Geek Pornography

Disclaimer:The blog remains PG-13 in 2010!! So before you roll your eyes and go complaining to your mom, read on!

pornography [pawr-nog-ruh-fee] (noun) – The graphic, detailed, often gratuitous depiction of something.

This blog-post is education for the non and the wanna-be geeks amongst us. Over the period of several years of reading blogs online I have realized that there are two specific types of videos that geeks seem to derive pleasure out of. I finally decided to classify them out here just so that next time when I am “caught” watching YouTube videos, you realize that I am just satisfying my carnal instincts :)

1) Unboxing ritual – Unboxing is like slowly undressing (strip teasing?) a gadget from its packing (box). The more elegantly you do it, the more amazing it looks. This ritual is good for people who don’t get to use the latest gadget till it enters its second or third generation (people like me! I still ogle the iPhone!) To borrow a quote from a website that explains this routine more explicitly “It's stuff that you're lusting over – you can't have it, but you want it.” And for people who can’t get enough of it, there is a whole website dedicated to see unboxing all day and all night!!

Here is a gallery of the new Nook being unboxed. And a video for your viewing pleasure:

And here is a funny unboxing that Samsung put together for its Omnia i900

2) Teardown – Teardown is the art of opening up a gadget right down to the basic components that it is made of, so that (this is very important) you can put it back again and start using it! Well I have done this since I was 2. But the main part of doing a proper teardown is – you should be able to put it back again in mint condition so that you can actually “use” the tore down device again in your life! The first teardown that I did was that of my dad’s Sharp pocket calculator, and I could still see the broken keys in my room drawer a couple of years down the line, cause I had literally “torn” it down! People interested in doing a tear down at the minimum should go and buy a set of precision screwdrivers and a swiss knife right now. Without it you can’t really do anything!

Here is an amazing photo of a Canon S500 completely tore down. You can read step by step instructions here.

 

Finally, before I end this blog-post I would like to announce that Gadget blending is NOT a type of geek pornography. It is more like an abuse, and it really bleeds our hearts. There are millions of us out there who are hungry without a Digital SLR and then you go and mercilessly blend those gadgets? I call for immediate boycott of this ruthless atrocity. It has caused me (and I bet a lot of other people) restless nights and serious mental problems ;)

Here is a video of the Olympus camera devices being blended. Warning, it is highly graphical and I would not recommend seeing if you have heart problems ;) !!

So coming back to my original topic … I haven’t exactly figured out what makes unboxing and teardown so interesting. But well, err.. umm to put it bluntly, unboxing is pretty damn exciting. And I would like to thank all of you (especially my friends who take me along to buy new tech stuff!) for having given me that pleasure so often :) !!