The most useful tech I own in 2024

Forty-year-old Aurex speaker system with an amplifier and a 20-year-old Logitech X540 5.1 system with an signal decoder unit.
A low-profile Keychron K13 Pro keyboard offers ergonomic design and customizable keys.
Ink refill bottles for inktank printers are cheap, the G7020's scanner is adequate, but neither scans nor prints are premium photo quality.

Above: Illustration by Chuhall/DepositPhotos

BitDepth#1491 for 30 December

There are two kinds of new car buyers. Those who want to feel a communion with their new vehicle, ensuring that its style and backstory align with their own aspirations, and those who read and compare specifications, comparing them with elaborate spreadsheets.

When it comes to technology, I’m a little bit of both. I won’t normally consider an item that is genuinely and unforgivably ugly, but the specifications and features of a purchase weigh heavily in my decisions.

As we come to the end of a new year, these are the devices that turned out to be truly good ideas and ended up both earning their keep and appear set to keep doing so.

Speakers. The oldest bit of technology in my workspace is a 40-year-old pair of Aurex speakers. This kind of speaker generally isn’t made anymore. Heavy, solid and blessed with a flat response that I can shape with software equalisation to taste.

They also aren’t the sort of speakers you can just plug into a computer. In a lockdown project, I brought them back into service with a small amplifier, yards of carefully routed speaker wire and a bit of carefully applied spray paint.

The other speaker system is a 5.1 Logitech X540 (five speakers, one subwoofer) that’s been in continuous use for almost 20 years. My computer doesn’t offer a native 5.1 audio signal, so over the years I’ve used external decoder units to get the surround sound it’s capable of.

This is another kind of speaker system that isn’t offered widely in the market. The 5.1 and 7.1 systems available today are either sketchy, don’t have wall-mountable satellite speakers or are intimidatingly expensive.

The contenders for a replacement would be among speaker systems from Edifer, Kanto and AudioEngine that pair excellent bookshelf style speakers with an optional subwoofer to fatten their sound response.

Input devices. Keyboards are a huge part of my computing life. I’ve rejected laptops because I didn’t like their keyboard feel and suffered through owning others because the keyboard just never felt right.

Most of my writing now gets done on an external keyboard attached to a laptop.

*This is what a keycaps replacement set looks like.*

I learned to type on an old mechanical typewriter and then at speed on an IBM Selectric, so in a fit of sentiment, I initially chose a Keychron K2, a 75 per cent mechanical keyboard with the chunky keys I remembered from the Selectric.

I’ve since switched to a low-profile Keychron K13 Pro, a ten-keyless keyboard with a number pad that supports online key remapping. The keyboard action is similar to the K2, but the half-height keys create a more even line from my forearm to my knuckles, important for reducing wrist stress.

Here’s an interesting sidebar on the K13. It features backlighting, but for no reason that I can understand, they keys are not transluscent. There’s no option for a model of the keyboard with translucent keys on Amazon, nor is there a compatible transluscent keycaps set.

For that, you have to order direct from Keychron in Hong Kong. It takes a while to get here but on the positive side, since you can change the default keymapping, a full set of keycaps means you customise the keyboard to your taste.

After flirting with cheap copies of premium mice, I’ve invested closer to the top of the line, with the Logitech MX 3s and the Razer Basilisk X – the mice and keyboards serve two computers and sit close to each other, so they need to be different in both look and touch. Both mice sport high optical sensor tracking rates, programmable buttons, and have long battery life. I do not cuss my cursor controllers anymore.

Printer. It would be great if we could finally do away with printers, but decades after the promised paperless office, they are still needed.

I’m well into my fourth year of using the Canon G7020 printer and that’s better than most inkjet printers have ever managed in my experience. The G7020 is an ink tank printer, which doesn’t use replaceable cartridges. It’s refilled by bottles of ink that flow into sizeable ink wells.

It hasn’t been perfect. The printer should stay on continuously, and it really needs to print at least one page a week (the built-in test page will do) to keep the nozzles clear.

It’s sometimes necessary to do a deep clean when they get clogged and while the process gulps ink to do so, it isn’t the financial punishment it can be with cartridge-based printers. The ink refill ink bottles are cheap, and the scanner is adequate, but neither scans nor prints are premium photo quality. The rear feed tray is also unnecessarily fussy to set up.

As with every all-in-one printer, each feature is acceptable while determinedly avoiding being best in class. Like many all-in-one printers, you have can make copies and send a fax. To who, exactly, I have no idea.

It’s been slow going for this cost-effective concept in the printer market. You pay more for the printer up-front, but save over time with dramatically lower ink costs. But the business model is slowly catching on, and even curmudgeonly HP is now offering an ink tank printer in its lineup.

A hub. If you have a laptop, then every time you return to home base, you have to connect a cable. Chances are you have to connect many cables. I’ve got a truly insane number of cables to connect. For most folks, a good quality USB 3 hub will do the trick.

I use a Thunderbolt hub, which connects to a single port and breaks out to 2.5 gigabit ethernet, a display port cable connected to an external monitor, external speakers (technically the pre-amp for the external speakers), a microphone, a web cam, the RF transmitter for the mouse and the cable for the keyboard.

The hub also provides power to the laptop; so one cable connects me to a rat’s nest of cabling.