Using older tech

[zanarkand]

Dear zanarkand,
  There are possible alternatives to gwiggle maps like the Garmin GPS III
My grandfather had one just like this that helped us through many long roadtrips.  There are many standalone GPS devices up through modern times.  I guess it is worth checking to make sure their satellites haven't fallen out of orbit by now or something 

that's very cool and good to know!! i'll have to look into this once i have a car. right now i'm a bus rider/walker so i am dependent on google maps because they have live updates of the bus routes and if buses are late etc. there's a way to get updates via SMS by texting the number that's on the bus stop sign, but i haven't tested it out.

[johnnyfangs]

Generally, I just find modern design and user experience cumbersome and inefficient so my workflow naturally draws me toward older programs and hardware.

I feel very much the same. Most new tech is cluttered with functions that aren't useful or helpful. There are some things I'm happy to have the newer version of (I got myself a gaming laptop that I love) but so much is bogged down with inefficient additions that no one's asking for.

[Uneuclid]

kinda, i wish i could exclusively use old techn but its not as practical for multiplayer games and talking to friends. honestly part of me wants to switch to a flip phone or something someday (if possible) and get an MP3 player for music. I do use my windows XP computer for games and looking at old sites and stuff from time to time tho.

really wish i could make a full switch to older tech it holds a big special place in my heart

[dirtnap]

if windows 7 counts as old tech, then i exclusively use old tech, because i think all technology i own is as old as or older than windows 7.

this wasn't a singular, deliberate choice to never use new technologies. i, in theory, like new technologies!

i just absolutely despise most technologies that now exist that happen to be new. in twenty years, when they're no longer new, i'll still despise them, because my distaste is for what they are rather than their age.

i refused to update to windows 10 because i found it deeply suspicious that microsoft were giving that away for free after thier lifetime of increasingly aggressive and user-unfriendly anti-piracy measures (including a bug that famously caused all copies of windows vista and 7 to think they were pirated even if they'd been legit for years). i was right in my suspicions, and win10 is aggressively user-unfriendly and also it's a mobile OS crammed onto desktop for some reason.

i maintain my firewall in a whitelist-only system to make sure nothing updates because every fucking time something updates it is worse in some way, and that's if it doesn't break entirely. i'm not sure exactly when it was, i'd say around 2012, updates stopped being good things that fix problems and started being bad things that caused problems. i'd say around the time updates started trying to add new shit instead of just fixing actual bugs.

i made the mistake of letting steam update recently (had to do it to download a new game) and wow! awful! i ran a couple of .bats to force it back to the way it was.

actually, i used to despise the very idea of steam. having to connect to the internet to play my game? fuck that. i resisted it for as long as possible. i had an account for tf2 a long time ago, and that made sense because tf2 was an online game. i saw steam as battle.net but for tf2.

i don't need or want a battle.net account to play portal.

i eventually had to get steam for fnv, because it literally could not be acquired in a non-steam-required variant. skyrim was the same. then more and more games could not be played at all without steam. at least in a corporate-approved way, but both of those aforementioned games were bought for me by well-meaning others; and then when steam became the only way to get almost any game, i could afford to buy them. and i came to accept that steam was just the only way to buy games, but i never really liked it, and this recent dance of having to run a .bat to get it behave the way i need it to has reminded me of all the reasons i resisted it for as long as i could.

steam is never allowed online (except the rare occasion i need to download a new game, and now i'm going to be looking for other ways of doing that to avoid it updating again) and has existed in offline mode basically forever. it's drm, and i want it to behave like drm and not like anything else. stay in the background, use the minimum amount of resources, and stay off my fucking network.

i absolutely despise things trying to connect to the internet when they don't absolutely need to do that for their basic functionality. i have so many games that try to connect for some arbitrary and unnecessary reason. some of them throw a fit about it and sometimes i have to mod out that fit because it's annoying, but they work just fine, better even, when they can't connect.

old software in general is still perfectly usable, and any given update jeapordises that, so it's safer to never allow anything to so much as learn an update exists.

i even use firefox ESR because i hate modern firefox.

about the only software i might update on occasion is vlc, and even then only because i need some newer functionality, or because youtube has once again broken vlc integration.

i sincerely miss the days when updates fixed things instead of breaking them.

and even on the physical side it's largely the same story: it still works, and even if it did break and i had to replace it, i'd replace it with the same thing instead of something new, because every new thing wants to connect to the fucking internet.

i still own and use mp3 players (i have two of them, with different libraries, because space) because i have so far not needed to replace them. of course, the earphones have been replaced many times over but the technology in these is not remotely new.

i don't own a mobile but when i did it was an oldass blackberry because i never needed to replace that.

my dvd and vhs players still work and i haven't needed to replace those.

my tv still works and doesn't need replacing.

i bought my watch in 2009 or 2010 and the only thing that's needed replacement is the strap.

it just goes on like that. everything still works, nothing needs to be replaced.

i'm really trying to think, and i think the newest technology i use is my tv. a flatscreen lcd, but not remotely of the modern network-enabled variety. the most complex thing it's capable of doing is playing .mkvs from usb, automatically including an external .srt if not wrapped in the .mkv itself (and for some reason i sometimes have to spool up mkvtoolnix to pull out the .srt for this purpose, because sometimes the tv doesn't recognise them when they're inside the mkv itself...don't know why)

it's honestly a shame. i see some new technology, more convenient or with more features...oh

it won't work if it can't connect to the internet. fuck that, then.

every. fucking. time.

[Gans]

Windows 7 goes under old tech I guess. It's out of support by Microsoft and so now it's up to the community to extend the life-span of all Windows 7 systems out there. I expect it to have a similar success story like Windows XP, which gets new community made browsers to this day. Sure, your brand-new high-tech games won't work. But the old ones will of course, given that they have a properly maintainable backend that makes hosting a server somewhat easy or have a configurable master server (so not how these centralised platforms like Steam work).

This weekend is a getting-together in Star Trek Elite Force, a 22-year old ego shooter, a true game with no nonsense: No level systems, no lootboxes, no upgrades, direct controls and almost no randomness. Just a pure gaming experience.

[Cobra!]

Windows 7 goes under old tech I guess. It's out of support by Microsoft and so now it's up to the community to extend the life-span of all Windows 7 systems out there. I expect it to have a similar success story like Windows XP, which gets new community made browsers to this day. Sure, your brand-new high-tech games won't work. But the old ones will of course, given that they have a properly maintainable backend that makes hosting a server somewhat easy or have a configurable master server (so not how these centralised platforms like Steam work).

This weekend is a getting-together in Star Trek Elite Force, a 22-year old ego shooter, a true game with no nonsense: No level systems, no lootboxes, no upgrades, direct controls and almost no randomness. Just a pure gaming experience.

You know, I should probably install Windows 7 over 10 on my Win partition. I hate 10 with a passion, and I use Ubuntu to play later stuff anyway, so why not?

[starbreaker]

I still do a lot of personal computing on a secondhand Thinkpad T60 from 2007. I had maxed out the RAM to 3GB replaced the hard drive with solid-state storage, and run Slackware Linux, which is one of the longest-running GNU/Linux distributions still available. My main editor is Emacs, which dates to the 1970s and began life as a set of macros for an even more ancient editor called TECO. (I've used ed and vi, but never TECO.)

A lot of techies like me like to use fancy static site generators like Jekyll, hugo, Eleventy, or Astro to build our sites but I've just been using a bunch of shell scripts and a makefile; shell and make are tools that have been part of UNIX since the 1970s. Likewise grep, sed, and awk, but pandoc and html-xml-utils are rather more recent.

[Gans]

Through using a Slackware-based Linux, you automatically are using some "older" tech. The package maintainers usually wait for 2-3 years before integrating a package (expect security things) into their package lists. The stability of that approach is certainly noticeable from my experience. Despite being only the exception, some of my Ubuntu installations made too many updates, which weren't proven yet, and broke unfortuneatly.

---

Home story: My 15 year old LCD gave birth to a third broken pixel. Now I have a blue, a green and a red one in my collection, that can't change colour anymore. They are only noticeable on a dark screen if being focused on. 

[CableCat]

I wish! I still get sucked into doomscroll, ugh. When I bought a new phone, I got the latest iPhone that way I could have it a few years and run it into the ground. I did not get it because I HAVE to have the latest phone, I got it because my iPhone 6 would no longer be supported soon. But tbh, I need to have a reckoning with my phone again and delete a bunch of things. I find myself only really using Discord regularly now. Plus, I have old accounts I want to delete for various reasons. I'm concious of the doomscroll at least, so I try to combat it.

I'm gonna do a Marie Kondo on all my accounts one day, pick the ones that give me joy and delete all the rest!

I have a newer laptop I got for free, but I keep my old laptop because it has CD burning software and a disk drive. I strongly dislike that newer devices are switching to having almost entirely just USB-C. The lack of ports drives me absolutely nuts as someone who does stuff with video and uses drives. I hate having to get adapters.

I won't use an older operating system because of cybersecurity concerns. It is hard when it comes to "old tech" and old software because I always worry about cybersecurity.

[Gans]

A stock-market-like trade: Getting a former 1800-Euro-beamer for 40 Euro. It's 19 years old, it's round, it's large. The thing misses all new connectors, but good old VGA is just fine. Super sharp picture, once set up to the optimal distance (through focusing and zooming). What a fantastic deal.

I won't use an older operating system because of cybersecurity concerns. It is hard when it comes to "old tech" and old software because I always worry about cybersecurity.

@CableCat: Surely the old operating systems have their unpatched vulnerabilites, but if you know how to handle the internet, click on links with caution and only allow Javascript when it's necessary, then you'll be able to use the old systems just fine. I only got a computer virus on my Windows XP machine when it was still in support. Why? Because as a kid you don't really know, what you're doing...