It’s very niche, but the only thing I could come up with is Kvevri, a traditional Georgian winemaking vessel. They’re sold today (and still used for their stated purpose, aging wine), I’ve personally seen kvevris with the exact same shape buried in a wine cellar of 12th century monastery, and at least going by the article they’re like 8000 years old, and haven’t changed much in that time.
My other ideas were:
- Bricks (turns out the earliest sun-dried mudbricks, which are very different from modern ones)
- Concrete (turns out it changed a whole lot since the Romans, modern concrete is much easier to pour, sets faster and is much stronger)
- Nuts & bolts (initially were hand-crafted and non-interchangeable - yuck!)
- Knives (I’ll let knife enthusiasts speak about that one)
Alternator Since its invention, the basic principle remained same, we are just finding a fancier ways to rotate it
I think sewing machines would count? They certainly got a hell lot more “portable”, but the basic design hasn’t changed much since the 1880s. Those things are little mechanical marvels
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Potato peelers. The ergonomic handle was a big step forward, yes. But the basic design hasn’t (and likely won’t) change.
Wasn’t expecting this answer. Can you elaborate?
Show this to a person from 1900 and other than the plastic, nothing has changed.
I would happily argue that the plastic is a step down; metal potato peelers last a lot longer.
The metal ones last longer, but the Oxo ones (like above) don’t hurt as much.
Lots of weight-training equipment. Bars, manuals etc.
Wireguard. I haven’t heard of any huge changes to it over the years. And it somehow just works
Meanwhile I just tried to set up a VPN connection for my laptop and can’t get wireguard to work properly
My work WiFi blocks WireGuard and OpenVPN connections, which is a huge bummer. I just want to be able to connect to my NAS while I’m at work, but IT doesn’t want to hear that.
At least I can still use IKEv2 with my commercial VPN, so my employer can’t see how much I browse on Lemmy throughout the day.
I may be wrong on how they “detect” VPN traffic but the lazy way would be to block the common “default” ports used by those services. If they are just blocking this port you could change what port you use. While it does come with its own issues as its a common scanned port changing the port to something like 80 or 443 and “look” like normal internet traffic. Might get around their block.
The ones that maintain a whitelist of connections are the hardest to get through
There’s a few ways to “detect” VPN traffic, and you’re missing some but port blocking is one of them. Rerouting over 443 is a possible workaround, but depending on the network architecture they can still detect VPN traffic using deep packet inspection.
Blocking ports is a very simple mechanism to prevent things and it doesn’t take long for a business to grow into IT management that involves more sophisticated methods like DPI.
VPN protocols have distinguishable packet headers/metadata/handshakes/etc. DPI can easily identify and block those, or any other known protocols, if they have it configured to do so.
Ah nice to know. I’m just an amateur hobbyists. I just remember years ago the company I worked for(somewhat large) blocked ports 80 and 443 but left almost everything else open. Stop employees from browsing the web. I went home hosted a web page served on some random high port that worked as a proxy and loaded pages I wanted then used it to play flash ( shows my age) games at work to kill time. Looking back guess I could of gotten into some shit but no longer work for them. It was a fun time though.
RSS Feeds
So good, that Google abandoned their reader
That’s a badge of honor, if anything.
Yeah that’s how I meant it. It short circuits their business model.
Really? I tried a bunch of time and don’t see the appeal. I haven found any like category filtering so I can’t subscible to like just tech or whatever. I think I’m doing it wrong
The goal is to treat the various sources as potential sources, just like you subscribe to communities here. Instead of subscribing to a tech community, you can subscribe to the various tech news sites that you enjoy.
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I want a scrolling news crawler thing on my home assistance dashboard and getting a functional rss integration working with it has been more challenging than anything else I’ve done and I’ve automated a lot, put together an entire camera and alarm system together for my residence, made a little dopamine game that shows me my daily score for Todoist tasks I get done, etc, etc. I think it frustrates me so much because I thought it would be a fun side project to work on between more challenging pursuits while learning the system and it’s all that still persists.
Edit: looks like this guide just came out a month ago, maybe it will help me get there. https://youtu.be/CK5tyvrt7pw
The 707.
Old refrigerators before all the ice makers were added.
But super energy inefficient in comparison to what we have today.
ramps
deep-frying
the D-pad
Since you mention the d-pad. It was patented, so all the big companies had their own legally distinct spins on it. Nintendo has their cross; sega had a circle thing; Sony had discrete buttons, Microsoft had a different circle thing.
The Nintendo patent actually expired a number of years ago now, so nowadays the cross is showing up more places.
It was patented? Fucking hell, today I learned
Less surprised it was Nintendo lol
[off topic?]
I can’t remember the exact quote, but Robert A. Heinlein said of the DC-3 that it was the best airplane ever built, and that the only way to improve it was to completely redesign it.
I just like the idea that some things are perfect the way they are.
I know Heinlein had his problems, but in highschool I loved his books.
The line is in ‘Glory Road,’ a great fantasy book that takes pretty much every fantasy trope and kicks it to the curb.
The Bic pen. Sure, you can make it better, but then the price has to go up. You can still buy a nearly unchanged Bic pen from any office store for cheaper than any other writing tool, nearly identical to what they looked like when they were first invented.
I’ll add Bic lighter to this list too.
What else does Bic make? 🤔
I was curious too so I looked it up.
Pens. Lighters. And razors for shaving. Mostly the single use ones.
But also
BIC has drawn criticism for maintaining its business operations in Russia after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
:C
But did they stop selling in the USA after e.g. the invasion of Grenada and Iraq and civilian bombing of Yugoslavia?
And obvious question is whether they still do business with the Zionazis…
surfboards lol https://varialsurfboards.com/best-foam-surfboard/bic-review/
I’ll see your Bic and raise you Zippo!
Just got my first one a while back, I bought it 2nd hand and it’s 7 years older than me and works better than any lighters I’ve borrowed off people over the years.
Replacement parts and even completely new lighter inserts still fit the original cases from the 1940s until now. And if something does break beyond you ability to repair, They got a lifetime warranty with no proof of purchase needed!
I had a chrome Zippo XIV, one of the models you just don’t fuck with.
I loaned it out one day to light fireworks. Somehow they overheated and ruined the flint wheel…
Anyways, if I catch you swapping Zippo parts, I’m gonna melt Frosty the Snowman…
I have a zippo, I like that it’s easy to pour in liquid fuel and they are somewhat wind resistant but the fuel does evaporate away over time. I keep it in a plastic bag which does slow the rate of fuel evaporation though.
Not sure what cheaper fuels could work well in it, that would reduce the cost of fuel that just evaporates then and I don’t use it that often so I suspect more is lost to evaporation than usage.
🧷 Safety pin. There has been a little change in the safety cap but that’s to save material not functionality or manufacturing.
The entire process is the same:
- Take wire, cut it
- Smash one end flat
- ?? (Bend the wire and fold the smashed end)
- Profit
Transistor. It was so far ahead of its time it is still being argued to be alien tech to this day.
I mean this thread is about tech that was perfect from it’s inception to the point where it didn’t or barely improved. Nothing could be further from the truth, transistor tech has had literally trillions of dollars and millions of smart people’s careers poured into it, and semiconductor IC manufacturing is now the most complicated single activity that our species does.
