When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.
I have an old dial telephone from the 1940s. A couple years ago I saw an Arduino project to make them dial digitally, but it’s not the top item on my bucket list.
When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.
Once I have seen an offer on eBay for a similar device, but for DVD’s.
Yes, really. It was that time, and it was almost serious ;)
My older brother still jokes about the time that when he and his wife first got a DVD player they watched a movie on it and once it was done he asked her to get up and rewind the movie and she ended up spending 2 minutes while he was doing everything in his power not to laugh at her trying to figure out how to rewind the DVD.
DVDs had been out for quite a while at this point they were just late to the game.
Like putting side 2 on for the CD…
I can do one better than that, I have a battery powered handheld TV that only works with analog NTSC broadcasts and does not have a composite input on it. It’s therefore damn difficult to get it to display any kind of picture at all these days. The only way is to broadcast at it with one of those short range toy transmitters, or hack up your own.
A large reel to reel tape recorder.
A few early pentium laptops that no longer turn on.
literally the same combo here, but my reel to reel is a rebranded “viking” telefunken unit
If you are interested in fixing those I might be able to help.
The most common reason is the internal CMOS battery exploding or needing replacement.
Of that era, it could well be capacitor plague.
I had a large collection of antique computers and adjacent technology. Although I lost most of it in a natural disaster 😭. But I still have my commodore 64, vic-20, and 90/00s apple computer collection.
LGR???
I have a Blackberry Playbook on my desk that I am trying to figure out how to crack. I also keep my Sharp EL-50 scientific calculator around. We had to buy that specific model because it didn’t have a persistent memory. We could turn it off and on in front of the invigilator and they would know there was nothing stored in it.
I have a rope lighter.
It’s like a normal lighter but it uses a flammable rope instead of gas.What an oddity - I never even heard of those.
They were used on boats and in WW1 trenches where matches weren’t reliable due to water, wind or mud.
Some kid I knew had a weird little matchbox-size box with something like a nail sticking out of it, which he called a permanent match. He would pull out the nail and it would be on fire - he might have struck it on the side of the box, I forget. Presumably the nail was coated with some flammable substance from the box. Seemed like the simplest thing in the world - no mechanics like a lighter. I don’t know why those didn’t catch on but I’ve never seen another one.
I have an old 6 volt lantern that uses a battery that is 6 inches wide, 4 inches tall, and 3 inches deep.
If I turn it on it gives you almost enough light to actually see where you are going and the battery lasts for about 2 hours.
With two 18650s I could replace that battery for a package 2/3 the size of a pack of cigarettes and run that light for a day or so.
If I replace the bulb in it with an LED equivalent I could probably stretch that out to nearly a week.
Ouch I remember thouse fat 4.5 volt battery who had like 2 long tongues, going into those old flashlights, glowing in the dark at best with a super small incandescent lamp.
These?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:4,5V-AA-battery.jpg
I’d forgotten that they existed. I used to use them for something, maybe powering a Lego or meccano motor.
Yes that’s the one!
They were expensive and didn’t work for long IIRC :-)
Its important to consider amperage discharge too. Can the two 18660s put out the same current as the big rectangle one?
Replacing the old halogen with led would be a big difference. Ot would need basically no amperage. At that point you can attach usb male to alligator clips, clip the ends of the lanterns battery pack connectors to supply 5v 2.4a of power directly with a power bank.
I use a 5 volt led bulb that plugs into regular usba slot. It works with small power banks and ast forever on larger 20ah batteries.
I own plenty of Libreboot computers without Intel Management Engine (2006-2009 era). For the average user in today’s world, I don’t see many people using them unless definitive proof came out that the government uses the IME to spy on them. These 2006-2009 era desktops/laptops can have the entire IME firmware removed, along with a 100% free BIOS. I collect as many as I can.
An iPod. It’s still the same iPod I got for my birthday 20 years ago. It probably still works… If I’d be able to find a cable for it.
I have used a dedicated MP3 player during the workout just few years back - I found carrying my entire almost 200g phone during the workout extremely inconvenient. In the end, I ended that for the benefit of bluetooth headphones which were not supported by the dedicated player.
My phone still has an SD card slot. So I can put my 64 GB SD card inside and have more music offline than my 4 GB iPod could ever have.
The iPod is a nice little piece of almost antique tech. But I’d still be using my phone over it.
Yes… But still… Especially when running… I find these things completely ridiculous.
For running, I got a smartwatch that can store some music locally, so I don’t need to be connected to listen. Still not perfect, kind of a hassle to use, and doesn’t always work perfectly. Almost miss those tiny iPod nanos. I feel like portable dedicated music players have gone backwards in features and usability with the rise in popularity of perpetually connected Internet devices and streaming services.
Ha, but with that smart watch we have almost came a full circle :) Except of course, it’s multipurpose and I presume much more expensive device now. What’s the model?
The Samsung gear watches all support Spotify offline playback. All the wearOS watches support as much local media playback as the hardware allows (I think), but managing that local library is pretty tedious and awful. Especially if like me you either listen through streaming services or streaming from a library of FLAC media on a NAS at home. With the Spotify app on my watch, I just select a playlist to be downloaded while I’m connected to WiFi and that’s it. It is not flawless though, sometimes the Spotify database or authentication gets fouled up and you’re unable to fix it until you return to WiFi. But I haven’t had many issues with it since Samsung switched away from their own bespoke watch OS to wearOS.
No one can argue that 64gb of storage holds more music than 4gb of storage but 4gb still holds hundreds of songs.
Depends on the compression. Yes, you could fit 500 songs on a 4 GB iPod, as the adverts constantly loved to remind everyone about. But it was the early 2000s, so the quality wasn’t good, and then we’re still talking about a pretty high compression even back then.
You can quite easily convert ipods to flash storage. I have a 256GB ipod mini with bluetooth and a taptic engine instead of the clicker.
Interesting. Most interesting. I take it it would need some soldering? I don’t have the tools, but could you send me a video of some instructions on how to do that? Could be a fun future project.
Radio w/ cassette player, still use the radio tho
I am going different on this one.
An awl on a utility knife.
Nowadays, 99% of camping, hiking, and “survival” equipment is light weight composites that can be better fixed with glue, tape, small needle and thread, or a patch with one of the above. There are very few alternative uses for it that aren’t better with a different standard tool.
Echo detector. Piece of shit only picks up the weakest artifacts.
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I have a 2RU HP DL380 Gen8 server. Which is under powered and uses too much power for modern compute purposes.
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