Asklemmy

Charging for cell phones. So much better than a decade ago.

My family has a history of blood pressure problems, so my mother, in order to keep control, has had to buy a couple of devices to measure her blood pressure, which she also uses with my father and grandmother.

I just think it's fantastic that such devices already exist and are so affordable. It makes me wonder if maybe in a handful of years we will have the ability to do x-rays at home and things like that, it would be great.

I mean technically smartphones. I have watched the smartphone world start, and BLOSSOM, and now we're certainly seeing some enshittification here & there but I have started to fully embrace the budget Samsung phones. Knowing that except for the insulting, glaringly bad exception that is battery life, it is better than the SGS3 of old I had in almost every other way.

I really appreciate LED lights. They used to be so expensive, and yet so basic!! $10/bulb, back when the USD was worth even half a damn, and quality? Ehhh you buy what we have, go fuck yourself. Now... I can buy a pack of quality LED bulbs where I can shift the tone/shade on each one via toggle switch, an 18-pk is $37? A little over $2/bulb?? 😌 Very, very cool

I just picked up TWO solar panel, rechargeable, D-Cell battery Duracell LED lanterns for $16 each (Costco). USB-C cable included. They can also be use to charge small electronics. Pretty nifty, and for not much money at all! You couldn't get that 10 years ago.

Security cams & recordings, obviously there's also a massive uptick in abuse/deception/people being shitheads. Comes with the territory. But take the shitty people out of the equation & objectively speaking, picture/video/audio quality is soooooooo much better. And digital storage has never been cheaper! So many good options! I saw a $30 security camera you can stick on your WiFi smart garage door opener. Again, looks pretty slick & it costs just a little more than eating out at a nice restaurant. Crazy.

CNC milling & creating art, structures, whatever with lasers & machines is fucking amazing & getting better, more advanced with each passing day. We can mill pieces to screw or friction fit....precisely...together. It's so simple but I'm telling you guys, this is going to lead to a lot of really cool stuff! And some scary stuff. But again, comes with the territory.

All kinds of EVs (especially e-scooters and other small fun PEVs), and computer hardware.

Unfortunately, gains with hardware are usually met with regressions in software performance.

Rejuvenation technology!

They have already rejuvenated an old mouse back to mid life!

It's like battery tech though, small small increments.

Light and tv. Led never breaks and is bright as hell. Also screens look ok now no matter what you buy. There is always better range of screens but cheap is not bad anymore.

NZB360. Lovely piece of software :)
Also uBlock origin

I could not think of one initially but actually my washing machine is better than yesteryear.

Distributed computing. Its amazing to see things go from isolated PC to things like p2p torrenting and BIONIC to block chain and IPFS to kubernetes to the fediverse and Matrix and Tor.

All filling wildly different niches of trust and capability.

Want to run a secure shared virtual reality space in p2p way? Check out 3rd space built on the matrix protocol.

Want to build a highly secure computer system spanning regions and dataceneters? Check RKE2!

What about just a secure little thing in your house or across friends and family houses? Not gonna believe it but rke2 or its simply brother k3s.

Just need to store public data? Chuck into IPFS and share it in a highly cooperative way.

Want to push it out in a pub/sub fashion or sub to others info? Check out ActivityPub. Great for medium trust networks since you can choose who you publish too or subscribe from.

Maybe you want to share just metadata between private servers but real time data between users, check out matrix.

Maybe you want to share data publically but what hard incentives to keep the compute and control of that distributed. Check out block chains and pick your poison of incentive models (e.g. pow or pos or maybe look at the wierder ones). With current pick of creating a limited supply digital asset to act like currencies do.

Maybe you just need a VPN you can trust, maybe try a distributed network of volunteers using layers of obfuscation to minize info leaked about your network.

Plenty of human problems around all of these but still super cool how far we've come.