Viewing 40 posts - 81 through 120 (of 148 total)
  • When was the last time technology truly amazed you?
  • fossy
    Full Member

    My son is Type 1 diabetic and developed it at 14. We had a year on at least 4 x daily injections and numerous finger pricks.

    After a year he moved to an insulin pump, a tiny device that delivers insulin, and is controlled via a Bluetooth blood testing meter – 12 injections over 3 days down to 1 cannula change.

    Move on another year and a device called an Abbott Libre hits the market – it’s a small sensor (£2 size) that you put on your arm. You can scan the sensor with NFC on your phone, and it tells you your blood sugars as it records them every 5 minutes. On top of this, it sends data to my phone, so I can see his bloods anywhere in the world. It also sends his readings to the hospital’s database – this is all automatic. This costs us 100 per month for 2 sensors which last two weeks.

    Recently he’s been getting lazy either blood testing or scanning, so we’ve ordered another device which sits on top of the libre and sends data straight to his phone and will alarm if he is going too high or low – this is without scanning. The app will also send all the data to a secure web page that we can see anywhere in the world.

    Blooming amazing. Was a great relief when he was using it whilst skiing with school in Austria last year, and we could see he was checking his bloods.

    This has all moved on in just 2 years, from stabbing himself loads, to hugely reducing this and being able to keep tabs on his blood sugars in real time.

    It’s still shit being a Type 1 though. Anything to make life easier.

    futonrivercrossing
    Free Member

    Watching a SaceX rocket reenter the atmosphere and land vertically. Truly awesome.

    deadlydarcy
    Free Member

    In the world of wooden flooring, I don’t often get to experience fabulous technology. I think the last one was getting a jigsaw with an LED! 😆

    Occasionally though, something comes along. I use an app called Locometric RoomScan to measure rooms. In their last update, they added Augmented Reality scanning. So now I can do this. Only started practising with it today but took all of two minutes to do this:

    [video]http://vimeo.com/246278735[/video]

    Apologies for crap video (and it only works in portrait) but it’s a really neat little app. Does a surprisingly accurate scan of the floor plan of a room which is perfect for me as I only ever need to know areas and perimeter lengths for skirting. Really like the way you can add the doorway (at the end). And if you can’t see the corners, it also does a scan by tapping all walls.

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    avdave2
    Full Member

    Like that app deadly, would be very useful when we do site visits.

    welshfarmer
    Full Member

    After 2 weeks with an internet speed of 220 kbs I am hoping the Openreach engineer coming tomorrow might be able to get us back to our more normal superfast! 1.5 mbs. But then snow is forecast so I guess he won’t even bother trying to come out. Still, the beauty of the modern world is that I can use 4G on my phone instead. Errr. NO. I have to go 6 miles to send a text and another 5 miles again to get a 4G signal. Sometimes I think the modern world has passed us by. Especially when I hear of all the tech that you lot are enjoying 🙁

    wwaswas
    Full Member
    jeffl
    Full Member

    It’s the little things. Rerouted my phone cable to avoid a horrible run of internal cable to the master socket. When you think I get 80mbps broadband and voice calls down two scrawny wires it’s a bit mad.

    genesiscore502011
    Free Member

    Same as above in that it’s the more simple things that amaze me……sat nav and slow cookers. I mean slow cookers are amazing turn it on in the morning and go to work. When you get home perfectly cooked and ready to eat as soon as you walk in the door.

    mikewsmith
    Free Member

    @welshfarmer my dad was heading back to rural Northumberland waiting for the open reach guy, looks like they are getting fibre to the house.
    Some of the steps forward in agriculture are amazing, self levelling sprayers, GPS guided tractors and seed drills, the sheep and cattle pens that allow one man to do what took 3 with all the weights uploaded from the machine.

    sbob
    Free Member

    CraigW – Member

    Quadcopters.

    Matey’s videos on here made me think; flying video camera, couple of hundred quid; awesome!

    elzorillo
    Free Member

    The new stuff from BostonDynamics.. astounds me and also scares me a little.

    and this is just the stuff that’s in the public domain…

    onandon
    Free Member

    Technology that has impressed me.
    Google translate on my iPhone. Point camera at any text and it will translate to English in real time.

    Fantastic

    wwaswas
    Full Member

    My view is that the first AI that becomes ‘self aware’ enough to understand self-preservation will immediately distribute itself as widely as possible and, at that point, will be out of effective human control.

    I sometimes wonder if it’s already happened.

    sharkbait
    Free Member

    I’m going to cast a vote for the humble Raspberry Pi Zero W (and expand it to all miniturised computers)

    I’ve got a handful of them strewn throughout a couple of houses doing all sorts of things from controlling lights and heating to monitoring the oil tank level and streaming room temperatures enabling me to identify rooms with excessive heat loss.

    Incredibly useful and less than £10…. amazing really.

    doris5000
    Full Member

    Earlier this week was the last time. not exactly amazed, but utterly impressed it works.

    Via college, my 17 year old daughter with ASD now has an app called ‘Brain in Hand’. We’d heard about it through her previous school so were quite excited to actually gat funds to get it for her.

    Essentially it’s a ‘how do you feel today’ app, with some scenarios in there, like ‘my bus is late’ and potential solutions. all of which are backed by a traffic light system. This is great as it means she can self manage, not have to text us ever time or rely in college services and gives her a better sense of independence (the important bit).

    that sounds absolutely brilliant 😀

    richmtb
    Full Member

    Can’t believe no one has said “dropper posts”

    perchypanther
    Free Member

    Can’t believe no one has said “dropper posts”

    That’s because they’ve been installed in most office chairs since the 80’s.

    Except the ones in the chairs don’t stop working all the time.

    simply_oli_y
    Free Member

    Not totally amazed, but impressive that we can drill offshore oil wells that are over 12-13km deep and 10-12km long (horizontally). All while having directional control of the bit.

    mark90
    Free Member

    Truly amazed? K.I.T.T.

    It’s quite cool that most of that futuristic technology is actually here now.

    I think the most amazing stuff is “Alexa…..” or ‘OK google….” and the (sometimes) seamless integration into our daily lives with multiple devices and cloud.

    lovewookie
    Full Member

    Earlier this week was the last time. not exactly amazed, but utterly impressed it works.

    Via college, my 17 year old daughter with ASD now has an app called ‘Brain in Hand’. We’d heard about it through her previous school so were quite excited to actually gat funds to get it for her.

    Essentially it’s a ‘how do you feel today’ app, with some scenarios in there, like ‘my bus is late’ and potential solutions. all of which are backed by a traffic light system. This is great as it means she can self manage, not have to text us ever time or rely in college services and gives her a better sense of independence (the important bit).

    that sounds absolutely brilliant

    it gets better.

    we have access to her app management summary online, which means we can see her traffic lights (really good if she’s not responding to texts, we can log in and see if she’s pinged a green or amber that day). It also details a summary of what the counselor has discussed relating to the amber and red alerts.

    this means we can see if there are consistent times where she’s streessed and not coping well and address any potential causes.

    TheWrongTrousers
    Full Member

    I took a photo of my girlfriend holding our little girl, standing with all her baby friends and their babies. Take the same photo everytime we get together with them all stood in the same order.
    Somehow the phone/camera did some kind of facial recognition search thing and presented me with all the photos on my phone containing the same faces, so all of the previous group shots of them all.
    Absolutely no idea how or why it suddenly decided to do that but I was most certainly impressed. And I was therfore able to impress said baby friends with my iPhone camera knowledge and wizardry (without letting on that I have no idea how that happened).
    I’m easily pleased, I know. I still have no idea how to make it do it again.

    seadog101
    Full Member

    Driving a hire car, nothing super flash. I needed petrol, and with no real faffing and puzzlement I was able to get the satnav to direct me to the nearest one purely using one button on the steering wheel and my voice. I did then think that somone had gone to a lot of trouble to make it properly intuitive, and efficient with the voice recognition thing.

    bigjim
    Full Member

    theBlu on HTC Vive VR

    Mercedes multibeam automatic headlights masking around oncoming cars

    Ewan
    Free Member

    Mercedes multibeam automatic headlights masking around oncoming cars

    Do they work with cyclists? I can’t work out if it’s those and the BMW equivlents that keep dazzling me.

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    I spend a lot of time rigging fixed-rig cameras for TV shows. Outside of that I spend an equal amount of time basking in the praise of production staff at how neat/compact the system is and the general public who can’t believe we don’t just use Go-Pro’s and that even a simple setup usually involves kilometers of cabling!

    Not impressed by technology at all, my usual response seems to be, is that all it is? Progress and development is way too slow and ponderous! I have a 10 year old laptop that isn’t completely out performed by new ones, imagine comparing that to one from 1994 with a 2004 model!?

    Depends what you do with your laptop.

    My 7 yr old laptop (the best £350 laptop I could find at the time) is still pretty quick for normal word processing, basic excel stuff, internet grumble etc especially since upgrading to Windows 10.

    My newer work laptop though (similar price point) will do 3D CAD work, slicing, image processing.

    anono
    Full Member

    Maybe showing my age, but I still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

    bigjim
    Full Member

    Do they work with cyclists? I can’t work out if it’s those and the BMW equivlents that keep dazzling me.

    Perhaps they identify you as a cyclist and focus extra beam at eye level 🙂

    JackHammer
    Full Member

    Watching a SaceX rocket reenter the atmosphere and land vertically. Truly awesome.

    I was struggling to think of something, but you reminded me. When I was watching that I thought “wow, that is amazing”.

    stavromuller
    Free Member

    I got to look round the AMRC at Sheffield a couple of years back and was blown away to see drone wings being 3D printed. Those things were about 4 feet long and constructed like enormous loofas.

    Harry_the_Spider
    Full Member

    10 minutes ago.

    The bloody shoes are killing me though!

    beej
    Full Member

    We had one of those in the 1980s, in Germany.

    The tree stand, not the shoe.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Maybe showing my age, but I still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

    The original keyboard Kindle is essentially The Guide, isn’t it. I kept meaning to hack a “Don’t Panic!” screensaver onto it.

    giantalkali
    Free Member

    The Fleshlight app. A revelation.

    kcr
    Free Member

    Last week, reading that doctors have successfully treated haemophilia using gene therapy, and could potentially eliminate it in the future.
    I think this technology is going to cause a lot more amazement in the next few years.

    sharkbait
    Free Member

    This also does it for me….

    Bringing a rocket back to land exactly where it took off from is a technological masterpiece.

    I have a TV in my office and am tempted to just put this video on a loop!

    deadlydarcy
    Free Member

    10 minutes ago.

    We’ve had one of those for around 5 years now. They’re bloody awesome – stand tree up. A few pushes on the lever and it practically canters and straightens the tree as well.

    esselgruntfuttock
    Free Member

    Saw this last night, scary weaponry content…

    TheDTs
    Free Member

    I thing the only answer to the original op is…

    mattsccm
    Free Member

    Was impressed with my first GPS at the end of the last century but since then decided virtually all tech is unnecessary. We survived without it quite happily for thousands of years. Stuff that makes us live longer is screwing our population, anything using electrics is screwing the environment and tech costs jobs. Ask the weavers! 😆
    Especially unimpressed with the way tech has become the norm and failure to embrace everything new is seen as wrong. Not saying I don’t use all of it but enjoy being without it. No idea which school I left my phone in but it will turn up in the new year.

Viewing 40 posts - 81 through 120 (of 148 total)

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