I guess I’m easy to please, but, recently I got myself a better bluetooth dongle over the holidays. I had one before, but it was stupid cheap, connection was frail and didn’t have good range. Now I have one with Bluetooth 5.4 and I’m amazed with what I can do with it.
I can funnel sound to any one of my bluetooth speakers so I don’t have it hogging my main speakers when I want something close by me.
Speaking of which, I wish I had really known this far earlier in my days of using a computer. But, being able to split audio in multiple ways. I can assign where sound is going to, program to program. One browser gets these headsets, that browser gets the TV speakers .etc
That kind of shit amazes me and damn shame I never explored this before.
Not technology in general, but there are specific technologies that are mind-blowing.
Back when I was in college, IBM announced they developed the technology to manipulate individual atoms. They used it to spell out “IBM” at the atomic level.
Not sure where or if they ever DID anything with it, but that was fascinating!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms)
They progressed to animations
This was in 1981, crazy
Technology, especially that which you didn’t fully understand, is basically magic and magic is very interesting 🪄
I’m one of those people that actually would rather not know how some technology works so I can retain some level of surprise and admiration. I know generally how a fair number of technology devices, process and functions work but I don’t get as excited.
I was a huge fantasy nerd as a child. Wanted magic to be real so badly, wanted to be able to affect change in the world purely through force of will. As I grew older I realized humans do have magical abilities; a group of humans with sufficient domain knowledge and the right tools can absolutely bring about change through sheer force of will. I absolutely studied magic (engineering) in University and seeing magic from other disciplines always left me awestruck.
Especially sparkies; “don’t let the magic smoke out of the wires” is the extent of my electrical knowledge.
I can, at the touch of a button, heat the entire home. Most of human history that’s mind boggling. You had to work a lot to heat and cool an area.
I can communicate with anyone, anywhere, even in space is basically real time. Hot damn? Something that could have taken ages until recently!
Computers are just modern clockwork made with silicon and electricity instead of brass and we’ve used them to build a global network where people and machines can communicate near-instantly and automate so much work. We tricked the rocks into thinking and I think that’s incredible.
Extremely basic example, but sometimes I’ll open a web page and feel amazed at the huge stack of technology that came together to make it happen. On both ends: CPU, RAM, motherboard, networking components. In between fiber, switches, and routers. And once the data arrives, a browser interpreting HTML, CSS, and JS, all to show me dickbutt.
If you know the right incantatuons, you can make sand do the things you want. IM A FUCKING WIZARD, HARRY
I’ve always been fascinated by the act of pushing a button to make something happen. Like since before I remember. Lift / Elevator buttons especially at first*. Light switches, even.
Then combine that with relatively high-functioning ASD or AuDHD or whatever’s actually going on between my ears, creating an affinity for things are logical and lack messy, confusing emotions.
*There’s one lift that’s been in service longer than I’ve been alive, was frequently used by my mother when I was in a pushchair / stroller to bypass the nearby staircase. I still yearn to go back to it, press the buttons for myself, see the way they light up and ride the lift. The last time I was nearby it was busy and in use by mothers using pushchairs / strollers, believe it or not. The nerve!
I can video call a relative in China and its real time exchange of information.
Someone like, say, Wong Kim Ark, for example had to send a letter that went by boat that took months.
(I highly doubt that there was even a telegraph line across the pacific, right?)
I can have a personal witness with me in case of conflict (phone video recording)
Nothing anymore really. Innovation is all but dead in favor of unnecessary convenience or monetary gains. The few projects that could have a meaningful impact on the betterment of lives are either brushed away due to lack of monetization or brushed away because it could take away some other, worse technology that’s already an established norm.
Still using oil, folks.
Seriously?
For example extreme ultraviolet lithography is currently used to produce GPU‘s to train your dogshit LLM, that we all hate. This technology however is arguably the most insane machines humanity has ever produced, it‘s absolutely insane and fascinating.
Can you share the dongle you got? I tried a couple of bt dongles and they SUCKED.
Yeah, I’d like the link as well, I am not a “speaker” person, so I can’t really understand how this dongle helped OP so much.
I own an Alexa but I barely use it as a speaker, most of my audio needs are met with my knockoff airpods 😅
Whether it’s hardware or software, I like technology that enables me to do things. Playing fun and impressive games, painting, animating, sculpting, making music, making my own video games, and so on…
One of the simple reasons I really dislike AI slop is that it removes humanity from the process. In fact, there isn’t much of a process at all. It’s all about plopping out an end product and there’s no “art” to it. As someone who values my own creativity, loves the process of making things, and doesn’t believe in exploiting others for my own gain, generative AI is the last thing I want out of technology.
Of course, a lot of technology is “fascinating”:
The complex and intricate boards with even more complex and intricate chips and parts on them.
Storing data with electrons in RAM cells or on magnetic, optical and audio media.
How chips are basically printed on to wafers.
How we turn high level ideas into source code, compile it down to machine code, which is then interpreted as a series of numerical CPU instructions.
And even though I hate how AI is being used and humans are being abused, how “machine learning” works by essentially biasing a data structute a certain way is also fascinating.
How fast and small all of this has become over the last 100 years.
How we power all of this stuff by harnessing river currents and the sun, and by splitting the atom, is also fascinating.
There’s a lot about technology to enjoy and find interesting. We just have to remember that it should be there to make life better, not worse.
I had one before, but it was stupid cheap, connection was frail and didn’t have good range.
I’m not sure exactly whether this was protocol improvements or some other form of implementation improvement (antenna location?) but, yeah, I’ve found that the popular Sony WH-1000MX6 headphones have much better ability to talk to my Bluetooth transceiver at range than do a number of older earbuds and headphones I have. The range is closer to, say, a cordless phone or WiFi.
Depending upon your use case, that may not matter; for a smartphone, more range probably doesn’t matter much. But if you’re talking to a desktop computer, it can be handy.
I think there have been some pretty major improvements in that sound tech recently. I remember when I was still using windows 10 a few years ago there wasn’t a good way to have two audio outputs. Android only added that a few years back as well iirc. maybe was possible with some major modifications but now it’s all included oob.
The pencil. Seriously, what piece of tech has had such an impact as this ~450 years old lump of graphite sandwiched between two pieces of wood? (edit: grossly simplifying it’s evolution, I know)
So impressively efficient it is still widely used today and, imho, in many cases still unrivaled too. Heck, even Apple with all its billions could only try to copy the cheap & humble pencil with their expensive high-tech ‘Apple Pencil’—they did not manage to put an eraser on their model, though ;)
We can already hold all of human knowledge in your hands.
Looking forwards to injecting Wikipedia into a Covid variant.
That’s coming with 6G
