51–60 of 257 posts
Glad to see this. As an Child and Adolescent Psychiatric, expert in screen time and soon to be father. I found myself thinking more and more about this. I thought about resurrecting my old game boy advance to introduce my little boy to the tech world. The long loading times, no auto-save, no in game purchases... I think It Will help him develop a healthier relationship with the machine in his more vulnerable youth.
Did the parents of 30 years ago, think the tech you’re giving today had gone too far?
This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school. It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young a…
This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school. It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young a…
This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school. It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young a…
>And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities. How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
There was no way of letting anyone know that you were running late once they were already underway to pick you up.
Some of the things my wife and I have provided for our kids: - lots of bookcases with probably >1500 books (including lots of kids/picture books) - what we've collected over the years - a family laptop (2012 MacBook Pro) with no internet connection, pre-loaded with Pages, Sheets, Affinity Photo/Designer, a few small games, and some coding tools (Python, Ruby, VSCode, Scratch, etc.). - Lego Spike and Spike Prime robot…
This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school. It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young a…
>And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities. How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
"Who is calling?" "Hi mom practice is over come pick me up!"
I'm not quite going back so far - IMHO the pinnacle of technology was around 2011, enough that you had smartphones and could use them as a tool but before engagement-hacking got so good that everything became an addiction. I am sitting here using Claude to get Proxmox and Debian up and running with my ~50TB of local hard drives though, so that I can get most of our digital life hosted locally and independent from the…
I think the pinnacle was 2003, right when the internet was becoming good but before World of Warcraft launched which changed how the attention economy worked by introducing the subscription model for digital content to millions of people.
I happened to be in that 14-21 range. It's an age range most people have rose tinted nostalgia glasses for.
Ironic, the picture on this article appears to be AI generated. I thought the Sony CD player looked neat, and I'd never seen one like it before. I thought I might try to buy one on eBay, that's how cool I thought it was. But Google says "Digital fingerprints embedded within the file verify that this is an artificially generated rendering."
I (genuinely) want to try the mouse with a giant scroll ball inside its single button.
http://xahlee.info/kbd/trackball_history_2.html
There are three different photos on that page, so do scroll down and look at the other ones that are there beyond the first picture.
There’s also links to other pages on the site with even more models and history.
Also, if you’ve never seen/tried a trackball mouse, modern variants exist too. I have two different wireless ones that I bought really cheap on AliExpress that I use a lot and am really happy with. The two I have charge via USB-C and connect via Bluetooth. And even though I bought very cheap ones, the battery goes for many days before I have to charge them again.