Answer to a younger friend - why things changed?

A younger friend of mine, asked me - brother, why are you not doing any hacking with phones these days like you were doing earlier? For a second, I was silent as my mind went past the time to dig an answer.

When I was in college, I enjoyed tinkering with machines. It started when I tried whole night to make my computer dual bootable instead of playing video games. My enthusiasm reached a new height when I figured out free Ubuntu CD to break into any computer with a CD drive; later I figured out to create bootable USB stick. I enjoyed computer repairs, when my school teachers, my techie as well as non-techie friends asked me to fix their machines. I still get some requests, sadly I can't say them - "No, I don't repair your computer". 

    Smartphones are the other fun part of the story. I started my journey with Nokia series-40 handset back in 2008. Those days phones had supported an SDCard of capacity upto 2 giga bytes size. I loved listening to the romantic songs of south Indian language movies. Okay, 2 GB was not sufficient to load my favorite MP3 files along with my favorite videos accompanied with thousands of images which we used to call as wallpapers. With the help of a multimedia converter, I figured out optimal size-to-quality ratio for audio clips and video clips by adjusting the bit-rates, which let me load nearly 900+ songs in 2 GB Card. ( Believe me, the batch conversion took whole night and the tiny music player responded like a dead beast after seeing those many songs). Then came Symbian OS handsets (N Series, E Series) which allowed me to reply a message on IM, browse web on a browser and listen to music at the same time - that's why I needed a multi task capable phone. That was not enough, there was a next step, where I could 'hack' (the very first meaning for this word I encountered in my life was close to jailbreak/root in today's ios/android terminology) the OS to provide full privileges. That enabled me to do some crazy things like install DOSBOX emulator on my Nokia E52, using which I was able to operate windows 95 and Turbo C++.

    I am sorry for your death, Symbian, I moved onto something I love even today - the Nokia N900. It had mobile debian linux OS called Maemo, and the best part was there was no need to hack/root as the OS offered it out of the box and it was legal. This is where I developed interest on Free and Open Source Softwares. Gone are those days, I had a mini laptop in my pocket! This story will become a new story if I start to give just a glimpse of what all I did on my N900, so lets move on to the next one. I joined the Android ride when it was at version 3.1. It was only a week after my purchase, my Galaxy Tab 10.1 was bricked while I was trying out something, but later I learned to root, flash, backup, recover the device without taking to repair shop. I don't remember me taking any device to service man for software repair even if device was within the warranty period. A few months later, I was virtually running ubuntu and fedora on my tablet as android was too kiddish for someone who lived with N900. Later I bought a Nexus device and an iPAD, which are way powerful, modern and capable than my previous gadgets (excluding N900, it will never be old for me ;-) ) but I don't remember having much fun with these compared to the previous gadgets. 

I think I found an answer for that question of my young friend, it is - 'I am busy with my work.' I have told this phrase to so many people at times, but this time it had a different connotation. This is the proof - we spend most of our time at work and it impacts our habits. On the other hand, I found my coolness in learning and solving harder problems at work so job is not the real culprit, it is change of interests.