How to be trendy

Oh, technology, you malcontented minx. You push me towards the new but without thinking through the consequences. It has taken you many moons to reach parity with the superiority of CRT's just to pull the rug out once more with the introduction of 'transparent' OLED. Even the Emperor's new clothes had better fidelity, compared to what this provides. Case in point:

You can get an infinitely better image at many magnitudes less money so outside of the party trick of resurrecting dead rappers, this serves no purpose. And, to add salt to the wound, it costs far more? Colour me unimpressed.

Which brings me to my latest discovery: if you remember, I had a small diatribe about my audio lagging due to the absence of a dedicated audio jack on my phone. Well, I fixed that. All it took was a USB-C to 3.5mm headphone jack converter. This allows me to avoid the annoyances surrounding charging, lag and the 'bluetooth tax' related to getting a wireless set of headphones. Overall, I am very happy, but still annoyed, that I need to thwart their attempts to push technology which is objectively inferior to that which its attempting to replace. It always helps to take a step back before you blindly follow the next trend. Your sanity and wallet will thank you.

For technology's sake

Sometimes I wonder whether they thought things through. Or maybe I wonder if there's some other agenda in play. For privacy (as per Snowden) he recommends physically disabling the camera/mike in your phone and using a wired headphone instead - which may explain things. All I know is that wireless headphones don't work for games. I bought 'low-latency' Bluetooth headphones recently and I can say it's great at audio and great at battery life but terrible at latency. Perhaps it's Android but I get around a one-second lag between the sound and action in games.

Let's all let out a resounding 'ugh' in response.

That's not to say that they can't 'hack it' by artificially buffering the video inline with the audio lag in (e.g.) YouTube but, in the end, it's still a hack. The wired simply is superior and that just annoys me. It has taken LCD screens about 30 years to be on the cusp of breaking even with the visual fidelity of CRT technology which ain't great. It's the same story for WiFi - you get about 40% of the performance of wired - but only as long as you camp your butt on top of the router.

In conclusion, all this technology just proves to old codgers like me that we had it better in the good old days - and it ain't due to rose-coloured glasses tainting my view. As good old Joe Friday stated:

And that's what I live by.