[apocalyptic0n3]

Yeah, this used to be me. I don't do it anymore but I used to spend a great deal of time playing with beta versions of Android, Windows, Firefox, and various iPod and Mac customization applications. I just enjoyed playing with the new features, figuring out how to break them, reporting those issues, and then helping get them fixed (even if I wasn't contributing code at the time). I don't have the time anymore, but it was one of my favorite activities when I was younger.

[accrual]

Same here. I remember playing with Beta versions of Windows Vista on my parents home PC. Ended up wrecking the system because I wasn't technical enough to fix it when it broke... but was still an important milestone in my journey today.

At the time, XP was 6-7 years old, and the screenshots of a shiny new Windows OS made me so itchy to try it out. Vista looked magical compared to XP just before release, it was the dawn of the frutiger aero aesthetic too. Very optimistic vibes back then.

[Tijdreiziger]

> Ended up wrecking the system because I wasn't technical enough to fix it when it broke... but was still an important milestone in my journey today.

Ha, I remember dual booting Ubuntu and wrecking the bootloader, rendering my machine unbootable. Fun times, lol. Taught me a lot, though.

[apocalyptic0n3]

Yeah, I was the same way with my iPod. I was contributing to iPod Wizard and one of the QA testers for iPod Linux, iPod Wiki, and Rockbox. I would install unstable firmwares on my iPod a few times a week and spend a few hours testing. I bricked my iPod more times than I could count. I had two iPod hard drives that I would swap between and I had a way of wiping the drive once it was out of the casing. To this day, I have no idea how my iPod 4G survived as long as it did.