* Command-line tools in general. I wrote one too.
* Going even further, a development environment based on the command-line. My entire IDE is in the terminal. I wrote about it too. [1] That post is a little outdated, though.
[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/12/my-development-environment-a...
I think pour-overs and the moka pot coffee maker, both of which I use daily, are better and nicer than technological advancements like the Keurig machine. They also work when the power is out.
I like to think and plan with pencil and paper. I like physical books because I like writing in the margins, or writing all the interesting words from them on the first page or inside the front cover. I suppose I highlight on the kindle too, so its not so bad either way.
For woodworking I have some electric tools but I really like using hand tools. The sawdust (or wood shavings instead of dust!) that hand tools create is much easier to clean up and I assume better for one's respiratory health than the ultra-fine particles. I also like that they are quiet, and I can work beside the wood stove at night to carve things.
- Spinning rust. My daily driver has 7200 RPM drives and an old Core i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz. It's connected to my old Sony receiver from 1998 and using VLC to play music from the 70's at the moment, shaking the house. The drive has registered a lot of errors but keeps on working.
- 1990's Sony reference line receiver. It's not green-tech but helps warm the room in the morning, offsetting the wallboard heaters so the wasted energy is a wash. That plus my old JBL's I bought from a coworker in the 90's keep hibernating animals out of the ceiling.
- ICE vehicles. Truck, side-by-side, etc... and a 1947 Fordson 2N tractor that still out-performs horses though both tractor and horses have their moments. I buy all vehicles used and extend their life.
- Manual hand operated tools. Sometimes battery tools are more of a hassle when I have a quick thing to get done. They are perhaps useful to keep around when electricity is no more. The scythes and related tools are also good exercise.
- SFTP for transferring files. It's not really outdated, just fallen out of popular use. To be outdated bots or humans would have to be able to exploit due to being unmaintained or something else would have to be faster. Can't beat lftp+sftp for splitting big files into multiple TCP streams through firewalls. Torrents can come close but have other negative characteristics including being useless for private files.
- Cheap wired headphones. No batteries to replace or fail which is good given many Bluetooth headphones do not have user serviceable batteries. No RFI. No hacking or leaking data. Less junk in the landfill. They seem to still be popular for audiophiles.
- Wired keyboards and mice. Not sure if that is considered outdated tech.
- Wired switches, appliances, lights, Ethernet, surveillance cameras will always be perfectly good for me.
- I have a GPS map in the truck but I also keep paper map books in the truck and am happy to use both. GPS may be jammed soon.
- All the free notebooks and pens vendors gave me over the years for taking notes, to-do lists, reminders.
Instead, here's a list of things I still use and believe are better without recent "advancements":
- Automatic (mechanical) watch: Aside from being amazing piece of technology just to marvel at, it's great because it's reparable and doesn't need batteries
- Paper books: I've had a Kindle for a long time, and appreciate the portability in certain circumstances, but nothing seems to be the same as a paper book. Can't put my finger on it, but it's probably to do with the immediacy of physical objects
- Non-IoT everything (fridges, light-switches, TVs, thermostats, etc.): I think we're all on the same page on this one, so I'll just say this; they're pointlessly shite
- Pen and paper, for study: Numerous studies show people remember things better and more deeply when they write them down
- Cash: Makes transactions more personal, and the spending of money more tangible
- Games consoles without internet: Switch it on, play games. I don't have time for a 20GiB "patch" that wasn't there on day one because you didn't have time to finish the game before release
All my computers use wired headphones and peripherals, but more because I hate changing batteries or disconnects. I don't dislike wifi, but if I am having video calls or playing games I try to avoid it, if I have a network cable close, just to avoid one source of error. The thought of getting battery powered shifters on a bike confuses me.
Not a fan of IoT and the two Shelly plugs I have I only use for measuring power usage, I don't think I've switched anything on or off except trying it out once.
I guess I'm not necessarily longing for old stuff, or not even for stuff that was hip and cool when I was young, but I think I am easy to satisfy with some "this generation of thing is SO much better than the one before" that I don't need incremental (to me) improvements.
Like:
Walkman: good; portable CD player: worse; Minidisc: didn't have one, but not better enough; MP3 player: much better; MP3s on phone: perfection, but technically only one less thing to carry, it's still an mp3 player (I still listen to CDs at home and in the car, but because the car is old and because I buy CDs in the first place...)
Since then, there have been 5 additional Pixel releases, each with shiny new features, and about a year ago I received an offer to trade in my Pixel 3A for the latest model at basically no cost.
Wait, what? Why would Google be willing to hand me a new phone that's four model years newer as if it's an even exchange for my old phone?
Well, it's because the Pixel 3A had an amazing feature that newer phones in the line no longer have: free unlimited storage in Google Photos.
Owners of newer models instead have to pay at least $2 a month for the most basic Google One data storage plan, and if you take a lot of photos and video, you likely have to upgrade to their higher-storage plans.
No thanks, I'm perfectly content with my older-model Pixel, and I will likely run it into the ground. Photo quality is still very good, especially for low-light photography, and there is nothing else about the phone that feels laggy.
I also like retro consoles. I repair and restore various consoles from Nintendo: DMG-01 for me. The kids like the Nintendo DS's we got used; I have a box of spares I cannibalize for parts as we need for repairs or customization. I keep my Nintendo 2DSXL going; great bit of kit there.
I still build things with the classic 555 chips and the (re-issued) CEM-3340 chips. Working on a mod synth with one of my kids to help them learn electronics (and music).
I don't buy new computers anymore... we just have refurbished, off-lease Thinkpads. With a good backup system in place these can be swapped out, repaired, or replaced easily as life happens.
And I guess when I do woodworking I also don't use power-tools and build things with hand tools only. I tend to find tools at estate sales or garages and I restore them and put them to use.
Mechanical watches. I came very close to getting into so-called ‘smart’ watches awhile back, but decided that would have been a pretty foolish waste of my money. Quartz would be more accurate, of course, but I like the sweeping hands and the clockwork.
In particular, drafting pencils (Rotring 800/600) are one of my favorite things to write with. They work so precisely, and are durable, and easy to disassemble, clean, and repair. They're the "original" mechanical pencils before it became a commodity thing made out of plastic.
I love German-made hand tools, it's hard to beat push-through style ratchets for durability, simplicity, repairability, and ergonomics. I would put my Wera Zyklop push-through ratchets up against anything on the market anywhere in the world and guarantee it comes out on top.
Phone has been better for media consumption for quite some time, due to a combination of power efficient chips and cellular connectivity. Laptops are pretty much good only as mobile work machines, and you don't need much hardware to run VSCode.
Ive also never needed long battery life, as places where Im actually able to sit and do work for extended periods, usually have some power outlet. Mobile charging bricks are also super cheap.
My go to is buy a $200 used/refurbished laptop with like 8gb of ram, throw in a SSD if it doesn't have one, install bunsenlabs linux.
- Love my 2010 Acura TL and the engine is as solid as it can be. Going strong at 125K miles.
I recently connected it to an old AirPort Express in bridge mode so that I can use it wirelessly. My partner got tired of plugging into it and wanted to upgrade it, but I refuse to part way with this simple and reliable beast.
Some other older tech I use:
- Corded power tools. Don't have any using batteries.
- Dumb thermostat. Set it and forget it.
- Plain ol' doorbell.
- 25 year old truck with a manual transmission.
- Motorcycle with a carburetor and manual choke. No traction control, ABS or any other of that stuff.
- Post-It notes.
- Guitar amps with valves.
People have been saying RSS is dead for years now. To me it's still better way of keeping up-to-date with content I'm interested in than anything else.
sometimes i use macvim so i can move quickly to that program in particular and do other stuff in the terminal, since i use it for general distraction free writing
technically macvim is not vi, but i guess both are considered outdated in an age where if you tell your iphone not to sync to the cloud it erases days on notes on nazis.
(the whole point of privacy was autonomy, not shoving things up to an unencrypted cloud to get a bullshit warrant served on it and tim cook has forgotten what the world was like when storage was scarce)
I also love libgen and my digital collection is easily 10-100x larger than my physical, but physical books is where it's at.
Vim (ok this is a timeless classic)
Going back from react/next/spa style to server rendered templates (thanks to htmx which I guess is not really outdated?)
PHP 8 introduced too many breaking changes. Many of them making the language worse.
At our company, we ported all public facing projects to PHP 8 over the last 4 months. A pain in the ass.
All internal projects will stay on PHP 7, running in Docker containers, and will be ported to Python in the coming months.
Python is hopefully less likely to come with breaking changes in the future.
The only time I don’t wear them is when I shower.
No charging, no updates, no BS. Works 100% of the time while being stylish.
- 2011 MacBook Air. Replaced the battery last year. Still going strong.
Also my laptop that has no Windows 11 available for it because 7th Gen Intel isn't good enough anymore. I don't think it's outdated, but ask Microsoft about that
They have been upgraded in various ways, the laptop probably has another year or two left in it before it gets retired.
- an Ural and a Dnepr motorcycle with sidecar, technology from the 1940's but made in the 80's
- a 1982 UTB 640DTC - that's a 4WD tractor made in Romania based on the Fiat of the same type number
- a 1960's Fordson Major-based excavator. Currently I'm not using it 'cause the engine is stuck, need to unstick it.
- a pre-WWII hair clipper which I use to trim my bread
- a flock of older Android devices from 2010 onwards
- unix - well, Linux but still...
- pencils, fountain pens
- ...
I have a few other nicer pairs, some open ear, some wireless with noise cancelling, yet I still pick up the HD-25 regularly. The design is 30 years old.
(As a side note, please bring back 3.5mm jacks on phones)
It lasted 10 years. I was able to get the same model online.
Sony LCD projection tv, got it in 2005 from CircuitCity, still going strong
TI-85 calculator from mid 1990s, still going strong
When I was a Java developer long ago I'd supplement it with some use of Eclipse as needed. But whatever drives my desire/need for simplicity in my editor is surely the same reason I left the Java ecosystem and the same reason I don't write/design code that can't be maintained without advanced IDE features.
- Makefile
- Vim (not neovim)
- C99
- Generating HTML string on server
- Maintaining local music library
If technology X is functional productive, is technology X really outdated?
If I think about how long the things I use will remain productive, the newest things have the shortest times…i.e. anything that requires the web.
A lot of technical change happens because scope expands. Battery powered screwdrivers make sense because more ordinary things use more screws and because there are more ordinary things in ordinary lives…e.g. DIY’d wire shelf organized closets.
[short answer]
String.
Just because a manufacturer wants you to use a newer product, doesn't make what you're using "outdated".
Especially in the modern surveilance product marketplace, many many "updates" are really about allowing the vendor to extract more information from you. The products that extract less data aren't "outdated".
Pen & paper. And sometimes: pocket calculator.
Alcohol stove is my daily driver for cooking food / coffee / tea etc.
(Some) paper maps. They always work & rarely need replacement.
Nearly antique, hand-powered drill has been useful occasionally.
I still write native apps that use the Win32 API in Lazarus/Free Pascal for Windows. I've been known to write web pages in NotePad++.
1994 buckling spring Model M
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Well, considering the price of used Fuji GFX50S (or SII) is gradually decreasing, perhaps one day I'm done with film.
I am a big fan of infra as code, but the flexibility and reliability of SSH and doing it yourself is really nice too.
p.s. I know it's not that outdated as it's quite popular in competitions.
1) pixel 3 -- Actually bought this new. It's in mint shape, and just had battery #3 placed in it. It does all the things I need it to do, and minus it's lackluster battery life from design onward, perfect. AND fits in a pocket, and allows your leg to still move without snapping it!
2) Every household appliance I have: Dishwasher, Fridge, washer/dryer -- These are all likely from the early 2000's and are of the most simple design. None of the devices have a screen or a 'digital' input mechanism. They are the opposite of fancy, but just do their job, on the daily.
3) Titan 440x paint sprayer -- Acquired this years ago now and have run a serious amount of paint through it. It's probably 15-20 years old. Again, it's not fancy. When you adjust the pressure, you turn a knob. You have no idea what value you are actually at. Need more pressure? Crank it right. Need less? Left. It's perfect.
4) Every car I've ever owned has been at least 8 years old, typically in the 10-12 year range. Always over 100k; Generally nearing 200k. -- I'm sure we're all 'handy' in one way or another here, and are generally able to figure out and be handy in the ways we have yet to learn. Being able to fix most things wrong with a car allows one to more calmly purchase what can turn into really solid purchases with a bit of love and well, luck. Everything is modern enough that 'high milage' isn't as much of a worry as to perceived and actual maintenance done before purchase. Keypoint: Always, always, own at least 2 if you go this route. Things will break, but as long as you can 'take the other one' for a few days/week life's schedule can be continued with 'fix car' / 'send car to get fixed' additions.
5) Woodstove. I live in Maine. It makes 110% sense to have a woodstove here. It's nice to know that as long as I have something to burn, the house will have heat, we can heat water, and we can cook food. The lax definition of input required vs all of the gains of the output it provides have a woodstove, certainly old tech, at the absolute top of perfectly happy with. Currently now heat with heat pumps for general 'fill heat' and the woodstove to raise from that to 'comfortable'.
I'm sure this list could go on forever. I find myself to like simple things that do their job. I like new simple things, that do their job, too. These days, it's seems however that the simple things are often not so simple, but 'smart' and with a feature-set that I really don't need, but often becomes the failure point.
I like the 'click' of the can opener when you squeeze it through the lid. If it fails, you can see why, and address the issue. I'd rather not abstract life away, but use tools that help free time.
not that it's really outdated ... just old