Asklemmy

My clock radio.

Mine’s the 390t with 256mb of storage. So it’s one of the ones that’s triangle in shape with a real smal lcd screen and takes a single AA battery. Suuuuper simple to just plug in with mini USB and drag and drop mp3s over.

I have a spring/crank music box stuffed animal from when I was born (several decades) that still sounds perfect.

I have an old CD Walkman that still works just fine. Although looking at the logo alone, it's most likely made after the year 2000, so it's not that old.

Samsung S4 mini. Can't believe it is the 3310 of the smartphone world, undestroyable. It's just for streaming kids shows but I take care to bring new ROMs on it, actually android 13.

GameBoy Color with a single game: Pokémon Red.

Next time I was able go to the shop they had upgraded to GameBoy Advance and no GB/GBC games were to be never found again. It was the best/worst thing I ever got. :'(

Probably my Canon 5D Mark II DSLR that I bought at launch (2008). Still works fine hundred of thousands of clicks later, multiple trips across the world, etc etc. It even still holds a candle to my current camera on the photo side of things (video specs definitely dated now though).

Got an Alphasmart Neo, it's basically a keyboard with a big enough unlit screen with a printer port and computer port. The original Neo model was made around in 2004-2006 and was made by Apple employees with education and disability in mind.

For the longest time I wrote on laptops and tablets but the fragility, battery power and eye fatigue made them not as suitable for continuous writing. I had the money and saw others talk about the Alphasmart devices as being the best writing tool, so I got it.

It's been 2 1/2 years and the batteries I put in are at 60-56%. The device takes 3 aa for power and a coin cell (like for weight scales) for the memory. I can spend the odd multi-hour writing sessions without ever worrying about the device dying from lack of power. And it takes a lot of writing to get the aa batteries to run down a few percentages.

Features:

• Nearly indestructible exterior
• Turning it on/off and navigating between menus and screens takes seconds
• 8 file (tabs) buttons to keep 8 projects open at a time
• Each file autosaves and can save the projects into named files to keep it in the memory
• All or individual files allow for password protection
• Just words on the screen
• Has find, replace, word count, file storage %, wpm, dictionary, thesaurus and calculator
• Uses basic keyboard commands for text (Mac or windows keystrokes)
• Detects sections in the file by how many blank lines are inbetween (1-9 blanks and is set up by the user for how many blanks count as a section break)
• Change font sizes and 'mod' for custom fonts and set screen contrast
• Stop accidentally turning the device on by setting on to Enter + On
• Allows other keyboard layouts (QWERTY, Dvorak, right/left hand for disabled users) and special characters
• slow and sticky keys
• Allows Spanish writing and dictionary somehow

Most of the features I dont use but they are nice to have. The biggest plus is that it is not tied down to proprietary software or cables. It uses a printer cable (I have a regular one and a c-cable one for my phone/tablet) and all I need to do is select a file button, plug it in, get a blank document ready and hit the send button so it types everything out as a keyboard emulation. It is faster to get files with software but it is not a requirement.

Best device I spent my money on.

haven't checked it in 4 or 5 years but I think my Mac Plus still works.