Seb's Web

I’ve been letting the dust settle on the ol’ blog for a while now. Time to end this dry spell with a proper post, a fun tag from Andrei, whose reliable posting is an inspiration to a slacker like me. One of the main reasons for me playing hooky lately is actually a feature further down in this post.

The theme is technology, one of the modern gods of our times, one who the disgraced author Neil Gaiman should have illustrated as more akin to Janus, a literal two-faced entity that can be both be amazing and an evil jinx.

(Pictured above: The Antikythera mechanism, the finest piece of technology of the ancient world, now in the National Archeological Museum in Athens)

Where Did You First Get Interested In Technology?

My father is an electrical engineer and his father was basically a working-class polymath, so when I was growing up I was surrounded by all sorts of tech. There were the ones that I never saw working such as: 1. an electric scale model of a crude oil pump-jack, 2. a reel-to-reel tape recorder, 3. a CRT television set from the 50s.
There were also the ones that had to constantly be mended: 1. the turntable and amplifier from East Germany, 2. a Soviet vacuum-tube radio, 3. an electric train that always got its engine burnt from me cranking it up too high.

It might sound like I was born in the 60s, but in post-Communist Romania you used what you had for as long as you could. But we caught up soon and before the new millennium rolled in we had our first computer. If I have disparate memories of the other pieces of technology I mentioned, the day The Computer came in is deeply etched in my memory. Learning Solitaire and Paint during the day and then installing the mighty Age of Empires in the evening, taking turns to play the single-player campaign with my dad until late at night. That’s most likely the day technology became wondrous.

What’s Your Favourite Piece Of Technology Of All Time?

I’m with Andrei on this one, it’s the radio for me as well. It’s the absolute best. I have about five radios in my house right now, and my last Ali Express search was for a Tecsun 990x radio. If I could put an ad-blocker on the FM airwaves I’d have it running all the time. It practically has been running almost non-stop since I was a kid.

An alarm clock radio woke me up before school. The kitchen radio was on during breakfast, lunch and dinner. Our old Dacia didn’t have a radio, but I had a transistor radio for long travels. Then I won a pocket radio from a Coca-Cola bottle cap. Then I had radio on my MP3 player. And then my phone had radio! (I’ll always remember you, Sony Ericsson W810i)

Even when I had no idea what the cultural zeitgeist was around me, some radio shows had a magical pull. I was absolutely annoyed that my school schedule overlapped with Andrei Gheorghe’s 13-14 radio show which I thought would be a more important education, this time in counter-culture. Ironically, nowadays I don’t listen to podcasts – with the exception of Henry Rollins’s music show.

At some point my dad mentioned we had a massive radio receiver in the basement (grandad’s!), which could capture shortwave radio from all over the world… if I create a makeshift dipole antenna using the clothes line in the yard. That worked wonderfully! For about two days. Blasted thing needed to get a new capacitor soldered in. But that was enough to keep my interest up. My daily driver is a Tecsun 380, which is 10 times as small as that Soviet lemon but just as effective in FM or shortwave.

What’s Your Favourite Piece Of Technology Right Now?

It’s gotta be my new gaming laptop. The old ASUS ROG was about 10 years old and it could only handle Stardew Valley and Minecraft (at 20 fps). As luck would have it I won a voucher in January which cut my spending by a few hundred euros. So it was finally time to stop asking my girlfriend to let me play on her rig and get my own.

It’s a sweet-ass Legion Pro 5, all pimped out, 4060 RTX, 32GB, cool RGB, jet-engine fans, the works! Loving it so far. Which explains what I’ve been doing lately: playing a lot of video games that I couldn’t play for the past few years.

Name One Cool Piece Of Technology We’ll Have In 25 Years!

Although I’m working in tech, I actually don’t follow all the new gizmos that come up and I’m not too interested in a lot of recent trends. But sure, I’ll toss my hat into the ring. I can’t speak for quantum computing or very complicated doo-dads… My crystal-ball prediction is simply that augmented reality will be as widespread as smartphones are today. VR was talked about since the 80s but only in the past 10 years has it become more mainstream. Still, its entry price point is too high and even Apple haven’t knocked it out of the park that well.

I think Google Glass was way ahead of its time but we’ll probably see it then as we look back at the PDAs of the 2000s. The idea was fantastic but the available hardware wasn’t there to release its full potential. I can totally see a future where smartphones transition to a simpler, sexier tool that doesn’t crunch your spine as much.

Closing Words

Technology is fun and it’s cool, but at the end of the day it should just be a tool. I struggle with screen time even without social media, but I know that screens are no substitute for real experiences and interactions. A nice coffee with someone you like is much better than a group chat, but you can still have a radio in the background.