When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.
Not mine personally, but my town still has some hitching posts and mounting blocks
Birmingham Alabama has a zeppelin mooring building.
Pretty cool! I’ve actually been to the site where the Hindenburg went up in flames. There’s a small museum there with pieces of the actual blimp in it, including a tiny piece of the Nazi flag that was painted on the tail portion. Felt pretty odd for me to see that in person.
Mooring to the top of tall buildings didn’t generally work well in practice
Chicago has one, but it’s never been used
Maybe they kept it around in hope of making it a flying saucer dock, as in old Popular Mechanics cover art.
In Amish country, you’ll see horses hitched up at Costco.
My hometown did, too! Even Chicago still has a couple.
Reminds me of another thing: you see these boot scrapers all across european cities (1) They’re usually victorian era, and were used to clean horse shit from your shoes before entering a house.
Owie the photo contains errors :-(
You’re right :(
There are those kind of things everywhere where I live, took me some time to find out what it was for:
A tone dialer. Like this
https://images.app.goo.gl/fbdmckv44BY7fdWw9
Not for phone phreaking, just for speed-dialling.
I would make international calls frequently. I would buy calling cards. The process was: dial the 800 number on the card. Enter the id number on the card to use some of its credit. Dial the number to call. Their service would then connect me at a low rate to another country(probably making a voip call).
So I’d set up the 3 speed dial buttons with those. For each new card I’d only have to change the card’s unique number.
I was a phone phreak, and I still have my last old-school brown Radio Shack tone dialer which I’d been planning to make into a red box. Ultimately I was too lazy to swap the crystal in it, and it sat in my junk drawer for years while red boxing died. Now it’s a curiosity that sits on my shelf of hacker books. Maybe I’ll still do the crystal swap someday for the sheer hell of it.
There an app for that now.
At least, there is on the Flipper Zero.
Building one of those was always on my list when I got a copy of the Anarchist’s cookbook, never got around to it though.
I have a rotary dial. It was made as a spare part for an analog telephone.
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…
Sliding ruler for doing multiplications (1). Still have it for nostalgia or post-apocalyptic scenarios.
Can do more than just multiplication, too.
Oh yeah! I have my dad’s old slide rule, looks a lot like that one.
Same. Got them from my old retired draft engineer papa.
What a beauty
You just beat me to it! Still got my slide rule in my desk, right next to the digital calipers.
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.
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.
Depends on ehat kind of ipod you have. The mini is probably the easiest to mod with flash. The taptic and bluetooth are a bit harder to do.
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.
Was it shaped like a sports car? Those were radical.
I remember it being more industrial looking.
My dad had the sports car VHS rewinder.
He also had a device that would turn the house antenna so that you could modify the reception you’re getting for the TV. I’ve never seen anyone else with a device that like that. The VHS rewinder just jogged my memory about it because they were next to each other.
We also had the antenna motor! That thing was awesome. I could pick up stations from Canada!
Haha, that’s funny because we used it to pick up stations from the US!
I think in some cultures that means we’re married now.
We had it as well! Turn it one way for ABC, turn it the other way for NBC, FOX. I don’t remember the details but we had a little label on the dial telling you which way to point it for which channels.
Radio w/ cassette player, still use the radio tho
I got a Toshiba music centre like this…
Keep it in good shape.
I’ve got a film negative scanner. I’ve also got a big pile of old negatives. I keep telling myself that someday I’m going to scan all those old negatives. We’ll see.
If I dig down into the drawer with several layers of old iPhones I can find my palm pilot at the bottom right next to the Treo that replaced it.
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.
High discharge 18650s can provide 20-30 amps, doubt the lamp needs that much current if it’s powered off older battery tech
I found my old TomTom GPS in a box last year. I struggled to find a reason it might be worth keeping. In the end it got recycled.
Rewritable CDs? Technically I can still use them, but I don’t really expect to use them and I wonder if they are still worth keeping.
I got rid of mine with my most recent move. Why bother bringing them with me.
I still have a couple hundred and a couple usb cd/DVD burners. Maybe someday I’ll use one again…
Depending on their age and how you stored them they might not even work anymore
I have a handheld analog radio scanner. Once upon a time it was fun to listen to local police frequencies, air traffic control, cell phones and cordless phones and so on.
Everything is digital now, except for the air traffic control so once in a blue moon I might listen to that.
