We mostly use natural logarithms in physics, you know with base 2.71828183 and this has nothing to do with being able to easily process in our heads. If you are referring to order of magnitude comparisons, which in principle are done as base-10 logarithms (or more commonly by 'counting the zeros'), I think you are kinda begging the question. Yes base-10 logarithms are useful here, but that's because we use base 10. This is of course a bit off topic, but somewhat relevant anyway. The reason to use base 10 is that that's what's natural for most of people. We first learn base 10 as kids and typically it'll be many many years before we even hear there are alternatives. And this has nothing to do with whether one is thinking of apples, oranges or computers.

I suppose it can be high tech in the same sense a cutting edge car can be high tech even though people rode horse wagons way back when.

I've been thinking of getting one of these for similar purposes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug You'll probably need to hook up an USB drive, and what not, but still seems intriguing. They claim 2.3W idle power consumption, with no attached devices.