#Technology!

[spockvarietyhour]

Pac-Man phone, 1982

[federationgothic]

90s Computers

[caguaydreams]

Revali rolling in the afterlife rn

[cyberhai]

My dad got this new sprinkler that has like a motion sensor to drive away critters from tearing up the garden, so I decided to test its limits. Walked up to it no problem but alas I became too confident in my stealth abilities

[unclevertitle]

An anthropomorphic cat that would emphatically state that they are not a cat.

Reblog and put the species of the nearest stuffed animal

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[catchymemes]

[airandangels]

The Sisyphean task of cleaning those keyboards

Burger King Internet corner, New York (1998)

[spockvarietyhour]

V "The Hero" (1985)

[mylittleredgirl]

i feel like it says something about us as a species that somebody worked real hard to invent 3D printing when i think anyone who has ever used a printer would agree with me that we have not really gotten our arms around 2D printing yet. we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

[airandangels]

This looks exactly as if it should control the transporter on a starship.

Olivetti TCV 250 Video Display Terminal. 1966. Designed by Mario Bellini

[meret118]

Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.How to Turn off Word’s AI Access To Your Content

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”:

File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”

[karlrincon]

Happy New Year 2024 from Korea.

Year of the 🐲🐉!

[technological-existentialism]

[nekos]

My Grandpa was born in 1922 in a rural area and grew up without electricity or running water as a kid, He rode a horse to school, which was a one-room schoolhouse heated by a coal burning stove (which he blew up with firecrackers once, and at the time that was considered a pretty normal boys-will-be-boys prank instead of the bomb threat it would be seen as today). As a young adult he drove a Ford Model T, which was already really old but it was also cheap and I have friends today who drive cars almost as old as they are. He graduated college shortly after the US became involved in WWII and joined the Navy as soon as he graduated. By this point he was already surrounded by way more technology than he'd had as a kid, and that was before he retired and went to work for NASA, where he had to learn to work with even more brand-new "space age" technology, a very long way from anything he even imagined a few decades earlier. By the time I was born, he and my Grandma had just as much modern (90s) technology in their house as my parents, plus a lot more woodworking power tools that my dad was a bit jealous of, and a slightly newer computer. By then he also wore hearing aids that were a bit too sensitive to high pitched sounds, so he learned to turn off the sound on everything that was capable of beeping, even things like the microwave that weren't meant to be able to be muted and had to be partially taken apart to do so. Even in his 90s, he still had a fancier computer than my family and knew how to use it, although he never really caught on to smartphones, but besides that (which I think was mostly a preference to be able to feel the buttons), he adapted to an entire century of technological development and change, and it's crazy to think that things are changing even faster now and that my life could involve even more change than what he saw in his lifetime.

Like, when I was born it was still common for people to not have an email address or a cell phone, now it's nearly impossible to get by without both of those things. Even by the time I got my first cell phone, it was a flip phone that cost extra to send text messages and only had number buttons that had to be pressed multiple times to type a single letter. It had a camera which took incredibly blurry pictures and could store about 500MB of pictures and music, a significant improvement over my first MP3 player, which had 128MB of storage. This phone has a swipe keyboard so I don't even have to click each individual letter, I just draw a squiggle and the computer in my phone figures it out, sometimes even correctly! I can store 512GB with a G of pictures and music and apps, and it tells me where to go when I'm driving so I don't get lost. Plus it has the entire internet and I can use it to look up anything I want at any time. Smartphones are basically a necessity and there are restaurants where you need a smartphone to even read the menu (not all progress is good). And that's only 10 years since I was using the flip phone! It'll definitely be interesting to see what kind of technology is invented in the next few decades, and what technology will catch on and become important, and what will become obsolete and disappear.

we were the liminal kids. alive before the internet, just long enough we remember when things really were different.

when i work in preschools, the hand signal kids make for phone is a flat palm, their fingers like brackets. i still make the pinky-and-thumb octave stretch when i "pick up" to respond to them.

the symbol to save a file is a floppy disc. the other day while cleaning out my parents' house, i found a collection of over a hundred CDs, my mom's handwriting on each of them. first day of kindergarten. playlist for beach trip '94. i don't have a device that can play any of these anymore - none of my electronics are compatible. there are pieces of my childhood buried under these, and i cannot access them. but they do exist, which feels special.

my siblings and i recently spent hours digitizing our family's photos as a present for my mom's birthday. there's a year where the pictures just. stop. cameras on phones got to be too good. it didn't make sense to keep getting them developed. and there are a quite a few years that are lost to us. when we were younger, mementos were lost to floods. and again, while i was in middle school, google drive wasn't "a thing". somewhere out there, there are lost memories on dead laptops. which is to say - i lost it to the flood twice, kind of.

when i teach undergrad, i always feel kind of slapped-in-the-face. they're over 18, and they don't remember a classroom without laptops. i remember when my school put in the first smartboard, and how it was a huge privilege. i used the word walkman once, and had to explain myself. we are only separated by a decade. it feels like we are separated by so much more than that.

and something about ... being half-in half-out of the world after. it marks you. i don't know why. but "real adults" see us as lost children, even though many of us are old enough to have a mortgage. my little sister grew up with more access to the internet than i did - and she's only got 4 years of difference. i know how to write cursive, and i actually think it's good practice for kids to learn too - it helps their motor development. but i also know they have to be able to touch-type way faster than was ever required from me.

in between, i guess. i still like to hand-write most things, even though typing is way faster and more accessible for me. i still wear a pj shirt from when i was like 18. i don't really understand how to operate my parents' smart tv. the other day when i got seriously injured, i used hey siri to call my brother. but if you asked me - honestly, i prefer calling to texting. a life in anachronisms. in being a little out-of-phase. never quite in synchronicity.