Jared’s favorite tech things (2024 edition)
My favorite tech things
Jared Newman | Hey there! I’m Jared Newman, a longtime tech journalist, and this is Advisorator, my weekly tech advice newsletter. Did someone share this newsletter with you? Sign up to get it every Tuesday.
Before we get to the newsletter, here’s the schedule for Advisorator over the next couple of weeks:
- Next week: I’ll send out the newsletter on Monday afternoon (Dec. 23), a day earlier than usual as I’ll be traveling on Tuesday.
- Tuesday, Dec. 31: There will be a newsletter, albeit an abbreviated vacation version. (Longtime readers should know what to expect by now.)
Thanks for bearing with me as I grab some much-needed time off!
As for this week, it’s time for what I consider my coziest tech column of the year.
Every late December from 2018 onward, I’ve wound down the year by looking back at the tech that’s made me happiest. It doesn’t all have to be new, but all of it is new to me in some way. Looking back on previous editions—2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023—it’s remarkable how many of these things I still rely on. Hopefully my picks for this year remain just as relevant in the years ahead.
My basement gaming makeover
When Black Friday came around this year, I decided it was finally time to move on from the decade-old Vizio TV and soundbar in the basement, where my gaming PC and all my old consoles are set up. Here’s what I picked up to replace them:
- Samsung’s 65-inch S90C OLED TV: This is last year’s model, but it still has a QD-OLED panel that combines eye-searingly bright highlights with the deepest black levels.
- Samsung HW-Q990C 11.1.4-channel surround system: Also a year-old refurb, it has upward-firing speakers for Dolby Atmos in both the soundbar and rear speakers.
Both are connected to the desktop tower PC that once lived in my office, whose eight-year-old graphics card I also replaced with a gently-used AMD Radeon RX 7600 from eBay. I use a free Windows app called Playnite to unify all my PC games across Steam, Epic, GOG, and other sources, and I’ve followed my own instructions to make the whole setup work with just a game controller (8Bitdo’s Ultimate 2C).
Not to get all spiritual or anything, but I may have entered a different plane of existence at one point as the lights and sounds of Shadow Warrior 2 melted my senses. All of which is to say that I’m extremely pleased with how everything’s set up now.
(In case you didn’t spot the pattern, I leaned heavily on refurbished, open-box, and lightly-used electronics to make these upgrades more affordable.)
USB-frickin’-C
My other big hardware upgrade is one that mostly happened on its own: All my essential gadgets now use a standard USB-C cable for charging, which means I only need to bring one kind of cable wherever I go.
The iPhone was the big missing piece, as my old iPhone 13 Pro Max used Apple’s proprietary Lightning connector instead of USB-C. With an upgrade to an the 16 Pro Max this year, and an intentional avoidance of new accessories with Micro-USB connectors in recent years, I am finally free of carrying obsolete cables around.
8BitDo’s Retro Mechanical Keyboard
I picked up this keyboard on deep discount in June largely for its color scheme, whose grays and reds shamelessly mimic those of the original Nintendo Entertainment System. (Other variants take after Nintendo’s Japanese Famicom system, the Commodore 64, IBM’s classic Model-M keyboard, and—most recently—the original Xbox.
What I didn’t expect was how much I’d love the keyboard itself. The programmable B/A buttons to the right of the space bar have become indispensable, as I’ve mapped them to take screenshots and extract text from images. (The keyboard also ships with two giant B/A buttons on a separate panel, which I’ve mapped to my calculator app and a little pop-up notepad.) Factor in the clicky mechanical keys, convenient volume knob and three connectivity modes—wired USB-C, wireless USB-A dongle, and Bluetooth—and it’s easily become my favorite keyboard.
Vivaldi
After bouncing between a few different web browsers over the years, I have at last returned to Vivaldi, for which I’ve had a soft spot since its initial beta launch nine years ago. I drifted away due to some pesky bugs and the lack of a mobile version, but those aren’t issues anymore. Meanwhile, I enjoy Vivaldi’s deep customizations and power user features, such as split-screen tabs, slide-out “Web Panels,” and “Workspaces” for organizing different types of tabs. Its lack of intrusive data collection is just icing.
Various app subscriptions
I’ve always been pretty stingy about signing up for subscription services—especially on the streaming side—but this year I relaxed my stance a bit while trying to support more sustainable tech products over those from growth-at-all-costs tech giants:
- Obsidian Sync: My favorite notetaking app quietly lowered the price of its sync service this year, down to $5 per month (or $48 per year) to easily access your notes across all devices. I previously synced my notes via OneDrive, but have grown tired of running into file conflicts and jumping through hoops to access my notes on the iPhone, where syncing a full OneDrive folder isn’t possible. Obsidian Sync is seamless, and Obsidian itself is a deeply likeable product.
- Bitwarden Premium: Bitwarden’s core password manager is free, but the paid version is only $10 per year and has made dealing with two-factor authentication vastly easier.
- Feedbin: I’m back to using an RSS reader to keep up with my favorite websites and blogs, and Feedbin is just so pleasant to use. I decided $5 per month was worth avoiding the interface gunk of free alternatives such as Feedly.
- Kagi: This one’s a bit of a splurge at $10 per month for unlimited use, but it’s the only privacy-centric search engine I’ve used whose results seem better than Google’s (in part because some of its results come from Google).
Blogs and Blogging
The other notable tech thing I did in 2024 was start a personal blog. It includes links to my published work elsewhere, but also the occasional stray idea that doesn’t quite fit the molds of Advisorator or Cord Cutter Weekly. (For instance, I tried doing a movie review.) It’s been nice having a spot on the web to write purely for fun with no expectations as time permits.
I’m also trying to keep up with more personal-ish blogs, using the aforementioned Feedbin RSS reader (and I linked to a bunch of neat ones in this blog post).
So much of what I’ve always thought of as the web seems to be eroding. Major social media sites discourage posts that link elsewhere so you don’t leave their confines, and generative AI products discourage you from seeking answers that it can’t spit out on its own (however inaccurately).
In my own little way, I’m trying to preserve the fabric that made me so excited about the internet in the first place, not just on a personal blog, but in newsletters like this one. I’m grateful to have been writing Advisorator for more than six years now—and Cord Cutter Weekly for eight years—and appreciate having you aboard.
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Until next week,
Jared
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