By Jeffrey the Barak

Time for a tech-rant. It’s been a while, but believe it or not people still ask me for my opinion, as if it really mattered.

I have decided to base this rant on the technology that I personally own, which is a naturally narrow band of goods, since I am not rich, and I am also a bit of a minimalist at heart.

As always, please note the date of this article, as tech articles do not stay fresh for very long, so it will soon stink even more than it does today, and believe me, it already stinks. It is 2009, July 20th.

I have three computers in my arsenal these days, all of them are Apples. (No, I said arsenal, wise guy). First is my 24 inch Apple iMac. It is two and a half years old and still operates on Tiger. It will stay on Tiger until Snow Leopard comes out in a couple of months time.

This was the big white beast that liberated me from the Windows experience. I had been wrestling with, maintaining, cleaning and generally nursing Windows since 3.0, so switching to Apple OSX in 2007 was a move that freed me from working for my computer. Now my computer works for me.

I also have a white Macbook, also purchased in 2007, which rarely gets switched on, unless I go away from home. The main reason for this, is I am spoiled by the 24 inch screen environment, and I unfortunately do not have very good eyesight.

Therefore my third Apple, a little white 16GB iPhone, is much more capable than it needs to be since trying to read a web page on it is torture for me, and unless it’s an emergency I don’t even try to do email on it.

So as I sit with my three white Apples, I often consider the state of personal computing today. I think that folks with good eyesight who never edit a batch of 200 photos or edit a movie or, like me, work with a fifteen thousand row, twenty column spreadsheet all day, would be fine having a netbook instead of a home computer system, but, and it’s a big but (I prefer little butts), they would need to have readily available fast wireless Internet to make it bearable, and it could definitely not be a netbook that ran Windows. Using Windows to run a netbook is like towing a motorcycle with a water buffalo. Some of the Linux flavors are apparently very good on netbooks, but Windows itself needs more power than a netbook possesses simply to play politely with human beings. And I can definitely say from experience, no-one likes any computing device that seems to work slowly. That is worth repeating, no-one likes any computing device that seems to work slowly.

Moving to the living room, we are still happy with our old 42 inch, room-heating, plasma TV that is on the wall with all the ugly wires hidden inside that wall and coming out of a socket lower down to fan out into a bunch of black room heaters.

But what is really needed is some modern take on the consolidation of all the mess. The aforementioned room heaters are the sound amplifier, the DVR from the cable company, and two different DVD players, neither of which is currently connected because the cable company’s DVR does not like the HDMI cable so it had to borrow the composite cables. Honestly, the amount of vinyl-clad copper spaghetti and the basket of remote controls is a complete mess. Someone has to invent a simple connection and control system for home entertainment. I sometimes feel like I’m shoveling coal and filling a boiler on a steam engine just to watch TV. I have to manually change the aspect ratio from channel to channel and go through a multiple button sequence on more than one device to do anything more complicated than change the volume. No wonder so many people watch narrow pictures squashed into wide screens so everyone looks short and wide, it’s too much hassle to adjust anything.

One piece of technology that is dear to my heart is my Keurig K-Cup coffee system. Anything else is so messy and uncivilized that I rank this device as one of the greatest technological feats since the rocket engine. Look elsewhere on the-vu for more about this charming lump of counter-top tech.

And lastly a piece of technology that made something extremely huge into something tiny. My Roland Handsonic 10. This has replaced a van full of drums, cymbals, cases, microphones, stands, racks, and more, and it’s not much larger than a laptop computer. Oh yes, this too is white, exactly like my three Apples.

Jeffrey the Barak is the publisher of the-vu