Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone else feel like technology - specifically consumer tech - kinda peaked over a decade ago? I’m 37, and I remember being awed between like 2011 and 2014 with phones, voice assistants, smart home devices, and what websites were capable of. Now it seems like much of this stuff either hasn’t improved all that much, or is straight up worse than it used to be. Am I crazy? Have I just been out of the market for this stuff for too long?

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)English
    7•1 month ago

    Dial-up could still be pretty exciting. Or at least for me.

    I am just amazed by data transfer via sound. When I found SSTV I was amazed by the ability to transfer analog images by sound. I was playing around with it for hours for months. I can get amazed by random crap like that. I can hear the image as it’s being transferred. So cool!

    But recently I was playing around with QSSTV and found HamDRM. Same thing, but digital. And it’s not only for digital images, it can take any binary file. Sadly, no Android apps for HamDRM unlike analog SSTV. So, I just saved it as wav, moved it to my phone and played it to my laptop.

    Holy shit! I transferred a 55kB document in 5 minutes using sound! It just feels so crazy and awesome. It sounds basically like random noise, static, but there’s real data in it. If only there was an Android app to do this, I could play around it for hours transferring small data back and forth over the air, using sound waves!

    But hey, I can even be excited by a large QR code. 2 seconds of 8kbps MP3 in a QR code, pretty cool!

      • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)English
        3•1 month ago

        Oh, I just simply used the data URI with base64-encoded MP3. It can be pasted directly into browser.

        However, you could get far more with codec2, although it’s very much a speech only codec. It goes as low as 700bps. So… roughly 20 - 25 seconds the same way, although you’d have to use the codec2 decoder instead of browser.
        Sample: https://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts2a_700c.wav
        “These days a chicken is a rare dish”

        Anyway, back to the MP3…

        Just paste it into a browser.