the GPS had suggested. It told me to get off at some exit, then a series of right turns, and enter the freeway. Well, we got on the freeway at the same exit it had us get off at. We just made a loop around a block. I was irritated, to say the least.
Shazam is great, but can't seem to lock on to me just humming a tune. Anyone else tried this? Or were all those mean comments ("stick to the drums, shithead!") true? Maybe if I tapped out a beat...
I was an early skeptic of all this new-fangled crap, but I couldn't live without my phone. I don't use it like the youngins (my face is not constantly glued to it, I hate texting, etc.). But, I can watch any NHL game anywhere at any time on any device (this alone has kept me in Japan, a hockey wasteland, all these years), I've pretty much ditched expensive camera gear, and no matter where I wake up (and how fucked up I might be) I just click "HOME" and know exactly where to go and how to get there (that, friends, is an under-appreciated miracle).
Not sure, but I think Shazam reads the digital metadata attached to the music not the music itself. It doesn't work at a concert either.
Yeah probly.
At one point about 15 years ago we were searching the web for photos of friend and colleague. We entered her photo and it immediately came back with more photos, but not of her. They were family. Blew me away. Realized later that the photos had captions with names and the whole thing was a word match scam.
Laughed, but bitterly.
Yes, that's right.
Having a good camera with you in your pocket is just amazing. Aside from how handy it can be if you stumble across some cops beating up a guy, my regular walks in the woods have given me a whole gallery of cool mushroom photos. And most walks the camera stays in my pocket, but I swear I look at things more closely now, knowing something COULD be a picture.
Computer memory sometimes blows my mind. When I first started fooling with computers, a one gig drive was selling for $1200. Now I can get a 512 gig thumbdrive for about $15. And it's *way* faster, in both search times and upload times. At the machine shop I work at, most of the machines are fed programs through phone lines and an RS232, at a baud rate of 960. We have some newer machines that have USB, and I can load a program off a thumbdrive into those machines in about 2 seconds that would take four or five minutes the old way.
Speaking of Shazam, my partner keeps dreaming of a Shazam for scents. You smell a nice perfume while out somewhere, you hold your phone up, and it tells you what it is and where to get it.
Re: Shazam for scents. I see that being weaponized by police pretty quickly (if it worked!). "So, not only were you listening (Shazam) to "Dopesmoker," there's this funny smell (Shazam)"
Ha! Well, she was thinking it would be set up to work only with perfumes, but the people who come up with stuff like that are always willing to take law enforcement bucks too. Now, if the cops used it strictly to find out who is wearing too much AXE, that'd be fine! (Though it would probably be themselves.)
They have a Shazam for birdcalls named Merlin. It's a lot of fun. Especially when there is a feeding frenzy at the birdfeeder.
That sounds cool!
It is
Sketchy tho. I watched a mockingbird mimicking several other birdcalls and Merlin had no idea it was a mockingbird. Also, if you are trying to enter data to Cornell's ebird web data system, and you claim a rare bird by how Merlin heard it, you WILL be challenged by the minders.
I fondly remember our excitement when our lab Mac was upgraded with a 20 MB hard drive the size of a dictionary.
The classic (paraphrasing here) Bill Gates: "No one will ever need more than 540 MB..."
I "invented" such a thing in a YA novel I wrote (that no one published). I called it Sniffer.
Nice! Well, not the "no one published" part, of course.
To be honest, I'm still pretty awed by the ice-maker in a refrigerator/freezer.
Legit!
This is terrific, Roy. There’s so much I could respond to (particularly re: music) but I suspect this’ll be a bad day to type.
I used to know a man—he and his wife were Manhattan Project alumnæ, he a chemical engineer and she a typist—who had an Apple ][ (I employ the strange typographical convention of the day) with a green phosphor monitor and a cassette drive (what, me floppy? Not, at least in that household, in 1980). At their home he demonstrated the first version of what eventually evolved into Microsoft’s “Flight Simulator.” This one was, by today’s standards…primitive. Wireframe graphics, a grid of thirty-six squares floating in space, with a jagged range of “mountains” at the far end. Interestingly, it proved possible to fly past the mountains, leaving the grid behind, traversing empty “space” until, by and by, the grid reappeared in the distance. My wife was entranced. A couple of years later she prevailed upon me to purchase one of these enchanted Apples, which I did for an outlay (financed through her credit union) we could scarcely then afford. Within a short time, I came to hate this underpowered machine. Not so the wife: using the 16-pin Epson dot-matrix printer that was part of the package, she volunteered to “typeset” about half of issue number three of Tim Yohannon’s zine “Maximum Rocknroll.” (Some of you, if you’ve ever heard of the man, may have formed the impression that he was personally unpleasant. Nothing could be closer to the truth.)
Fast forward two years and I’m still making payments to the credit union on the goddamn ][ when the wife, now working for a software house in Berkeley, began to agitate for the purchase of a Macintosh, the original 128K model with the nine-inch monitor. “Never!” I roared, putting my foot down with a thump that could probably be felt in San Leandro. “I will never have a machine from that loathsome company on my premises again.” And there the matter rested for a few weeks until one evening when, working late, she called to ask if I would retrieve her in downtown Berkeley. I duly arrived. “Meeting’s running overtime,” she explained apologetically. “Shouldn’t be much longer. You can wait in here,” ushering me into a room in which a lone Mac sat, running “MacPaint.”
Presently she returned. “Where do I sign?” I sighed.
Two years later she ran off with a colleague—they were still living together when he co-founded the “FreeBSD project,” and it still rankles that the guy who nicked my wife has a Wikipedia entry whereas I will die in obscurity—but kindly left the Mac behind as she cleared out her goods and chattels. A year after that my own employer, the venerable San Francisco firm of Flatline, Comatose, Torpor & Drowse, offered me, on the basis of the redesigns I’d done on some crude in-house forms, a two-year TDY that involved editing and graphics, and offered in effect a blank check for my equipment needs. The two years turned into thirty, and I made my living on a succession of more powerful iterations of the platform, although following FCT&D’s ill-considered merger with Senescent Technologies and the Dotard Group the new outfit, BrainDead Systems, thereafter declined to purchase any more equipment or software, so I self-financed my little art department (easily five figures over the years) for the remainder of my alleged career.
Sorry to run on so. The magic? That first, ænemic, tombstone-shaped Mac. Forty years have elapsed since I set it up on my desk, but I’ve never had as much sheer fun with a computer as I did with that old toy before its descendants became my livelihood.
At the start of my writing/editing career, we got those first 128k Macs. They were a major step up from the Compugraphic typesetting "computers" we were working with (you had to save you work to a disk after every 100 characters--go 1 character over and the whole thing dumped). Suddenly, writing a feature article of 10,000 words became, well, almost a breeze since I could not save my work to a diskette! Of course, you had to swap the diskette that had MicroSoft Word 1.0 with the diskette you were saving your work to since the 100K Word disk only had 36k free for storage. But it was a miracle for us word slaves!
"Nothing could be closer to the truth." Heh.