I was tagged by maple.pet to respond follow the chain blogging quiz/getting to know you game.

I haven’t publicly blogged in a while, mostly while trying to figure out what I’m doing with this space, but it should feel good to get back in the action, update my CSS for the new SASS changes, and motivate myself to talk more about the CAD and FDM projects I’ve been working on.

When did you first get interested in technology?

My mother was an avid member of the Metroplex Commodore Computer Club in the Dallas/Fort-Worth scene of the 80’s and 90’s. She was educated as a music teacher, but always had a computer in the house, and was poking at something on a BBS, illicitly copied floppies, and playing some digital Mahjong solitaire.

I soon received the hand-me-down Commodore 64 as she upgraded to the Amiga 1000, and again when she got the 2000 plus Video Toaster. I remember as a 6th grader, loaning my C64 to the younger grades at my school, setting it up, demoing how to use it to the teacher and her class. Little did I know that would basically become my career, or at least the meaningful start of it.

I was practically born with a C64 Joystick in my hand.

My mother was also an avid console gamer. The “SEARS Tele-Games Console” (aka the Atari 2600), the Sega Genesis, the Super Nintendo. Eventually I was old enough to play Link to the Past on my own, and later she’d graduated to borrowing my GameCube so long that she decided to buy her own.

I loved her method of play too. She loved Super Mario Sunshine, and would frequently reset her game file intentionally so she could replay early chapters of the game with more understanding and competency. Still, though a few challenges could escape her, and in a reversal of me having her defeat Dr Robotnick for me in Sonic 1, I was expected to handle the Manta-Ray Shadow boss in the Mario Sunshine hotel level.

She introduced me to the Video Toaster, VHS editing, 3D rendering, and encouraged my own unique interests. Although once when waxing poetic about something in a mathematics college course, she laid some hard truth about support: “I don’t have to understand you to love you.”

I just started getting into MIDI and sequencing, the world of music, at the end of her life. We had another two years living under the same roof, and I had almost 3 weeks to say goodbye to her in ICU.

What’s your favorite piece of technology of all-time?

I missed out on a lot of neat things that either didn’t pan out or had their time before I had enough disposable income to get interested.

Magneto-optical discs, and especially MiniDisc were such a thing. I really wish that I could, today, burn music to a coaster sized object and listen to stuff in an offline, unmarketed experience. And that MiniDisc had some time of it’s life that was both an audio technology but also a computer data storage mechanism, ugh, so good.

For a similar reason, audio tape cassettes are pretty top tier. They’re even still relevant today, despite being past their peak.

iturnknobs on YouTube: “What Happens When You Break the Rules of Tape Loops?”

The humble 3.5mm (1/8 inch) stereo headphone jack remains strong as the new face of MIDI as it turns out no one ever did anything with those two extra pins on the DIN connector.

What’s your favorite piece of technology right now?

The web, plain ol’ http(s), still to this day provides the most compatible, cross-platform applications and services. Java was supposed to deliver the single-codebase future per the futurists of the 90’s. And while a lot of services have Java on the backend, it’s hardly the picture being sold to customers I had to support installing Java on end user’s machines and load these _TINY little GUIs that looked at least 10 years older than the computers that could barely run them.

Native apps feel nice, in theory, but when a service offers an app in addition to the web, whichever platform has the most users will remain the engineering focus for features and usability. YouTube is a superior experience in a web browser in almost every available feature. TikTok (at least as I remembered it) and Instagram (past the egregious algorithm) are made for the (phone) app first, and the web/desktop/tablet experience suffer.

Other apps give the web a bad rep, especially with closing API access, rough Electron wrappers, and the advent of web notifications.

The web remains the one interface that provide a core set of basic features and increasing amount of user modifications available. Amazon offers an app that makes the experience of shopping marginally smoother, but it drops the ability to “find in page” in favor for spying on your phone’s contents up to your sand-boxing allowance. The web lets you run user-scripts, install content blocking lists, and take back a shred of anonymity without handing over your history from your ISP to some rando VPN (where encryption is not technically a requirement in the protocol).

Personally, I prefer Safari on the Mac, and I put up with Safari on the phone, heavily augmented with a password manager and content blockers.

Name one new cool piece of technology we’ll have in 25 years!

Ugh, 25 years… NEW… hmmm…

Well, I believe in a hundred years, we’ll still be building shitty ranch-style homes in America, although they’ll be sold directly to corporations for the indenturing of the working class.

The spirit of MIDI will get more extensions and be adapted in weird and new applications. We already have DMX for lighting and OSC in VR full body tracking (despite the “Sound” in the name).

Speaking of virtual reality, inside-out VR without controllers is trash. If palm-rejection is the big issue to solve in tablet computers, then idle finger movements is the unsolved problem of the Vision Pro.

Okay, my out-there prediction for the future…

Magnetic data storage integrated with FDM 3D printing.

AND IN CONCLUSION

Oh my gosh, I’m gonna miss out on a lot of neat toys before I have a chance to see them in their prime. I hope candy colors and transparency come back.

The trouble is we only have so much time, and honestly it’s way easier to see things in the past make it through the filters of market selection, and thrilling to find the oddities that dared to challenge the status quo.

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A list of people who I’m tagging (links to those who’ve accepted):

• wildweasel!
• a work friend
• an RPG/board game friend