For us over 50 - Favourite Technology

[JulianPH]

AstonZagato said:

The slightly odd thing is that oldies seemingly understand how/why these things work a bit better than their children. My teenage and 20yo kids use me as tech support: "Dad! This isn't working. Can you fix it?". Laptops. Tablets, Smartphones. WiFi. Spreadsheets. AV systems. Sat Navs.

Having grown up with Acorn and BBC computers, I guess that hands on programming experience gives one a better understanding of why they do the things they do.

Also, I had no mug who I could turn to to fix my problems. They do.

And Apricot!

I learned my first coding in BASIC. Extremely old fashioned now days but some of the syntax is still relevant.

I think the difference is that we had to understand how things were achieved and this is not actually a requirement today unless you want to become a coder.

I am trying to teach my daughter (code.org as a starting point) but she has little interest!

[anonymous-user]

Music streaming services, has improved my music listening no end. No more having to listen to filler tracks anymore and a playlist to suit every occasion or mood.

Just need to decide what to do with the boxes of CDs in the garage now as they are now redundant.

[vixen1700]

Vandenberg said:

Music streaming services, has improved my music listening no end. No more having to listen to filler tracks anymore and a playlist to suit every occasion or mood.

Just need to decide what to do with the boxes of CDs in the garage now as they are now redundant.

I still have tonnes of CDs and vinyl in boxes under the bed, the cabinet in the front room and various other places.

Haven't played a CD in a couple of years now, but I can't bring myself to get rid of them.

The tablet is Bluetooth connected to the amp, so what ever comes into my head gets played via Youtube. The quality is decent and I can usually find what I'm after.

[Silent1]

Freakuk said:

nyt said:

In the US I used to 'pay in' cheques by taking a picture of the cheque in the banking app.
Various banks in the UK say that this is coming but it never seems to get any nearer.

Been in the Barclays mobile banking app for some years now, I worked on the dev

Lloyd’s too

[Bobajobbob]

nyt said:

In the US I used to 'pay in' cheques by taking a picture of the cheque in the banking app.
Various banks in the UK say that this is coming but it never seems to get any nearer.

HSBC supports this in their app now.

[The Mad Monk]

85Carrera said:

Possibly better in the old days when you had to leave Kuwait to effect the transfer.

Less reasons to leave cannot be good grammar...

It certainly isn't.

Fewer.

[TTmonkey]

Data speeds is where the mind boggles.

Just a few years ago downloading films used to take hours. now its seconds.

Also access speeds for games - I can be playing a very impressive COD BLOPS 4 in 20 seconds from reaching for the PS4 remote......

back in the day, loading a game on the ZX spectrum..... took ages and often failed. Me an the then girlfriend used to be able to have a shag whilst waiting! (I was pretty quick but she was always happy!!!!)

[br d]

GetCarter said:

Digital Audio Workstations.

Oh yes!

I used to mess around years ago on an Atari 512 with Steinberg 12 or something like that, being able to enter program changes seemed like wizardry back then. Lately I have built a small home studio and am using Cubase Pro 9.5, this thing is beyond anything I could ever have imagined! I know you are in the game GC but as just a tinkerer I don't think I will even live long enough to use half the power of this software, it blows me away. I never get anything done cos I'm too busy trying things out!

And Drones. I have a Mavic Air and it's an amazing thing. I can be sitting in a chair in my back garden with a beer while flying about over a lake 3500 foot away recording the island in the middle.

[AstonZagato]

Vandenberg said:

Music streaming services, has improved my music listening no end. No more having to listen to filler tracks anymore and a playlist to suit every occasion or mood.

Just need to decide what to do with the boxes of CDs in the garage now as they are now redundant.

I slightly disagree. I get in my wife's Tesla and look at Spotify (which is the main delivery mechanism for music). A near infinite choice. Great in theory. However, I have no idea what I want to listen to other than "something I like". if I select a playlist based on something I like (say, Pink Floyd) there is a whole heap of rubbish on it that I don't like.

On my phone I have rated all my music 1-5 stars (several thousand tracks). I have a smart playlist that plays things I haven't listened to in the last three months that I rate 4 stars or higher. That serves my up a great soundtrack without me thinking that I can't seem to replicate from streaming services.

So I end up selecting my phone as the source.

The only exception is if someone brings up a piece of music and you want to listen to it. Then it's fabulous.

[C&C]

GetCarter said:

GroundEffect said:

To the oldies: have you noticed an acceleration of the acceleration?

Oldie here.

You bet. From typing code into a ZX80 (and losing all of many hours work every time I switched it off) to now, acceleration has been exponential.

Definitely on the exponential growth.

Much of the technology that we take for granted today, we couldn't have even imagined as a kid. As has been said, even the science fiction writers could only think of advanced devices that generally had a single purpose - e.g. the communicator in Star Trek. Now a tiny flat smartphone can run video calls, work as a sat nav, book hotels and flights worldwide, show you what a street looks like in other countries, play any music or film that you want, track and tell you what the plane is flying overhead - where it's going along with height, heading and speed, the same for boats in the sea. Access almost any information you're interested in, live translate text into other languages, convert voice to text and respond to voice commands, order and track a taxi, work as a pretty good still and video camera. Oh, it'll also make voice phone calls and send texts as well! It's not that long ago that even the existence of a mobile phone (the size of a couple of housebricks) seemed amazing.

I remember when a friend first got a "video game" that you could play on your home TV - the Binatone "pong" game - it was amazing you could control a white line to bounce a square white ball on a black background! Now we're at immersive VR, and 4K games on 65" full colour screens less than an inch thick. Even 20 years ago, about the best widely available TV was a huge, heavy box containing a 36" SD CRT.

Other stuff like new materials - carbon fibre, kevlar, and improvements in older items, like torches, which now throw out huge amounts of light from a tiny tube that lasts for hours and hours.

One of the most impressive though, to me, is 3D printing - the idea you can download a pattern and print your own 3D items - it's almost like being able to teleport parts around the globe.

But, definitely the most amazing thing about all this development is the ever increasing exponential pace of it. It's hard for people to really grasp what this means for the future, as there is only the past to look at, and we inevitably mentally use the development that has previously gone on as a benchmark for what future development may bring. This effectively underestimates what will happen by an increasingly significant factor. It's tempting to think that as we've come this far, the same technology will be around in say 20-50 years, but just "better". What is impossible to imagine, but inevitably will be the case, is all the new stuff that we're not even aware of yet, that will make a lot of today's most advanced tech look quaint and old-fashioned in an ever decreasing timespan. It's going to be interesting....

[GetCarter]

vixen1700 said:

Vandenberg said:

Music streaming services, has improved my music listening no end. No more having to listen to filler tracks anymore and a playlist to suit every occasion or mood.

Just need to decide what to do with the boxes of CDs in the garage now as they are now redundant.

I still have tonnes of CDs and vinyl in boxes under the bed, the cabinet in the front room and various other places.

Haven't played a CD in a couple of years now, but I can't bring myself to get rid of them.

The tablet is Bluetooth connected to the amp, so what ever comes into my head gets played via Youtube. The quality is decent and I can usually find what I'm after.

The quality is indeed, surprisingly decent. But it ain't good!

[br d]

Silent1 said:

Freakuk said:

nyt said:

In the US I used to 'pay in' cheques by taking a picture of the cheque in the banking app.
Various banks in the UK say that this is coming but it never seems to get any nearer.

Been in the Barclays mobile banking app for some years now, I worked on the dev

Lloyd’s too

I've had the Barclays app since day one and I had no idea it could do that.

[GetCarter]

br d said:

Oh yes!

I used to mess around years ago on an Atari 512 with Steinberg 12 or something like that, being able to enter program changes seemed like wizardry back then. Lately I have built a small home studio and am using Cubase Pro 9.5, this thing is beyond anything I could ever have imagined! I know you are in the game GC but as just a tinkerer I don't think I will even live long enough to use half the power of this software, it blows me away. I never get anything done cos I'm too busy trying things out!

And Drones. I have a Mavic Air and it's an amazing thing. I can be sitting in a chair in my back garden with a beer while flying about over a lake 3500 foot away recording the island in the middle.

Re DAWs - indeed. I now have over 5,000 instruments, including much of the LSO and several Steinway pianos to choose from each morning.

Re Drones - Agree again, this kinda' says it all. I was also in my garden taking this photo, though it was a little too early for beer!

[br d]

That's beautiful. I live in South Essex so it's safe to say you have me beat on the scenery front!

Drones are addictive, I find myself taking it every time I go out in case I see something I want to investigate.

[C&C]

TTmonkey said:

Data speeds is where the mind boggles.

Just a few years ago downloading films used to take hours. now its seconds.

I remember back in around 1993 on a Novell Netware course, the instructor (who had spent years working in the industry before deciding to teach), said that in the future there would be 2Mbps comms lines into pretty much everyone's home.

We sort of believed him due to his wealth of experience, but couldn't really see how this would be possible.

A 2Mbps line (a Megastream) was effectively 32 x 64kbps kilostreams bundled together, and a kilostream cost well over £50k per year, and wasn't available everywhere - depended on location.

Obviously nowadays a 2Mbps internet link is considered unusably slow.

[Robbo 27]

C and C said:

I remember back in around 1993 on a Novell Netware course, the instructor (who had spent years working in the industry before deciding to teach), said that in the future there would be 2Mbps comms lines into pretty much everyone's home.

We sort of believed him due to his wealth of experience, but couldn't really see how this would be possible.

A 2Mbps line (a Megastream) was effectively 32 x 64kbps kilostreams bundled together, and a kilostream cost well over £50k per year, and wasn't available everywhere - depended on location.

Obviously nowadays a 2Mbps internet link is considered unusably slow.

In 1997 we asked our IT consultant what we should be doing to back up our records in case we needed to refer to them in say 2020, we were told to back it up onto floppy disks.

I used to have a plastic box on my desk with around 30 floppy discs, each had a sticky label with a hand written note as to what was on each disc.

[Cold]

A quick thought about the exponential growth comments; I'm not seeing much in the way of new innovation, just a refinement of previous ideas or an amalgamation of existing technology.
"New" ideas seem to have stagnated somewhat.

#controversial.

[boyse7en]

PositronicRay said:

Hotel reviews and booking.

It beats driving to a town and spending an hour finding somewhere second rate to stay.

Edited by PositronicRay on Saturday 10th November 22:40

That's one we take for granted.
On a trip in the USA earlier this year, I set off from New York towards Cape Cod area with family on board but no real itinerary. When we knew roughly where we would get to by evening, went on the phone app and looked a few hotels in the area, checked reviews and prices and booked one online. All without stopping the car.

Compare with when i was a kid and we were driving back through France when there was a sudden ferry strike. Spent hours driving door to door around Le Havre looking for a hotel room to stay in. Had no knowledge of where we were, just driving up and down streets looking for Hotel signs and knocking on their doors and asking, then driving until we saw another one. Hours of stress.

[SeeFive]

Quite a fan of my Amazon Alexa in the kitchen.

When I am up to my armpits in goo from ingredients, I can simply put on some music, set timers, adjust volume, all without having to wash and dry my hands. Most importantly, if I am listening to the local radio station, when an Ed Sheeran song comes on I can immediately get rid of the pain of it with no hand washing delays.

Yes I know I am far from fully exploiting it, but it does what I bought it for (Amazon Prime music in the kitchen) and have only added a few other skills (like getting my local music server available too). I am not going NEST heating routes or other smart tech in the house any time soon, so it does me fine. I am seriously considering more smart tech in the next house though, but in a few years I am sure it will be different / better / easier all over again.

[boyse7en]

vixen1700 said:

I still have tonnes of CDs and vinyl in boxes under the bed, the cabinet in the front room and various other places.

Haven't played a CD in a couple of years now, but I can't bring myself to get rid of them.

The tablet is Bluetooth connected to the amp, so what ever comes into my head gets played via Youtube. The quality is decent and I can usually find what I'm after.

How do you know what you want to play? I can never remember the names of bands I like, so tend to end up streaming the same few artists on a regular basis.
I browsed my CDs the other day and was surprised by how many artists i hadn't played in years