My three favorite tech devices

I love technology, obviously. I work in tech and have always wanted to be in tech. Unfortunately, it feels like most modern technology is engineered to consume our time and attention rather than enrich our lives. Plenty of people have written on this so I won’t go on, but lately tech seems to only do bad things. So I decided to write about three tech gadgets that I love. All of these devices I genuinely feel I get more out of than what they take away.

1. Kobo Clara e-reader

Easily my favorite, and it’s not even close. Some people don’t love the e-ink screen, and it does cause some lag when you “turn” pages or navigate around the UI. I am here to argue that these traits, that are seemingly deficiencies, are actually huge wins. The e-ink makes it feel and read like a book, and the lag reminds you that you are not reading on a super computer. Being patient doesn’t have to be a bad thing in a time where everything has to be instant.

On my laptop, I use Calibre to organize and maintain my library of ebooks. It’s an excellent piece of open-source software. It also has a very old school feel, reminds me of an application I would use as a kid to manage my mp3 files.

Kobo Clara’s also work with Instapaper. If you don’t use instapaper, drop what you are doing and sign up. Instapaper will download any article that you see on the internet to your account, where you can read it anytime offline from any device you want. See an article you want to read but don’t have time? Send it to instapaper. They have a chrome plugin, an ios app, and a direct connection to Kobo. So I can find an article on my phone, send it to instapaper, and then later that night read it from my kobo. The only issue is that I have too many articles to read and not nearly enough time.

2. Garmin Instinct 2

I got this as a best man’s gift from my brother, and he didn’t even know that I was actively in the market for one. I love it for counting my steps, tracking my sleep (someday I’ll get a sleep score greater than 95!), heart rate, and a bunch of other things.

Garmin has some interesting statistics like your “body battery”, which is a numerical value out of 100 that estimates how “charged” you are at any given time. It essentially ranks how tired you should feel, and it’s surprisingly accurate.

It’s weird, I’ve only had it for a year, but it’s hard to imagine not being able to know what my heart rate is at any given time, or understand how intense my run was this morning broken down with numbers. It’s something I probably won’t go back to not having.

3. The Steam Deck

Alright, I know what I said at the top. This one is technically a huge waste of time and attention. But it does bring joy. And I genuinely find it one of the most impressive pieces of technology from the gaming industry in a long while.

In case you are somehow unaware, the Steam Deck is a whole gaming PC miraculously shrunk down into a handheld device. Think Nintendo Switch but with a better CPU, more RAM, and free range over the internal software. You can switch from gaming mode to desktop mode, allowing you to use the Linux-based operating system as your own personal computer. And this thing works well as a computer.

But it’s mostly a gaming device. Outside of your steam library, one of my favorite aspects is emulation. You can use EmuDeck to quickly set up your machine into a retro gaming device console (assuming you own these retro games and properly load them, of course.)

They are all sold out now, with no update on when they will be back-filled. I am glad I grabbed one.

Here’s my friends and I playing split screen Halo 1:

4. Bonus: This laptop set-up

I bought a small logitech keyboard, a small logitech mouse, and this laptop stand and now feel like I could easily work from anywhere.

Of course it’s always nicer to have a big screen, but what I hated about working on the road is not having a dedicated workspace. This setup quickly makes anywhere feel like one.

I am still trying to figure out how I can get a lightweight screen to attach to my laptop while on the stand so I can have two monitors. Most secondary screens require their own stands so their weight does not hinge solely on the laptop. I’d like one that gets its support solely from the laptop. But an additional screen would probably cause the stand to fall over, so I would need a work around for that. I haven’t seen or heard of any solutions, but won’t give up just yet.