What's the most futuristic piece of tech you can buy for under $100?
What's the most futuristic piece of tech you can buy for under $100?
143 comments
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If you shop around you can find a Brother (B&W) laser printer for about $100.
Imagine this weird future: Printers that always just work no matter what type of computer you have or how long they've sat since you last used them. And the "ink" cartridges last forever. And you can buy 3rd party refills or even refill them yourself. Plus it's completely reliant on microplastics to do its job, what's more futuristic than that?
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Even better, if you scour your local thrift stores you can occasionally find them for as little as $10 and all they typically need is a cleanup and a new toner cartridge.
I bought mine for $7 4 years ago and it's still working on the toner cartridge that was in the printer when I bought it.
Admittedly, I only print about 40 or 50 pages a year but that's a hell of a deal.
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so wish I had bought my brother laser earlier.
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Imagine this weird future: Printers that always just work no matter what type of computer you have or how long they've sat since you last used them. And the "ink" cartridges last forever. And you can buy 3rd party refills or even refill them yourself. Plus it's completely reliant on microplastics to do its job, what's more futuristic than that?
I lived in the 90's, when office work was a tad more reliant on printers and late stage capitalism wasn't as bad. My dad had a laser printer for his business. Very reliable, fast, never needed anything.
I remember that as the past, is my point.
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I was thinking this too, but consider some improvements:
- wireless printing seems to “just work” now. Besides having to painfully enter my wifi password with up and down arrows on my printer, it seems like my windows and Mac laptops are able to print to it wirelessly without any initial setup. (I use Linux on my desktop but haven’t tried printing from it yet). I think it even works from phones.
- cables: I don’t remember what type of cable printers used, but I remember the big keyboard cable, then the smaller purple and green PS/2 ones (I think keyboard and mouse were different?)… I vaguely remember multiple different peripheral cables, like FireWire? Giant parallel ports for things like scanners?
I hate that most printers don’t come with the USB (B?) cable that seemingly only printers need now, but I’m glad that it’s standard and that everything supports
<strikethrough>USB-A</strikethrough>I mean USB-C (except my PC) now. Such a utopia.
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I've got one of those and I'm pretty sure I've been using the same toner cartridge for like a dozen years.
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Still this thing, 20 years on:
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Kinda true, how this thing even worked, nobody knows
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The tape head is basically a small and really sensitive electromagnet. Magnetized tape creates small disturbances in the magnetic signal. Amplify those disturbances and you get sound. Similar to an antenna, but only works in close proximity.
This also works in reverse. Feed an audio signal through the electromagnet, and the electromagnet will create the disturbances in whatever is next to it. You can do this to record to a tape, or you can do this to pass sound to another tape head, which is how these aux cassettes work.
You can build one yourself really easily. Just take the tape head from a broken player and solder to an aux cable. Take a cassette, remove the tape, and put the tape head in the middle portion so it comes into contact with the player tape head.
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3 sea shells.
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At the sea shore
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A 1-terabyte MicroSD card
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For under 100$ ?
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Yep https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-microSD-MicroSDXC-MB-MD1T0SA-AM/dp/B0CWPNS8JY $99.99 it shows for me - not sure how taxes work on this (I’m not American) but that probably counts.
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A bow drill fire starter.
...I suppose it depends on what you assume the future will be like...
Barring that, you can get some small vials of tritium gas for under that price.
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What would one do with small vials of tritium gas?
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Not much really. Looks cool though. I suppose it's more of a decoration than "tech." About the only practical application of it is a tool to terrify the uneducated. The quantities of tritium the average person can buy are beyond harmless. You could breathe a hundred vials of the stuff and be completely unaffected. If you drank nothing but tritium water for several weeks, you would have some issues. But tiny vials with micrograms of tritium vapor inside? Utterly harmless.
Or, I suppose for the criminally minded, you could find some evil uses for it. You could probably rob a bank with it. "Give me all the money or I break this vial of radioactive vapor!" That would probably get you a wikipedia page, if you're just dying for your 5 minutes of fame. You could go down in history as, "that mad scientist that robbed a bank using radioactive gas." Of course it would be a bluff.
Though if you're just going to bluff your way through bank robbery, you can just stick your hand in a hoodie pocket for the same effect.
I suppose you could use it for other similar criminal acts of varied nobility. You could probably use the same bluff to create a hostage situation to bring awareness to whatever political/religious cause is your cup of tea. Ultimately most people are very ignorant of nuclear science, and simply the words "radioactive tritium" would cause people to shit themselves. And that fear could be harnessed for all sorts of malevolent purposes. (Even better as you can actually show people the faint glow from it, and prove that you do have something radioactive.)
Hmm... what else could you use tritium for? I suppose you could use it for religious purposes. Absolute quantities really don't matter much for that.
What else? You could tie it to a keychain and be able to find your keys in a dark room.
But really, it's mostly a novelty. I think small amounts of it can be used for gun sights. But in any quantity the average person could afford or legally be allowed to purchase, it's a harmless novelty. Larger quantities can be used in fusion reactor experiments and nuclear weapons. But if you try to acquire that much, you better have a budget in the millions, and the NRC is going to be on your ass. The average person can get a small vial of it that faintly glows blue in a dark room. It looks cool embedded in jewelry, but it really doesn't have much practical purposes beyond perhaps terrifying the ignorant. But I really don't consider malevolent uses to be truly practical applications.
(In case it isn't obvious, I do not endorse using radioactive tritium in the commission of any crime or act of violence or threat of violence.)
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There was a TV show. Stephen Fry 100 greatest gadgets.
For 1 he told a story about how some guy was talking to a largely uncontacted tribe and they were really interested in their tech.
So he knew they would have a supply drop and took them out to see the plane for the first time ever. The tribe was remarkable unimpressed with the sight.
The guy asked what was up and they came back with the reply "You can make fire from your fingertips. Of course you can fly"
He named the lighter the number 1 gadget.
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I suppose it really depends on your perspective. If you're that uncontacted tribe, you see birds all the time. The idea of a creature being able to fly is pretty mundane. Humans can't naturally fly like birds, but neither can they naturally wield knives as long and sharp as tiger claws. But flying is ultimately just duplicating something already found in nature.
But the ability to instantly and effortlessly summon fire? The closest thing in nature is the bombardier beetle, and that shoots boiling acid. Impressive, but it's not true fire. There are no creatures in nature that can just summon fire on command. From a natural perspective, instantly creating fire is a lot more impressive than a flying machine.
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A full working computer, more powerful than what we used to go to the moon, and using less power than a light bulb.
It can take many forms, like smartphones, SBCs or older PCs/laptops.
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You can buy an ESP board that meets all those qualifications from AliExpress for less than $3CAD shipped.
Setting one of those up was the first time in a while I’ve been so impressed with just how cheap and accessible tech has gotten. It’s a web server with WiFi and Bluetooth shipped to my door all for the price of a chocolate bar.
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or mini pcs
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By that logic, a lighter. Better than smashing two rocks together, that's how we used to make fire.
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One of those fancy plasma lighters, sure. But butane lighters have been around for decades
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A knife. Futuristic in that it will be handy for hunting and self-defense after the future collapse of civilization that results from our insatiable appetite for consumption - of, among other things, useless gadgets.
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It's interesting the difference in what people think a collapsed civilization will look like.
Some people think we will "return to monke" where wilderness survival skills will be essential and people who have them will be the "main characters." That would probably be the easier and better future.
The more likely option will be technofeudalism where rich people have small, brutal armies and control localized power grids, farming operations, and politics with tech as mass migrations happen and wildlife becomes all but extinct outside of human cultivation. Survival skills won't matter when all land and food scarcity is controlled by a rich few with absolute control. The average survivalist will be wiped out with the first natural disaster or by the feudal lords with drones. Return to nature might only come after 50 years when chip supplies and power grids have dried up and fallen apart, but it would just as likely be mad-max as oil could likely still be used.
Who knows. Fascism might take over with how it is going now and solve the climate crisis with mass genocide and forcing green energy for all we know.
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I see you've read Yanis Varoufakis. In all realism though, a fallen society is most likely to be a result of climate change. First it gets too hot for Africans, so their only option is to move northward and eastward to the Middle East. This results in tightened borders and the death of many due to heatstroke and dehydration - I also don't doubt a slave trade-like and human exploitation era might come about because of this. Increased demand for AC's in the west will also be a byproduct of this. Melting ice caps will also increase the danger to many of those living in coastal regions - Florida probably sinks faster than we'd predicted.
All of this I project to happen within the next 50 years where the problems are left for Gen Z and further generations to deal with.
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Raspberry Pis and other microcomputers can be had for pretty cheap, and they can be put to a surprising variety of tasks. You need to be a bit of a jack of all trades to fully embrace that DIY element, but I'd bet that showing off a project that you mostly built yourself would be seen as futuristic by most people.
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I feel like that really depends on how you view futuristic.
I think things with colored e-ink displays, USB C chargeable AA batteries, handheld emulators, 2230 NVMe drives, and USB C power portable displays are really cool but I feel like their availability these days has made them lose a bit of their futuristic luster. They would have blown my mind when I was a kid.
More niche products like Meshtastic and ESP32 Marauder devices are things I view as futuristic (and can be found for under $100).
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The thing about meshtastic is the walking distance range and limitation to text messages.
Though I don't know if it is possible to integrate a LoRAWAN concentrator with a nice collinear J-pole antenna to mount on the top of your house to move to a double digit range where it could be useful as a neighborhood mesh with multiple channels. (With the added benefit of using lorawan devices like pet trackers and things).
Still Lora smart (but local) home agriculture, water collection, etc... Is a really cool technology for large properties.
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I find it's a lot of those ideal use cases I find futuristic. The RISC V architecture and Briar are kind of similar. They're really neat and I could see some cyberpunk style uses for them but the drive for their adoption and the level of it just doesn't seem to be there yet.
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I think this is really the best answer. The future is decentralisation, to me. Stuff like meshtastic could take the best parts of the internet and make it local and community owned.
In fact, I think there are a bunch of things you can get for free which to me represent the future. Linux, Lemmy, FOSS in general. Physical technology is only a small part of the puzzle nowadays.
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Yeah I feel like having control over the things you use is definitely a big part. Something that really hampers my enthusiasm for AI is that so much of it is out of my control and generally disconnected from me.
Having AI that I can modify and run locally on my devices seems a lot more sci-fi than something that can relies so heavily on the Internet and rigid responses.
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I once found a curved 4k monitor at my local thrift shop for $70.
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While "good for you" and "congrats", it's not something anyone can buy for under 100 bucks.
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That specific monitor? No. But I often see things second-hand that are under $100 and could be considered "futuristic tech".
If you know where to look and are patient there are good deals to be had.
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An R36s is like 40 bucks, and can emulate a LOT of old game consoles. I think that's pretty neat
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I just got one and it's awesome! Finally gonna finish chrono trigger!
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That's a good example! I have a RG35XX, and definitely fun to see how far gaming tech has come.
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Where can you get one and does it take a lot of work to set up?
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We got ours off Aliexpress (pretty sure all other sites are just dropshipped from there anyway)
Technically they come with the full OS and all the games preloaded, but their SD cards are very shoddy and you run the risk of losing all your data if you use those
Setting up a fresh SD Card took my husband about an hour for both of our consoles, so I guess it wasn't too tricky
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Looks like they sell them on Amazon and some .UK site but I only see them for $65
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Ali express (like Chinese Amazon, mostly direct from factories I think).
They are always "on sale", but the prices are usually 30-50 bucks.
Here's an example: https://a.aliexpress.com/_mOcxZJq they come with thousands of games that for the most pretty just work. It a game doesn't emulate well, like mario64 didn't for me, I don't know what you can do about it.
Get the r36S - the S is faster or something.
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Sam with miyoo mini plus. Great time to get into emulation machines.
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For an extra 20, you can put Gulikit hall effect joycon sticks in it. And for a few dollars more, there's a spot on the board to solder and mount a haptic feedback motor. Still under $100. You want to get extra crazy, you could fit a small usb wireless adapter inside it. Still trying to figure out how to get stereo sound. But at the point of all those mods, you could get an RG35XX.
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Devices less sophisticated than smart phones were once pretty common in sci-fi novels, but they still achieved the same sort of thing, all the world's knowledge in the palm of your hand.
You can get smartphones for absurdly cheap these days, and while crappy by modern standards they're still technological marvels.
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lighters. fire on demand! for all of preindustrial human history these things would be worth more than gold
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I think the deauther watch is pretty cool if we're thinking cyberpunk-esque
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I'm not sure what that's for but it looks cool as hell
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Deauther is generally used for kicking clients off WiFi networks.
You can setup a mirror network, kick clients off the real one, they'll try to reconnect to yours, by which you can steal the WiFi credentials, or even listen in on the traffic.
Or just for testing, obviously.
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A COVID vaccine (offer not good inside the US)
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OP said buy though.
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Bluetooth headphones/headset/earpiece. You too can look like Uhura from Star Trek by sticking a wireless speaker in your ear!
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She is hearing always in mono. Maybe she lost one of them?
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You can buy a cheap smartwatch that will monitor your pulse, give you a pulse oximeter reading, handle text messages and phone calls, take photos, and also within a reasonable margin of error check your blood sugar for about $35 on AliExpress.
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And ping all that data to CCP instead of our corporate overlords? No thanks
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Not that it's accurate enough to be of much use
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And if you read the manual of even the latest fancy pancy samsung or apple ones, you'll find that it's health monitor is nothing more than a gimmick
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What do you mean with that? Depending on the recency of your device they can be quite accurate. I use a Garmin though because they last longer on battery and are a bit more oriented towards sports and health. Some studies I found back then suggested Garmin is not that far off lab testing on most metrics. Yes even the guestimated ones like vo2max.
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ÂŁ76.77
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The pound isn't the future since Brexit.
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what is “futuristic” in this context?
A calculator is pretty futuristic depending on where you start
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I was thinking of something that would be considered futuristic to an average person today. So, maybe something uncommon, with impressive capabilities, but still affordable?
Not sure if many items fit that criteria, but was curious if any!
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Anything with GPS capability
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A smartphone
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What smartphones are you buying for under $100?
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the Walmart special can be had for $20, it sucks and is locked to a useless carrier, but can load web pages on WiFi.
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Stolen iPhones
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Low end phones aren't that bad, if you are willing to make some sacrifices, like an uglier screen, worse camera.
For example, the Samsung Galaxy A05
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... So am I the only one that whenever I want a new phone, I just look for highest rated phone under 100 dollars? Been doing that for years, generally it's just always just like top of the line models from 3-4 years ago.
Been doing it for years and I've never really had any complaint with my phones.
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Poop knife, it's the future I tell ya!
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Get one in damascus for really deluxe poop cutting experience!
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A Voxellab Aquilla FDM printer. They're regularly on sale for about $70. Maybe cheaper these days since they're kind old now.
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Amazon and Walmart have microwaves under $100
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Otamatone.
It's a synthesizer shaped like a note with a mouth and eyes.
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A 1TB micro SD card
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you can get several smart outlets around your home for that, have fans and lamps and humidifers etc all remote controlled even with your voice.
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Sous vide
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Is a cooking method from the 70s really... futuristic?
Not saying it isn't worth it, though.
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It’s rare (intended) for me to find someone who knows what sous vide is. So I suspect for the majority it would seem futuristic.
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Bunch of cute contrarians in here today.
I got a 4k TV from Paycor stadium for $10 per k.
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A screw driver. Cause everything seems so much screwed.
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5 months of an OpenAI subscription
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Lemmy don't like LLM's
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A basic DNA test can tell you your ancestry back thousands of years and identify numerous genetically determined traits. It's kinda crazy what kinds of things they can tell you about yourself.
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And if you send in your dna three times, you can find all three if your ancestries! Really tho, there was some funny news on this a while back when identical twins took those tests and got different results
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143 comments