Technological Gizmos: Which Ones Truly Improved Your Life, Which Ones Were Duds?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Tivo. I almost never watch live TV anymore. And no VCR to muck around with, or tapes.

High-speed always-on internet. I remember when you might wait for an hour to be able to dial in.

Google. No more phone books for me, except as weights for the cat towers.

Digital cameras/cell phone cameras. It used to be that I’d take pictures when I went somewhere, then never get around to getting them developed (I think I may still have a camera around somewhere with undeveloped film from my trip to France in 2001).

The Walkman. I think the inventor of it should get a Nobel Peace Prize for preventing so many family fights on car trips just in my own family.

Online message boards. I’m socially awkward and have a hard time making a good first impression on people in person.

Email. It’s great to be able to communicate with, say, my parents without having to find a time that’s convenient to both of us, and without having to mess around with stamps and envelopes. This was especially a lifesaver when I lived in California and they were on Eastern time.

The timer on the coffee maker that shuts it off after a couple of hours. A lifesaver for someone who is forgetful and very much not a morning person.

Call waiting. I don’t want to go back to the bad old days of having to stay off the phone because someone is waiting for a call.

Online bill payments. No more messing around with checks, envelopes, and stamps (the chances that I can find all of those, plus a pen that writes, at any given time- that’s Vegas odds).

I’m of two minds on cell phones. They are convenient sometimes, but annoying.

22

I think people are referring to two kinds of GPS - one is a device that tells you your coordinates (nice to know but not all that useful unless you’re doing orienteering) and the other is the onboard direction system where you punch in an address and it tells you how to get there. I can see how the latter would be a must for some people (it was great when I got a minicab home from a club a couple of years ago, just told the guy my address and went to sleep as the machine did all the work).

Okay, for me:

Must have

MP3 player - days worth of music in one place.

Mobile phone - never have to be disconnected if you don’t want to. I do find it strange how some people think the phone is there for their convenience in contacting me, when it is in fact for my convenience. If I want to turn it off that’s my call.

Not so much

HDTV - I agree that the cost this just doesn’t match up to the usage of it. Until there are more films/programs designed to be viewed in HD it’s just not worth having (either because it doesn’t live up to potential or because it makes things look too real).

23

Things I’d be lost without; Laptop computer, internet access, mobile phone, digital camera.

Things I could survive without but are really quite handy; Cable TV and video on demand services.

Duds; A little handheld scanner for books, useful perhaps in some circumstances, none I’ve found myself in.

24

I actually think people who don’t watch much TV tend to like TiVos more than people who do watch a lot of TV. Why? Because you pretty much don’t want TV for a few reasons - there’s nothing interesting on, you don’t feel like sitting through a whole show, or you can’t stand all the commercials. The TiVo fixes all of those things. It’s a wonderful feeling to be guaranteed on those nights that you do feel like veging in front of the TV that there’ll be something worth watching.

25

So for those who say “PC” how do you feel about a PC without an Internet connection? Would a plain old PC, with no web, email, online gaming, itunes, google, maps, weather, etc. have changed your life the way the Internet connected one did?

I had a problem with my broadband router a few days ago and I was cursing my PC(a good machine that I built myself) as a silicon paperweight. It seems I don’t do much of anything with it that doesn’t require a net connection except watch movies and play the occasional round of Neverwinter Nights or Warhammer.

I’m considering building a new system with a TV tuner card so I can hook up a Wii to it. I’m undecided if I’ll tear the old one down or not. We really don’t need two PCs, but it’s hard to justify tearing it down when it’s all perfectly functional and would work well as a server to store backups/pictures on.

Enjoy,
Steven

26

I consider a PC (with internet access, of course) to be such an everyday part of life for the vast majority of Americans that it’s not even what I would consider a technological gizmo. It’s just a thing, like a sofa or a sink.

27

I forgot one yesterday: LCD monitors. Part of my job used to be to move those huge, heavy CRT monitors for users. I don’t miss that, not one bit. That said, I’m in no hurry to junk our old but working TV for a flat-screen. What can I say, other than that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds…

I don’t watch a lot of TV, and I watch less now than I did BT (Before Tivo). Used to be, I watched TV for two reasons- one was if there was something specific on that I wanted to see, and the other was because we were eating dinner or just wanted to watch TV. Now, the specific shows I want to watch are available at the times when I want to watch TV, so I no longer watch stuff that I only watched because I wanted to watch TV when it was on. I could have done that with VCRs before, I guess, but setting them and making sure there was enough blank tape (what with only a few hours per tape) made that too much of a hassle to actually do.

I got a PC a few years before I got a really good internet connection, and I’d say yes. I hated hand-writing papers for classes with the fire of 6.02 * 10[sup]23[/sup] suns, and I didn’t have to do that any more when I had the computer, even if it wasn’t hooked up to the internet. I still hate hand-writing anything at least as much now.

See, I consider it a technological gizmo unlike a sofa or a sink because I can remember a time without PCs with internet access, but I can’t remember a time without sinks or sofas. I realize this is a bit on the arbitrary side (the definition would be different for different people), but I think just about any definition for “technological gizmo” as opposed to “everyday thing” would be arbitrary.

28

One of my AP classes in high school required that we take notes for each chapter, and turn in the notes every two weeks or so. That’s when I started taking notes on the computer – I could to all kinds of neat highlighting, they took up much less space than handwritten notes, and it was easy to leave enough empty space to allow for little additions during class.

I continued this in college with my first PDA – a Compaq iPaq that I purchase in August 2000 and stopped using this past year (due to a bad battery; the device is otherwise fine, although not compatible with any existing software). The handwriting recognition was great; I used it to take notes for all my English and humanities classes. One class required that we print all the reading assignments from PDFs – it would have been hundreds of pages even at the smallest print setting. I loaded them on my PDA. : )

My MP3 player has made a huge difference – and it’s not even hooked into my vehicle yet! I’m especially fond of Podcasts, and I love finding new artists. None of that was really possible (or easy) when I just listened to CDs.

While certainly not a new thing, battery backup surge suppressors (mine is APC) are awesome!

I really can’t think of any “duds”, though there’s plenty of stuff I’ve avoided – for example: GPS, fridges with TV’s stuck on the front, text messaging.

29

GPS in an airplane is 100 times more useful than in a car. It tells you exactly where you are, where your destination is, what direction to fly, airspace to avoid, runway layouts, communication frequencies, emergency directions such as closest airport. Nicer ones give you weather overlays including lightening strike patterns. It has revolutionized flying. I had problems finding a particular grass strip due to the terrain so I created an artificial approach to it and was able to line up just using the GPS. And going to Oshkosh by yourself through all those airspaces around Chicago… I love my Garmin.

laptops and flatbed scanners have made copying historical photos better, cheaper, and way faster than photographic methods.

Digital cameras and electronic software make it super easy to create stereoviews and panoramic pictures.

Memory sticks allow storage of MP3’s that I play through my car stereo.

DVD burners allow me to store large numbers of movies in a binder that replaces boxes of VCR tapes. The quality is consistent and they last longer.

Fuel injection and computers in cars. People have forgotten how poorly carburetors worked in the winter and how often cars needed a tune up.

Business software –How did we work through data without Excel to crunch numbers or Access to sift data.

30

Oh GOD I forgot about those - who the hell bought those wastes of space and electricity, other than people working on “Pimp my house”?

31

It’s a little too early to say that this Truly Improved my life, but I’m loving the hell out of Pandora now that it’s available via the iPhone. It’s almost obsoleting the iPod - most of the time, I’m not looking to listen to one particular band/playlist/whatever. I want to find new music that I like. Pandora is the shitz at that kind of thing.

32

Truly Made a Positive Difference in My Life

The word processor. I’m serious. For many years I earned a living as a writer, and I’m sufficiently old that when I started we used typewriters, then in came electronic ones that could store a few phrases and lines of text, then slightly more fancy ones… and then wham! Word processors! Being able to push words around on a screen, cut, paste, edit, delete, chop and change, store different versions, re-use old documents… wow! It made an amazing difference. (Score two cool points if, during the earlier part of this paragraph, you felt moved to say, “Actual typewriter? Luxury! We 'ad it tough…”.)

Laser printer. As a corollary to the above, for about the first four or five years when I was using a word processor, output was via a dot matrix printer or something else that involved clattering, hammering and high-speed tap-tap-tappity noises. The first time I saw a laser printer, and saw this silky-smooth output from a near-silent machine, I nearly died and went to heaven knowing what a difference it would make to my life.

Digital camera + photoshop combination. I’m only a rank amateur photographer, but nonetheless my photos of my travels around the world mean a lot to me. I love all the advantages that came with digital cameras (instant verification and virtually no consumables) but what I love even more is being able to tweak the images until they are just peachy perfect before I print them out and display them. I spend hours of my life doing this, and consider it very enjoyable time well-spent.

**Internet travelling. **The internet has made it so much easier than ever before to go travelling. Very often, I go on long journeys using a sort of daisy-chain technique, only planning one hop ahead. Being able to go online to check options for travel and accommodation is amazing, as is the ability to book things online with my trusty credit card. When you think of the social and technological infrastructure that has to be in place for this to happen, it’s breathtaking.

**DVD recorder. **I’ve been waiting all my life for this to be invented. This is how I always wanted to watch TV, and now I can. Easy as anything to record (point and click at menu) and watch whenever I want, with a clear, jitter-free, no-degradation image.

Desktop video editing. For my money, and in my experience, the zenith of desktop miracles. I worked in the video industry in the 80s when we needed a room full of heavy hardware to achieve a single video edit, and even that was prone to every glitch imaginable. Now I can edit a video with perfect frame-accurate editing, and a slew of digital effects, just using my computer. And it just works. Amazing.
**
GPS.** Love it. Love it. Love it. I have happily surrended to this technology. Every map has been dumped, and I don’t even bother to pretend to think about the route I’m going to take. Yes, if it goes wrong, I’m dead. But I love the miracle of it.

Didn’t Pan Out

Texting. Arguably the worst way of communicating ever invented. I’m not quite sure if it’s the technology I hate or the way people abuse it, but either way I’m not a fan. I regard it just a form of hi-tech nagging. I particularly despise people who send me a question by txt, where the question might be short and sweet but the answer would require several screens’ worth of writing. Why can’t they phone or use email?

Digital Audio Broadcasting. Um. Have tried this for a year now. The technology is fine, and searching by name is better than having to dial through meaningless numbers, but at least here in the UK the infrastructure and market haven’t quite settled down yet. Stations seem to come and go alarmingly, and I can’t say it’s made much of a difference.

Wireless headphones. Maybe I just had a bad experience. Was excited by the idea, tried it, sound quality and ‘reception’ was awful, never gone back to it.

Waiting to See How It Works Out

Television everything. Digital, hi-def, new screen ratio… there have been a lot of changes in the past 7-8 years and there are more to come. I do wonder if, at the end if it all, we’ll actually have anything that’s sufficiently better to have been worth all the hassle. Or whether it was just a way to get us all to buy new television sets. Besides, all the hi-tech gimmicks in the world can’t make a dud TV show any good, so I’d prefer it if they’d spent all the R&D money on better writers, better ideas and better scripts. Instead we get glorious hi-definition images of… reality shows and singing contests.

33

As previously mentioned, iPod, Cell phone, Tivo are things that radically make a difference in my life.

One of my new favorites is the AppleTv. Every DVD I own available at the click of the remote. No more having to replace disks when my 3 year old scratches them all to hell. No more previews or FBI warnings, just straight to the movie. Plus Podcasts, YouTube, any pictures I’d like to view on my TV, my iTunes music. Best purchase I’ve made in a while.

34

Wow, completely left that out. I gave props to spreadsheets and database software but not that.

Back in the early 80’s we had an IBM stand-alone word processor (Displaywriter) which used 8" disketts and it only cost $7,895. We used a cradle modem with a speed of 300 baud which was the fastest at the time. You could watch a text file transmit line-by-line on the screen.

In college I took a class in word processing that came with a program called Norton Textra. It was a DOS based program that was as powerful as the IBM system above and fit on a 3 1/2" floppy. I still have it and just tried using it. I forgot what it was like to work in DOS. The background color is black, it doesn’t work with a mouse and you have to install each printer driver. I still have a HP inkjet set up. every function such as bolding required a series of steps starting with a highlighting command.

And I was the first person in line to buy an HP Laserjet 4. I still have it. I thought I was king of the world in college with a computer AND a laserjet. After I bought it I had to call HP to get the correct driver and they apologized in advance for the 2 day delay. It actually arrived 2 days later.

Computers have come a LOOOOOONG way from the Displaywriter.

35

I’m going to go with my Blackberry as the number one thing that improved my life. I can job hunt, apt hunt, email, check news, stocks, sports, etc.

Honestly can’t imagine my life without one.

36

I’m going back a bit further than most of you. (No, not fire.)

VCR/DVD - when I was a kid there were some movies I saw in the theater that I would have loved to see again. I’d haunt the TV pages looking for interesting old movies on Channel 9. Now, especially with Netflix, I can watch what I want when I want it. We like our DVR (which our kids got us) much more than we ever expected to.

Microwave: Heating up coffee in a little pan is a pain, not to mention the much wider range of breakfast foods I can make quickly.

Cellphone. I remember looking for payphones in the pouring rain. I’m not a cellphone junky by any means, but it sometimes comes in handy.

Iffy: GPS. Good the few times I go someplace new, or go someplace that getting out of is a pain, but I use mine very infrequently.

MP3: I got one as a gift, and it is good for listening to when I garden or walk the dog, but I’d never put all my music on it.

Bad:

Satellite radio. We got Sirius for my father-in-law, who never got it to work. We used it at home for a while. Okay, but not worth it. In the car I listen to either NPR, the traffic, or CDs. I don’t drive enough to make a car satellite radio worth it.

Instant Messaging. I did this over 30 years ago. I don’t want to be that tied to a computer. It includes the worst of a phone call and email in one package.

37

Not sure if this qualifies as a dud because the damn thing works but I never use it (and I’m embarassed to say I bought one).

A salad shooter. It actually does a good job but I never use it. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m always grating fresh ginger by hand and its a pain in the ass. Now where did I put that thing, teriyaki shish kabob sounds good right about now.