[Closed] When was the last time technology truly amazed you?

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.

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

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:

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.

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

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 🙁

Scud this article echoes your experience. [url= https://gizmodo.com/facebook-figured-out-my-family-secrets-and-it-wont-tel-1797696163 ]https://gizmodo.com/facebook-figured-out-my-family-secrets-and-it-wont-tel-1797696163[/url]

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.

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.

@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.

CraigW - Member

Quadcopters.

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

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...

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

[url= https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/12/deepmind-ai-needs-mere-4-hours-of-self-training-to-become-a-chess-overlord/ ]

And when AlphaZero instead decided to teach itself chess, the AI defeated the current world-champion chess program, Stockfish, after a mere four hours of self-training.

[url= https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html ]The AI Revolution[/url]

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.

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.

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 😀

Can't believe no one has said "dropper posts"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

theBlu on HTC Vive VR

Mercedes multibeam automatic headlights masking around oncoming cars

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.

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.

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

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 🙂

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".

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.

10 minutes ago.

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The bloody shoes are killing me though!

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

The tree stand, not the shoe.

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.

The Fleshlight app. A revelation.

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.

[url= http://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/spacex-science-fiction-come-true ]This also does it for me....[/url]

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!

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.

Saw this last night, scary weaponry content...

I thing the only answer to the original op is...
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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.

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I just parked my car in a random carpark in winchester and rushed to meet my family somewhere in the centre. Don't know the city at all. Realised that I hadn't really paid that much attention to where I had parked then discovered Google appears the have tracked my every movement today, even highlighting when I went from being in a car to being on foot. Hey presto, found my car. magic.

Letting the car drive and steer itself is pretty mind blowing.

I love science too so CRISPR

We survived without it quite happily for thousands of years.

We did?

Who exactly has lived in iron age Britain and the 21st century to compare? Personally, I really don't think I'd have enjoyed living even 50 years ago. My life would have been massively limited compared to today. I sure as hell wouldn't have been having a discussion about sexism with people all over the country.

1994. As a ten year old I saw both SEGA's Virtua fighter and Daytona USA on a ferry to france.

Having been subjected to only 2d megadrive and SNES sprites these games blew my mind. Daytona especially. What a game.

That was when arcade tech was way ahead of home tech.

I'd never be wowed again by graphics.
Especially now when everything is small steps in improvement.

I don't really game anymore.

I'm also impressed by my nest thermostat. Brilliant bit of kit.

[quote=molgrips ]I sure as hell wouldn't have been having a discussion about sexism with people all over the country.

You're using that as an example of the positive benefits of technology? 😆

On the gaming theme, Tekken 1 on the PS1.. a lad from school had a PS1 immediately after release in the UK and it blew me away! Moving in 3 dimensions on a computer game was a different world.. the next biggest jump in gaming for me was PGR3 on the 360. As above, we'll never see such step changes ever again IMO. Mind you that VR shit is impressive especially as it’s only early days

Especially unimpressed with the way tech has become the norm

the irony of posting that on the internet from your PC or phone is fairly impressive

..unfortunately.

To me its not so much singular tech that blows me away its how we are starting to see it being integrated (i.e. the IoT of things), for example the cell phone and the Tesla above.
Facial recognition software, its been around for years but with the advent of cheaper hi-res cameras and matching processing power its amazing how this can be used to tie in with a lot of other tech.
Having played around with some software recently aimed at the retail market, lets hope we don't lose some of those valuable privacy laws or it will nearly be impossible to sneak of for a craft pint when you are meant to be Christmas shopping.

Another vote for Oculus Rift, amazing and scary at the same time.

@bearnecessities the good thing is you can, you can also close the doors, switch it off and read a book etc. it's up to you how you deal with it

We survived without it quite happily for thousands of years.

We survived. 'Happily' is hard to gauge though.

'Always hungry and alway scared' might be a better reflection of most of humanity's timeline. Even in relatively modern times we've only been [url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer ]one bad harvest[/url] away from a global catastrophe. Now we'd just be complaining that there were a few less jaffa cakes in the packet.

10 minutes ago.

Is that the new 'Plumbus X' ?

I think it's the whole wireless network thing that still impresses me.
Last year I was watching a live concert, on my tablet. The concert was in Australia, and someone in the audience was recording it on their phone, and uploading it in real time to the web. (This was one of many feeds I could have watched).
Just the phone bit is a staggering piece of technology. Shame it's used for sending 'I'm in the pub' text messages most of the time.

Amazon Web services - not the store but the tech of cloud computing.

The rate of progression of AWS in particular is pretty impressive. This is the tech upon which increasingly large amounts of other tech is being built.

1994. As a ten year old I saw both SEGA's Virtua fighter and Daytona USA on a ferry to france

I used to work in R&D for Sega's coin-op division. About 1999 they did F355 Challenge which wasn't a great game but used GPS data for the tracks, and the 'deluxe' cabinet with 3 monitors, h pattern shifter and clutch was pretty amazing at the time, hard to drive until you got used to it. We played it *a lot* and the department lap record for Monza proved unbeatable.
Later, as a publicity thing, we delivered it to Barrichello who lived near Cambridge and set it up in his gym. He confessed he wasn't really into video games but got in the thing and went for a spin around Monza for the cameras. The bastard smashed our record on his second lap.

Nice story.

My vote, though it's in its infancy, is the quantum computer.

Deep Thought indeed.

Doing a FaceTime call to my parents when they were in the back of beyond in NZ and I was dropping the kids off at Beavers in Bristol.
Not just the technology but that it was easy enough for my folks to use

Quickpar. No one knows how it does what it does.

Last Christmas when I fired my vinyl player up

... the music actually being printed in wave form on a plasticy surface and a tiny needle reading the actual analogue signal... no 1s and 0s involved..mind blown!

the music actually being printed in wave form on a plasticy surface

I'm working on an EPSRC project with 4 universities and multiple industry partners that amazes me for two reasons.

It's for 'smart' materials - specifically concrete. Concrete's not actually that strong, it's the steel in it that gives strength, but steel rusts. So if concrete cracks (and in most cases it will, eventually) and moisture gets in to the interior it will freeze and thaw and crack worse, until it reaches the steel which rusts, and expands, and cracks worse. So bridges and tunnels have to undergo the civil engineering equivalent of dentistry, drill out the decay, patch it up, etc. Costly, dangerous, and in some areas (undersea, nuclear, etc.) almost impossible.

So we are working on self sensing and self healing materials, that sit dormant until a crack starts (at microscopic scale) at which they can sense the crack, and inform the highways agency or whoever (avoids need to inspect as frequently in case); but then they are filled with microencapsulated material (our part) that ruptures as the crack propogates through it which releases a catalyst which enables the concrete to bridge over the gap.

It's real Tomorrows World stuff, but it actually works on a lab scale. And that's the second part that amazes me - we're working on stuff that might be 20 years before it is in the market (the industry currently isn't a 'take a punt' mindset) so many on the project won't see the fruition - and the expected lifespan in 80-90 years, so it's pretty likely none of us will actually find out if it worked or not.

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!

After 90 minutes in sleety rain watching my lads team taking a 4-1 drubbing, it has to be heated car seats.

I was in Scarborough recently, and walking around came to the big graveyard. Saw Bronte's grave, and decided to look her up on Google. I only managed to type in the letter 'A' and Google instantly came up with Anne Bronte.

Facebook, again. I'm playing NIN via Alexa. Just looked onto my Facebook feed, and it is full of adverts for NIN tour dates. How do they know!!

Facebook, again. I'm playing NIN via Alexa. Just looked onto my Facebook feed, and it is full of adverts for NIN tour dates. How do they know

I walked past a restaurant today for the first time ever and paused for 15 seconds to read the menu in the window. I hadn't searched on the internet for the restaurant or anything to do with it.

Within 40 minutes said restaurant was appearing in my Facebook feed as a sponsored advert 😯