Ask HN: What was your favorite piece of technology that you owned?

Had this wild old power transformer, forget what it came out of. 25lb thing, big steel can full of oil and copper, spark-plug looking post terminals all over the top. As I recall it has a 1960's date on it somewhere.

The thing had, for some reason, 240/120 input taps, and output taps for every 6 volt interval up to 1:1.

I soldered springs onto the terminals, like the Radio shack "200 in one" learning kits used to have. That transformer was a part of innumerable bodge machines on my desk for 20 years or so.

I think I finally melted it using it backwards as a step up in a spark gap kinda thing. The bolts melted and the gap was no longer a gap, leading to rich chunky amps being dispensed to the limits of that tool's ability.

My DEC VT 220, which I bought it back in 1997 for $20 from a company liquidation auction.

At the time, I had two computers: my gaming rig and my linux box acting as my router.

My gaming rig was hooked up to the at-the-time Sony flagship 21" CRT monitor which left little room on the desk. I also couldn't afford a KVM, so I set the DEC VT 220 on a little folding table (like you'd use to eat dinner in front of a TV) as the terminal console for my linux box.

Before that, I would hook the DEC VT220 directly to a Hayes modem and dialed into the University network.

Sadly, a few capacitors leaked and I was not good enough to figure out which ones, so I had to throw it away.

I'd buy another one but people want ridiculous prices for these things. :(

When it was Jailbroken, my OG iPod Touch was just about perfect. Nowadays though, I've been really enjoying homebrew/emulation on the Nintendo Switch.

Edit (rate limit reached): Don't have a Steam Deck because I've been gaming on Linux for the past 4 years :)

PRS 505, an old ereader. It was my first introduction to eink, it was such a fantastic device and so well thought through in terms of button placement, features, connectivity. This is before Kindles took over though, and Apple-ified the ecosystem.

A Sony camcorder for me, one of those that flipped open with a screen. I would take that thing everywhere. It had quite a bit of storage and battery life, and recovering those videos years later was a joy.

My Psion 3c PDA. I've never since found a piece of technology that had this level of usefulness and sheer ease of use.

MiniDisc player, then Dreamcast.