I stumbled across these photos this morning. They were taken inside a hotel room in the Philippines back in 2014. Of course, this was way before I had a YouTube channel or even shot video. I didn’t have a laptop or a tablet or even a smartphone.
However, as you can see on the table, I did have a small digital point-and-shoot camera from Canon. That’s what is normally inside that small pouch. I had a Kindle for reading books. The Kindle isn’t on the table, but I recognize the charger cable and adapter for it. And I had an iPod Nano for listening to music. I remember that when I stayed inside a room that had a table and chair like this, I felt like I was in the lap of luxury.
For writing, I had a special device called a NEO Alphasmart. That is the keyboard you see on the table. All it can do is record keystrokes as text. It runs on AA batteries and can hold about 300 pages in memory. And the only way to offload the content is to attach it to a computer via a cable and then retype all of it in real time. It would take hours adding up to days. It had no operating system or ability to copy and paste files or anything like that. All it could do was record keystrokes and then retype it later on.
On the floor, you can see my Trangia alcohol-burner stove. I used that to boil water for coffee and cook spaghetti. It was a simpler time, that’s for sure. It’s crazy that now I think of that time as being very primitive when it comes to technology. Yet, this was the year 2014, and the technology I was using was completely unheard of back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s when I was growing up. Compared to my youth, the tech in this picture is futuristic and space age. But compared to 2025, it is almost laughably old and primitive.