The Golden Age Of Gadgets

But There Was So Much Stuff To Carry…

I mentioned when I started this that the iPhone smooshed together three things that I carried everywhere: my cellphone, my iPod, and my digital camera. And it did it in a pocket-friendly package. What it also did was tear down the amount of ancillary crap that had to go with it. A bespoke Apple cable for the iPod so that I could keep it charged while I listened to it at work. Naturally, I needed my earbuds.i Then a different flavor of USB cable for my camera so that I could pull photos off. Oh! And a charger for the camera because we hand’t figured out how to charge stuff through USB reliably. Then toss on top of that a charger for my phone (sometimes). Each of these things needed a case and shit just started to add up, ya know? It was a mess!

If you were in a mutually respectful partnership where each of you had these things? It meant carrying a backpack of crap to support your tech.

I didn’t even mention the laptop that was almost always in my bag. I rarely carry one of those around these days, but in 2007? It was highly likely that I’d have a MacBook Pro in my bag or at least a work laptop.

The Devil In The Details

That one cable? The one that connected the iPhone to the laptop so that you could update it using the abomination that was iTunes? That was the thing that broke it all. Given enough dev cycles, Apple perfected the Over-The-Air (OTA) update. You didn’t need to plug it in anymore. Well, that is, unless you wanted to put music on your phone. Then you still had to deal with the synchronization nightmares and generally poor performance that was iTunes.

Then we got The Cloud! That meant that music could be stored up there and we could pull it down to our phones over WiFi or even cellular data if we really enjoyed pain. Which we did! Oh we love us some pain! I’ll endure just about anything to avoid syncing with iTunes. Seriously!

Boiling The Frog¹

As we all got used to the idea of OTA operations, the very idea of keeping all of that music on a physical drive seemed silly. Why not just leave it in the cloud and pull it down when we needed it? The next logical step would be to just…stream the music. Sure, we’d have to compress the life out of the sound, but modern recording studios were already doing worse things when they remastered albums, so why not? Stream those bits to a device over the air and then push it through to some Bluetooth earbuds and you’ll have a listening experience that is…uh…far, far worse than listening to a CD on those puffy headphones Sony used to sell with the Discman.

Yeah, the sound quality got worse. I remember arguing whether you could hear the difference between a CD and vinyl back in the day. That was a legit fight. But something streamed from Spotify to Bluetooth earbuds vs. my 1990 vintage “Boom Box” CD player? That’s not even a fight. As my son would say, Coughing Baby vs. Atomic Bomb.

We lost.

The Long Dark

In this time of awakening, I realized that my music collection is the most vulnerable. I listed to a lot of stuff, some of it rather obscure. Greek composers for the modern classical guitar aren’t trending anywhere, sadly. (You should go look up Yorgos Nousis right now! Do it! You’ll thank me!) Even worse? Some of the recordings done by such artists in the 21st Century are going straight to streaming with no stops on a plastic circle. In short, I can’t buy the CD because the CD was never made.

This scares the shit out of me.

Yes, I still have my binders full of CDs from The Before Times, but it’s going to be really, really hard to fill in some of the blanks. I’m struggling with online used CD places now and there are things I simply cannot find. And why does that matter?

Because the kinds of compression we’re getting aren’t of the quality of FLAC. I can - and do! - get that on Bandcamp recordings, but I’m hard pressed to find any of the Alice In Chains opus in such formats. It gives me great pause to think about what will happen to music that goes straight to streaming with no artifacts. Am I the only one losing sleep over this?

Vending Machine Tech

On this quest, I came across a blog post somewhere talking about dedicated music players making a comeback. Yes, there’s one from Sony that runs about a grand and apparently is amazing. I’ll never know. What few people are talking about, however, is the vast number of seriously inexpensive and quite impressive audio players that can be had for under $30.

I call this Vending Machine Tech. It’s the kind of thing I can imagine being in a machine where you stuff in a couple of twenty dollar bills or swipe a credit card and plop out comes a plastic ball with an MP3 player and some wired headphones. Essentially that’s what I did when I picked up this little monster.

This piece of strange plastic will play MP3/APE/FLAC/WMA/WAV/AAC/DRM/ACELP. What are all of those? I don’t know. But I recognize enough of them. It also has all of the Palm Pilot level stuff you’d expect: calendar, e-books, stopwatch, alarm, and pictures. Why does it have all of that? I have no idea. I don’t know that I need it, but I’m sure I will experiment with it soon enough. It goes for a really, really long time with one charge and it takes wired headphones. I grabbed a cheap pair of in-ear monitors that sound better than a lot of earbuds I’ve used and are certainly less of a pain than having to charge things.

The entire package didn’t cost me $40. Sure, I had a couple of SD cards lying around so that helped, but still, this is a seriously cost effective solution to “How Do I Listen To My Music?” It’s also lighter than my fountain pen (yeah, yeah, yeah…fanci lad) and doesn’t get in my way in my bag. It’s perfect!

I’ve loaded it up with a ton of FLACs from Bandcamp and ripped CDs and I’m happy as a clam sitting in the library listening away. It’s great!

About That Image

Uh huh. This was an impulse thing. It’s the Kodak Charmera keychain digital camera. It looks kinda like this:

This frame that it can add to any picture actually does a pretty good job of sharing what it looks like, but not how small it is. It’s about 2 1/4” long and maybe an inch deep and wide. It’s tiny. It’s cute. It’s a keychain sized camera and it would fit in nicely with the quality of 2007. I clip it inside of my backpack and will likely use it for all of the images on this blog because I’m willing to do something stupid to make a point.

Would I use this to record important memories? I mean, I don’t know? I would have 20 years ago for sure! It would have been worse quality than film but cheaper and images would be easier to share. So…maybe? Today it’s a curiosity and runs about $20. It goes in the bag.

The Point?

These are single use devices. They do one thing and they do it well enough. They do not have any network capability. The best you can do is mount them like a USB stick on your computer. It’s freeing. No nagging. No apps. No buzzing. It does what it’s told when it’s told. The downside is that there is a real sense of these things being completely disposable. Losing one wouldn’t put me out too much, really. Replacing them would be trivial from an economic perspective. But environmentally? Yet another disaster. Yet another rechargeable battery in a landfill because no one really knows how to recycle their tech.

But in the hands of someone who can solder and doesn’t mind fucking around a bit? Well, it’s different.

And so, they join me on my journey. Let’s see how they do.