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BenMcc
Level 2.2: Froyo
Joined 2 years ago
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[Day 5] Community festival: I Tried Living Like It's 2005 for a Week
I Tried Living Like It's 2005 for a Week (And My Thumbs Still Hurt from T9 Texting) In which I attempted to survive seven days with flip phones, MapQuest printouts, and the soul-crushing realization that the Motorola RAZR was actually considered "cool". Twenty years ago, the Motorola RAZR was the height of mobile sophistication, MySpace let you rank your friends publicly (and cause lifelong trauma in the process), and if you wanted directions to somewhere then you printed them on actual paper and prayed you didn't miss a turn. No Uber, no YouTube music. no Instagram. Just you, your iPod with 5GB of storage, and a whole lot of patience. So naturally, I decided to torture myself by living like it's 2005 for an entire week. No smartphone. No modern conveniences. Just me and the technology available exactly twenty years ago, trying to navigate a world that has since become unrecognizable. What could possibly go wrong? Day 1: The Setup, Or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Flip Phone" The first order of business: acquiring my 2005 tech arsenal. After scouring eBay and my old tech drawer, I assembled my kit: Motorola RAZR V3 (silver, because I have some dignity) iPod Nano 2GB (first generation, the one that scratched if you looked at it wrong) Canon PowerShot A520 (4 megapixels of pure photographic mediocrity) Dell Latitude D610 laptop running Windows XP (weighing approximately 47 pounds) A healthy sense of denial about what I'd gotten myself into The RAZR turned out to be simultaneously the best and worst thing about 2005. It was impossibly thin at 13.9mm - which felt like holding a credit card after using modern smartphones. The screen? A luxurious 2.2 inches of 176x220 pixel glory. For context, that's roughly the resolution of a potato. But here's what killed me: 5MB of storage. Not 5GB. Five. Megabytes. I could store maybe three low-res photos and a handful of text messages before the thing started wheezing. The Pixel in my drawer had 256GB. I was going from a spacious mansion to a storage unit. The setup process was actually refreshing in its simplicity. No app store. No cloud sync. No software updates. I charged it fully, and the battery indicator basically laughed at me—this thing would last four days on a single charge because it had approximately four things it could do: call, text, take terrible photos, and play a MIDI ringtone version of "Crazy Train." Day 2: The Great T9 Texting Disaster My morning started with me trying to text my friends that I'd arrived at the coffee shop. Simple message: "I'm here, where are you?" Twenty minutes later, I'd managed to produce: "I'n grrdr, wgrrr arr yoi?" Let me explain T9 predictive text for those blessed enough to have forgotten. You had a numeric keypad where each number corresponded to multiple letters (2=ABC, 3=DEF, etc.). T9 tried to predict which word you meant based on the sequence of numbers. To type "here," I pressed 4-3-7-3. Sometimes T9 guessed correctly. Sometimes it gave me "gerd." Sometimes it offered me "ifsf" and I questioned its commitment to the English language. The real chaos started when I tried to add punctuation. That required pressing 1 multiple times to cycle through options, and God help you if you overshot and had to cycle through ALL THE SYMBOLS AGAIN. My thumbs started cramping after the fifth text message. My friends thought I was having a stroke. One replied: "Are you okay? Should I call someone?" Another person just sent back: "???" And here's the thing that got me - each text cost me 10p because I didn't have a texting plan. By Day 2, I'd already spent £4.50 on text messages. I started making actual phone calls because they were cheaper. Like an animal. Day 3: Navigation Roulette, or "How I Got Lost Going out" I needed to drive a couple of towns over for a meeting. In 2025, I'd just tap the address into Google Maps and go. In 2005, I had to visit MapQuest on my desktop computer the night before, type in the address, print out six pages of turn-by-turn directions, and hope for the best. The printout told me things like "After 11 miles turn right onto Wilson Road" and "Continue for 0.5 miles." Very specific. Very confident. Completely useless the moment I missed turn #6 because a van blocked my view of the street sign. And that's when I discovered the fundamental problem with printed directions: they don't recalculate. Once you're off the route, you're just a confused person holding useless paper while your blood pressure climbs. The paper map was also particularly poor at showing the current congestion of the roads. Anyway I pulled into a petrol station and did something I hadn't done in fifteen years - I asked a stranger for directions. "Oh yeah, Wilson? You're gonna want to go back about two miles, hang a right at the big oak tree—you know, the one that looks kind of dead—then you'll see a small corner shop. No not that corner shop, the other one..." I arrived 47 minutes late to the meeting and was asked why I didn't text that I was running behind. I explained the T9 situation. She looked at me with pity generally reserved for injured animals. Day 4: The iTunes Sync Incident By Day 4, I was desperately bored with the 10 songs I'd initially loaded onto my iPod Nano. I wanted to add more music. This should be simple, right? Wrong. First, I had to find my laptop (all six pounds of it), wait for Windows XP to boot (about three minutes, accompanied by that start-up sound that definitely awoke dormant memories), open iTunes, and connect my iPod via the proprietary 30-pin cable. Then came the sync process. iTunes cheerfully informed me it would take 12 minutes to sync 15 new songs. Twelve minutes for 45MB of data! But wait - there's more! I'd forgotten about the tyranny of DRM-protected music. Half the songs I'd purchased from the iTunes Store in 2005 were locked with FairPlay protection. They would only play on authorized devices. I'd exceeded my authorization limit, so I had to deauthorize my old computer (which no longer exists) to authorize this Windows XP machine. This took another 20 minutes and required me to reset my Apple ID password because I'd long ago changed the security questions from "What's your favourite colour?" to something involving cryptocurrency and existential dread. I finally loaded the new songs. By this point, I'd burned an hour. In 2025, I could've discovered, downloaded, and listened to an entirely new album in YouTube music within two minutes. As I disconnected the iPod, iTunes asked if I wanted to update to iTunes 6.0. I clicked yes. It took 45 minutes and required a restart. I briefly considered violence. Day 5: The Social Media Vacuum This was the day I truly felt the isolation of 2005 technology. Facebook existed, but only for college students with .edu email addresses. I was not welcome. Instagram? Didn't exist. Twitter? Still a year away. TikTok? Might as well have asked for a teleporter. Reddit had just started but I hadn’t heard of it in 2005. This meant there was no passive social media consumption. No scrolling through feeds. No watching Stories. No seeing what everyone was having for lunch. And you know what? The silence was deafening. I found myself with something I hadn't experienced in years: boredom. Actual, crushing, what-do-I-do-with-my-hands boredom. So I did what people did in 2005 - I logged onto AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). Well I would have if the company hadn’t closed it in 2017! :( I did the next best thing and remembered it fondly! Oh, AIM. Sweet, chaotic AIM. I'd forgotten about the beauty of away messages, those little status updates where you'd post song lyrics, inside jokes, or cryptic messages designed to make your crush ask what was wrong. The AIM experience was oddly refreshing. Conversations were deliberate. You knew when someone was actively typing because you could see "ChunkyLover53 is typing..." at the bottom. No read receipts haunting you. No pressure to respond instantly. You were either online or you weren't. Simple. But here's what I'd forgotten: AIM only worked when you were sitting at your computer. No mobile version. No smartphone app. If I left my desk, I was unreachable. The untethered freedom was... actually kind of nice? I walked to get coffee and nobody could bother me. Revolutionary. Day 6: The Great Photo Upload Catastrophe I'd been dutifully taking photos all week with my Canon PowerShot A520—a 4-megapixel beast that required four AA batteries and could store maybe 200 photos on its 256MB SD card. The photos looked fine on the camera's 2-inch screen. Adorable, even. Then I uploaded them to my computer. They were... not good. They were "early 2000s Facebook profile picture" quality. Grainy. Poorly lit. Zero dynamic range. Every indoor shot looked like it was photographed during an eclipse. The 4-megapixel resolution meant any photo looked pixelated the moment you zoomed in even slightly. But the real torture was the upload process. I had to: Remove the SD card from the camera Find the SD card reader Plug it into the laptop's USB 2.0 port Wait for Windows XP to recognize the device (3 minutes) Navigate through folders to find the photos Copy them to my computer (5 minutes for 50 photos) Open each one in the default Windows Photo Viewer Cry softly Then, if I wanted to share them, I had to upload them to Flickr—which in 2005 was THE photo-sharing platform. The upload process took 15 minutes for 20 photos on my DSL connection. No instant sharing. No cloud sync. No automatic backup. Just manual labor and regret. My friend texted me (after I spent 10 minutes composing the message via T9): "Why do these photos look like they were taken with a microwave?" I couldn't even argue. Day 7: The Music Piracy Question I Won't Answer Let's talk about music acquisition in 2005, shall we? Legally, you had three options: Buy CDs for £15-18 each and rip them to your computer Buy individual songs from iTunes for £0.99 each (with DRM) Buy albums from iTunes for £9.99-14.99 (also with DRM) Illegally—and I'm not saying I did this, but statistically speaking, 1.7 million people were doing it daily—you could use LimeWire. LimeWire was the Wild West of file sharing. You searched for a song, downloaded it, and either got: The actual song A virus A different song mislabelled as your song A Bill Clinton speech Dial-up modem sounds All of the above The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) was actively suing college students for thousands of dollars. They'd settled about 2,500 cases by 2005, with average settlements around $3,000. People were genuinely terrified. But iTunes Store had sold 500 million songs by July 2005, proving there was a legal market. Of course, those songs were locked with DRM that prevented you from playing them on non-Apple devices, which felt like buying a book that could only be read in one specific chair. For this week, I legally purchased songs from iTunes and ripped CDs I already owned. My music budget for the week: £47.93. In 2025, I pay £12.99/month for YouTube Premium and have access to over 100 million songs. The math just doesn't math! The Final Tally: What I Learned After seven days in 2005, here's what nearly broke me: The Bad: T9 texting made me want to throw my phone into a lake Getting lost with printed directions was not "an adventure," it was torture Photo quality was potato-grade Music syncing was a multi-step nightmare Social isolation was real - no passive connection to friends Every single task required planning and patience The Surprisingly Good: Battery life on my RAZR was amazing (3 days!) Being unreachable while away from my desk was liberating AIM conversations felt more intentional and focused No social media scrolling meant I actually read two books The simplicity was calming - each device did one thing well The Expensive: Text messages: £12.50 Music purchases: £47.93 Petrol from getting lost repeatedly: £13.00 Replacement AA batteries for camera: £8.99 Therapy cost for T9-induced rage: £130.00 Total: £212.42 The Verdict: Would I go back to 2005 technology permanently? Absolutely not. The lack of real-time navigation alone nearly destroyed me, and I'm pretty sure my thumbs have early-onset arthritis from T9 texting. But here's the thing - there was something oddly peaceful about the intentionality of 2005 tech. Every action required thought. Every photo was deliberate. Every text message had to be worth the thumb cramping. You owned your music, your photos lived on your hard drive, and when you left your computer, you were truly disconnected. In 2025, we have infinite convenience and infinite distraction. Everything is instant, effortless, and cloud-synced. But we're also constantly reachable, endlessly scrolling, and tethered to devices that demand our attention 24/7. Maybe the sweet spot isn't 2005 or 2025 - it's somewhere in between. A world where we have modern convenience but 2005-era intentionality. Where we can use Google Maps but also occasionally put the phone down. Where we have YouTube Music but actually curate playlists instead of algorithmic recommendations. Where we're connected but not enslaved. Or maybe I'm just romanticizing the past because I'm getting old. Either way, I'm keeping my smartphone, my unlimited texting plan and Google Maps. My thumbs have suffered enough. Final note: The Motorola RAZR is now in a drawer next to my old iPod, my printed MapQuest directions, and a pile of AA batteries. The Dell laptop running Windows XP is on eBay listed as "vintage computing experience, very heavy, buyer pays shipping!" No flip phones were harmed in the making of this article. But several were definitely cursed at.Re: Food: Pizza guide
What a fabulous write up (anyone else hungry now)! While making sushi was new to me, pizza has been something I have been doing for a long while - in fact Saturday night is my pizza night. While I don't have much to add to Michel writeup I can add some info basic on the fact I just use a domestic oven. The dough needs to be slightly drier but I have found this works well: For 4 x 12" bases 492ml - water 818g - 00 flour 3g - active dry yeast 24g - salt Combine and mix as above and let rest for an hour. After that divide into 4 equal balls, shape as above and then either keep them to cook that night or freeze. Yes I make 8 at a time and freeze the extras. To use simply remove from the freezer in the morning and leave covered for the day. Around 2 hours before cooking reshape the ball and let rest for two more hours. About 25 mins before cooking put the oven on at a max setting (250c for me) and stretch the pizza as shown in the above videos. This evening it was tomato sauce (Mutti as above), BBQ sauce, mozzarella, mushrooms and peperoni! Takes a bit longer than with a pizza oven but still just 10 mins. Enjoy!Re: What app would you recommend to your friends?
Oh my what a question! I have so many apps that I use on a weekly, if not daily, basis that this question is like asking which is your favorite child! I think the one that gives me genuine enjoyment is Be My Eyes. An app where a person with a visual impairment can connect with you anonymously and ask a quick question about something in front of them - such as what colour is this item of clothing, what is the label on this tin, can you read the exp date on something etc etc. Calls last 10 to 20 seconds but can really help that person out. BenRe: Play Store number of downloads counter
Google can and should be identifying them as such. Indeed but "should" and what is happening are two different things. If today you want accurate answers you need to roll your own. That not to say you should not push for better analytics but even if you were successful in that it will be 8 months to a year before you saw any changes.Re: What security threats do you experience the most?
Honestly no, Everyone has been warning of the dangers for so long; I think people are fed up of it - everyone thinks what they is doing is secure (even when it isn't). We could force random long passwords on people but as Michel has said they will just write it down somewhere. The best form of security has always been "something you know, something you have" such as password and 2fa, or in the case of an office door an access code and a keyfob - but that still doesn't prevent stupidity or ignorance and stop people giving it out over the phone. Perhaps all 2FA apps should have a big red banner at the top saying "Never give this out to anybody for any reason"Re: What security threats do you experience the most?
Good question. We have been dealing with the same issues since the 90's - A time when I started giving talks about social engineering being the easiest way to access computers system. An hour in a pub listening to people, favourite sports teams, pets, family members and you have a wealth of information to try out. There was video not long ago with the host approaching some teen saying they could guess their bank pin code in just 3 attempts, after asking some random question about favourite numbers, number of siblings etc he made a few guesses all to the delight of the teen he got wrong. He then said "oh well it didn't work - what is it then?" to which the teen replied with her pin number. Social engineering at its simplest! To give more context to my recent experience; I live in a smallish village, low crime rates etc so sitting in the local coffee shop feels a lot safer than perhaps in the middle of a major town centre - but it is that sense of security that is the problem for digital security. People with weak password who say "well I have nothing to hide if someone reads my emails" just don't understand the implications especially when they then also use the same passwords for business systems, or that email account is used as the recovery email for other systems or other password resets etc. We see daily terminations of Play Developer accounts because a dev has added, some random person they met on a social platform, access to their account and have been rewarded by that person uploading apps that clearly violate the policies. The account holder wasn't trying to break the rules and didn't think they were doing anything wrong, in some cases they were just trying to be nice and help someone else out. I would love to live in a world where I could absolute trust that the next person wasn't out to exploit or do me harm - wouldn't we all? The reality is we have to protect ourselves and that extends to the digital world but until people get that message systems are still going to get broken into. Education in this field doesn't seem to have work (at least not in the last 30 years) so we now implement other systems, 2FA, passkeys, biometrics - all of which people find a way to exploit within days and it's mostly not the hardware, software or algorithms that are exploited but some form of social engineering, perhaps some member of royalty for some country that just needs a bit of help to move some funds because of some impending war.... I don't know how we get this message across to the users of systems I have been trying for years! You can probably guess as this sounds more like a rant than a factual post! 🤣 I, like many, am frustrated trying but we have no choice but to keep trying.Re: Play Store number of downloads counter
Yes absolutely - Just generally there are a number of issues with the stats shown on Play. One they only details apps distributed by Play and not other stores (if applicable), they are often subject to delays while data is collated - we have seen stats change or even not show at all for 3, occasionally 4 weeks which can lead to a dev seeing a number that isn't yet accurate. The only way to be sure of your own metrics is to record your own, either something like Google Analytics or a roll your own will currently give you much more accurate results.Re: What security threats do you experience the most?
I agree with mattdermody in that the biggest threat is people - mostly staff/admin of systems that themselves are not security specialists and just don't understand the problems. Whether it is them falling for a phishing scam, using weak passwords (pets names) or using unsecured networks (hotels, airports, coffee shops etc). And its not just digital security they need to think about. Just the other week I was in a local coffee shop next to a table of people I knew worked in a local solicitors office opening telling, what I assume was a new starter, the pin code for the digital lock on the office back door. Now I am just one step away from physical access to their computers and every step nearer to hardware makes the job easier for someone wanting to do harm. As engineers we can do all sorts to protect the system we are creating - yes we can make mistakes, but we can also acknowledge that and offer bounties, use 3rd party testers etc to keep testing our defences. What we don't have much control over is stupidity - at least not without making the system an absolute nightmare to access for users!Re: Play Store number of downloads counter
The lack of insight should really be handled by the dev with their own analytics - the Play store number goes through a "de-spamming" process anyway and isn't really that accurate for dev insights. The issue of looking like a smaller app (in terms of users) than it is an interesting one but ultimately the same could be argued by users who distribute via other stores as well where the userbase is split. Ultimately this issue comes down to "should play count and display anonymous downloads" which is effectively what is happening. The problem with this is the publicly show download number is unique users and as soon as you count anonymous users that would break the whole thing! Not sure if there is a good solution for this other than to allow developers to choose to hide the download number on the store. Of course that also has issues. BenRe: Play Store number of downloads counter
Hi Tom1 I am afraid I don't know of any documentation like that. I know Play keep the exact way that number is calculated close to their chest - presumably to stop some devs trying to game the system. I have asked the question downloads through MGP are counted but it may be a while before I get an answer (if I get one at all). Emilie_B may be able to get an answer faster - but as I say sometimes with metrics like this then Play is not keen on spilling the beans so there may not be answer.Re: Play Store number of downloads counter
Hi Tom1 , Not sure if private apps are counted or not but some general info about the number shown in the Play Store is that it is often lower than what people think it should be. The number is displayed after going through a "cleaning" process to ensure things like duplicate downloads for the same person are removed and more. The number is also ranged so if, for example, you have 1k showing then what it means is somewhere between 1k and 5k. It won't switch to 5k until you pass that number. BenRe: Private app package name already in use
Hi, Yes you are right that package names have to be unique across the store, even apps that are no longer available can't have the name reused. The only option is to change that package name, resign and upload. It's good practice to use a name based on your domain name such as com.mycompany.appname BenRe: Is Google Play Closed tracks for testing only?
I still think the biggest problem is that there is nothing to stop Play changing the policy for any of this. Test tracks are designed to be just that and so using a test track as a production outlet may cause problems if, for example, they decided next month to limit test tracks to 500 testers! While it may work, longer term it may not be a great idea!
