Technology & Social Media Are you technically savvy

Holy crap, I have become my dad (and his dad before him)

 

Mine is always on vibrate (wife gets annoyed with it going bonkers all night every night), so I never actually hear it, I miss most of the calls made to me

 

Google has made us all dumb. Stopped thinking and using our brains!

 

Google has not made us all dumb.

But we need to acknowledge that broadly accessible information and knowledge does not progress to deep learning or wisdom without sustained effort.

 

But that's part of the problem. I won't bother to remember this because google will tell me. What's 550/12? I'll just use my phone...

 

Google has reduced memory requirements ie we don't need to remember so many things now as it's at our fingertips (from a coding perspective, this is brilliant, there is a massive collective brain out there). Google is probably my most used tool in both work and none work life, having phones and tablets available to access the information means there is usually always a way to get to the information.

When I was at school and we had to do maths, we had to show our workings, I asked why we couldn't just use a calculator and the response was "Well you're not always going to have a calculator with you are you?"........ Well yeah, we sort of do nowadays.

Not everything was better in the old days, just some things

 

Yep - love it - buying and selling property for 20 years and am yet to personally meet my conveyancer and broker ... all done via internet and courier

 

but kids are just so switched on in current environment.

Just watch those little gen Z' they are going to run a better show than their gen X and Y parents were ever capable of.

If previous generations had it all together due to a lack of technology then the world would be a better place. That is not the case.

 

Thats awesome @Steven Ryan

 

I think we skipped Z Gen, I think they are called the I Gen (i'm not joking ). It is going to be amazing, we as a species continue to get better, faster and more informed on a daily basis, I can't wait to see the playing field in 10, 20 or even 30 years time.

Look at things like the Raspberry Pi, it has brought coding and making into the home, people are paying less than 50 bucks for a fully functional computer which their kids can build and learn on and if they fry it, who cares its 50 bucks .

With people like Eben Upton (Raspberry Pi Foundation) and Elon Musk (Tesla) (who seem to be more focused on the progression of man as opposed to the progression of their own wallet) pushing our future forwards , the future is bright, and there has never been a better time for young people to jump in, learn and most importantly create .

For me personally, the next BIG leap will be when we perfect Wireless Electricity. Imagine a world with no power cables, no batteries and no "limited range" on electric vehicles .

The I Gen are going to reinvent the world we live in .

 

Now can you explain it in my language.... perhaps I should google, I'll start with ...... Raspberry Pi

 

It will be the end of your afternoon if you do lol.

Basically the Pi is a computer the size of a credit card, it runs linux (and a scaled down Windows 10 but this is really only for coders / makers). You can use it for anything you can imagine.

I have one as a media centre as my TV is not a smart TV, it will play absolutely any video or sound file on my network storage drive and push it to my TV.

I have another that has all the old gaming devices on, it runs Atari 2600, 7800, Sega Mega Drive, Sega Master System / Game Gear, NES, SNES, N64, Arcade games, C64, ZX Spectrum 48, ZX Spectrum 128 and loads more, also runs old dos games like Doom and stuff.

The awesomeness is what it inspires you to do, I could leave this thing as a circuit board and play these games but no, I will now embark on a quest to build a cabinet that looks like an old arcade machine to house it . I am also considering building a nice coffee table that has removable side covers that hide joysticks for the old table top arcade games. I wouldn't have considered these quests if I had to spend $1000+ on PC parts to put in it.

All this from a $50ish computer . And even better, it runs off a mobile phone charger.

Some people have completely automated their garden maintenance with a Pi, it monitors soil water levels and checks the weather over the internet, if the soil needs water and rain is not forecast for the next couple of days, it activates the sprinklers .

Literally the only limits here are our imagination .

And if that were not enough, Eben is such an amazing bloke, every Pi sold covers the cost of TWO Pi's, one for you and one to be sent over to Africa to be used in schools to teach the kids to code and build a future for them .

 

I'm not technically savvy at all.
We have a Smart TV at home that is not connected to the internet because I have never felt the urge to get someone over to work it out. As a consequence, the TV is not used much, which is not a bad thing.
The tools I like are ones that make dust and noise and that I use to build things.
I have come to accept the fact that computers are probably here to stay, but I don't have an affinity with them or affection for them.
What gets me is that computers and the internet have been around for a long time now. How come so much still goes wrong with them?

 

If one of my machines dies it's usually my fault, I have either run it out of life (ie video cards, I tend to push mine so the heat eventually destroys them but we are talking 5+ years of being on all day every day) or I am coding something and I have been sloppy and try to do something that makes the PC spit an error (blue screen or lockup).

So your good with power tool hey? Might drop you a PM to get advice on what tools I should get for my woodworking quest

 

Operator error?

 

ID 10 T error apparently

 

Hehehe PEBCAK error

 

Definitely all of those things. But things also go wrong way too often even for people who know what they are doing.

 

ip110?
Wireless mobile printer that can only be set up on one wireless network. Painful, impossible.