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Natural Joe posted:I love crazy technology that solves problems that don't necessarily exist. The Williams formula one team was, and williams technology is still, messing about with flywheels instead of batteries for KERS
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# ? Jul 5, 2013 16:58 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 22:51 |
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Meet the Deutsche Bahn series 430.0-1: These were running in Stuttgart since the end of April. This week, the last of them were sent back to Bombardier (hmm, a familiar name in this thread ), for persistent problems mainly with the doors. The last straw was when one of them refused to close its doors in the central S-Bahn* tunnel in Stuttgart, blocking all traffic for over an hour, during the evening rush hour. This wasn't the first time, either, so they actually had some experts from the manufacturer riding on that train; even they couldn't fix it. (* In Stuttgart, the U-Bahn runs mostly above ground, the S-Bahn below. Swabians are weird that way.)
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# ? Jul 5, 2013 17:53 |
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Foxhound posted:Been waiting for a while for this sentence to pop up, as it inevitably would. Ansaldobreda bolloxed up their delivery of trams to Gothenburg too! I think most of Nothern-Europe ended up with AnsaldoBreda trains and found out why the deals they got seemed too good to be true.
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# ? Jul 5, 2013 17:54 |
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America's also had the pleasure of dealing with AnsaldoBreda. Here in LA, after failing to deliver a bunch of light rail vehicles on time and at the specified weight, they had the balls to ask Metro to buy more of their trains in exchange for moving their headquarters there and building a factory in the city. Of course it turned out later that they'd tried to make the exact same deal in several other cities before then. There's an article at The Transport Politic that goes a bit into some of the background of AnsaldoBreda's story in Los Angeles and the US.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 00:02 |
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Axeman Jim posted:What the gently caress? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_One-Eleven
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 01:02 |
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Consist posted:America's also had the pleasure of dealing with AnsaldoBreda. Here in LA, after failing to deliver a bunch of light rail vehicles on time and at the specified weight, they had the balls to ask Metro to buy more of their trains in exchange for moving their headquarters there and building a factory in the city. The MBTA also bought a bunch of trains from AnsaldoBreda to replace the Boeing-Vertol units from the 1970s back in the late 90s. The Boeing-Vertol trains weren't removed from service until 2007 because of problems with the AnsaldoBreda cars. Mostly brake issues if I remember correctly. Here's a Boston Globe article about the whole mess
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 01:35 |
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Umm... I hope it's okay if I request more obscure video game consoles? I really like learning about that type of thing! Especially the ones like the Konix and stuff!
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 02:49 |
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two forty posted:I'm glad you asked since I figured this was some sort of typo. Pennsylvania Anthracite had a certain cachet attached to it until, I guess, the Eisenhower era. I have an old house maintenance book from the 1950s somewhere that shows, with diagrams, how to load and light a furnace with anthracite, and then later it explains how to do the same but with crappy bituminous coal. Yeah, one of the railroads in Pennsylvania (and NY and NJ) even created an advertising character called Phoebe Snow to emphasize how clean-burning their anthracite coal supposedly was:
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 03:44 |
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I don't think I've seen this yet. It was a regular in Popular Science/Popular Mechanics back in the late 1970s: the BONE FONE! It was a response to the Walkman craze, the second wave of portable electronic music devices following transistor radios. I don't know if I ever saw one in person but this ad always caught my eye.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 03:48 |
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Consist posted:America's also had the pleasure of dealing with AnsaldoBreda. Here in LA, after failing to deliver a bunch of light rail vehicles on time and at the specified weight, they had the balls to ask Metro to buy more of their trains in exchange for moving their headquarters there and building a factory in the city. I have some pretty intimate knowledge in dealing with AnsaldoBreda here in Buffalo, as they are rebuilding our light rail vehicles. In short, they are terrible, terrible, terrible at well, everything.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 04:51 |
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Zopotantor posted:the last of them were sent back to Bombardier (hmm, a familiar name in this thread ), for persistent problems mainly with the doors. The last straw was when one of them refused to close its doors in the central S-Bahn* tunnel The Toronto Transit Commission ordered a bunch of brand new subway trains from (guess who!) Bombardier back in 2009 and started rolling them out onto one of the busiest subway lines in North America in 2011. Why did it take 3 years to get these trains rolling? Because the original door supplier went bankrupt, so Bombardier said gently caress it and did it themselves. One new feature on this train is that if someone gets caught in the doors as they're closing, the door servos detect it and recycle the doors. This was supposed to reduce problems with the doors because previous train models used pneumatics and someone forcing the doors would burn out the motors. Subway drivers and supervisors at the TTC discovered quickly that if the doors cycle more than 3 times in a row, the onboard computer throws a hissy fit and the entire thing must be taken out of service and rebooted. During rush hour, trains and platforms are packed like clown cars, so you can imagine the delay and frustration. The TTC got mad at Bombardier and they had to software update the trains. After that happened, the doors still had software glitches and twice in one week this happened: Anyone leaning against those doors would have been crushed or fried on the power rail. This has since been fixed (again) and hasn't happened anymore. However these trains consistently create jams and uneven headways on the line because the doors are slow to open from stopping and the train is slow to go from doors closing. It's more likely than not if you're waiting a while for a train, it'll be this one followed closely behind by several old trains. The cab door on the side of the train is purely decorative and art for the foreseeable future. These trains are made of stainless steel and are somehow starting to rust before they reach their terrible 2s. Other notable features of each $13 million piece of poo poo are:
Door glitches are not restricted to new Bombardier trains. Old Bombardier trains were doing it too! Telemarchitect has a new favorite as of 05:00 on Jul 6, 2013 |
# ? Jul 6, 2013 04:56 |
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Telemarchitect posted:
I've heard about these awesome problems on the TTC trains. It's sorta mind blowing that there isn't relay logic involved to drop propulsion on the train in the event of a door opening while the train is moving (I'm assuming the train is moving when this door problem happened (happens?)) instead of just software. I get relays are sorta being phased out in carborne equipment for PLC based everything but drat, safety sensitive stuff should still be safe.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 05:08 |
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ninmeister posted:I've heard about these awesome problems on the TTC trains. It's sorta mind blowing that there isn't relay logic involved to drop propulsion on the train in the event of a door opening while the train is moving (I'm assuming the train is moving when this door problem happened (happens?)) instead of just software. I get relays are sorta being phased out in carborne equipment for PLC based everything but drat, safety sensitive stuff should still be safe. They do. In all these cases the trains were stopped. I did see a video of a really old TTC train (made by Hawker Siddeley, who was bought out by...) cruising down the tunnel with one set of its doors open. Someone must've done goofed for that to happen. I'm guessing they were isolated somehow. When doors break from too many morons forcing them open (can't wait for the train right behind it!!!), the doors often don't close enough for the computer to register them as closed. So the crews disable the doors (so they don't open) and isolate them (so the train can move off). When this happens the crews put large red tarps blocking the doors or take that car out of service.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 05:22 |
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Telemarchitect posted:They do. In all these cases the trains were stopped. Ah well that's good. I just assumed the trains were running with the doors open. That would be quite the experience.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 05:36 |
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Did the NYC MTA have nearly as many problems with the Bombardier trains that make up at least a decent part of the Subway fleet as seemingly everybody else?
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 05:37 |
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Bombardier is far too French Canadian to be able to do anything without major problems. They proudly state that they're the only manufacturer of planes and trains- maybe because everyone else was smart enough to pick one or the other? Speaking of Quebec, how about the Big O Olympic stadium in Montreal? Built in the early seventies for the 1976 Olympics, it cost a fortune which was paid for by cigarette excise taxes, but even the heavy smoking French Canadians (c.f. Rene Levesque) didn't pay it off until about five years ago. The centerpiece is an enormous tilted tower which was supposed to be able to lift the fabric roof off the stadium. The roof was poorly made and the system as a whole didn't really work, and after 1992 they never bothered to remove it. Later it served as the home of the Expos, but was apparently not a great stadium to play baseball in. I still love Quebec, anyway.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 06:14 |
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Telemarchitect posted:
We're already shipping some back to Bombardier to have grab bars installed on the AC bulkheads, external speakers installed and caution tape put on the diaphragm bulkheads. They have other problems too: -In addition to being overweight, the first and last trucks are unpowered and the rest underpowered, so they're really slow. Slower than the 40 year old Hawkers they're supposed to replace -Because they're so slow and unreliable, the TTC can't replace the old Hawkers like they said they would- all the 23-25 year old H6s are staying, and the 1975 vintage H5s are only slowly being retired. -This also means the whole overcrowded Yonge line runs at a slower speed with more frequent delays and longer waits between trains. -The interior flourescent lights are blindingly bright, like a dentist's chair, and the deafeningly loud AC is really weak, so they're a 450 foot long oven when it's hot or the're full.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 06:28 |
two forty posted:Speaking of Quebec, how about the Big O Olympic stadium in Montreal? Built in the early seventies for the 1976 Olympics, it cost a fortune which was paid for by cigarette excise taxes, but even the heavy smoking French Canadians (c.f. Rene Levesque) didn't pay it off until about five years ago. The centerpiece is an enormous tilted tower which was supposed to be able to lift the fabric roof off the stadium. The roof was poorly made and the system as a whole didn't really work, and after 1992 they never bothered to remove it. Later it served as the home of the Expos, but was apparently not a great stadium to play baseball in. The CFL team in Montreal chooses to play at McGill university (25k capacity) instead of the Olympic stadium (66k). Re: Bombardier - they did a great job with my city's rail. Although the latest line by Rotem is better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFDSaRWUya0
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 06:30 |
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Sunshine89 posted:and the 1975 vintage H5s are only slowly being retired. It's unfortunate that they're not keeping the even older H series cars because they were classy as gently caress with those gigantic ceiling ventilators and comfy padded vinyl seats. I've spent probably half my life on subway commutes and have never slept better than on those old-rear end cars.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 08:23 |
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Telemarchitect posted:New TTC trains Yeah, but can you get drunk and surf the articulated floor between cars on the old trains? I thought not. Another fun thing is to sit at the end of the train and look all the way down to the other end while it's going through a curve, while playing the Inception soundtrack on your phone.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 08:33 |
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Japan might have some issues with putting nuclear power plants in dumb places (like on top of fault lines and adjacent to shores that experience massive tsunami every so often), but by gum they can make some reliable trains. Seriously, reading about all the poo poo trains you guys have to deal with boggles my mind. I live on a line running some of the oldest rolling stock in the metropolitan area—the carriages I'm in often sport dates from the 1980s or early 1990s—but they are in tip-top shape and barely miss a beat. And what's more, if there is an issue with one train, well, there's a spare parked at one of the yards somewhere along the line that can be spliced in! You guys living in these places that are negotiating with Italy or whomever to replace your lovely trains with shittier trains should just get on to your local MP and have them outsource the entire operation to JR or one of the big companies over here.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 09:19 |
Montreal's metro trains have rubber wheels and they are just adorable.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 10:42 |
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Crap British Planes The Nimrod AEW3 With the Americans deploying the Hawkeye and the Soviets developing the TU-126, the British decided that they needed to get in on the AEW/AWACS action - an aircraft carrying a massive radar that can detect enemy aircraft hundreds of miles away and direct fighters to intercept them. The only AEW (Airborne Early Warning) system the RAF had was the Avro Shackleton, which was basically a turboprop-powered Lancaster dating from 1951, affectionately known to its crews as "10,000 rivets flying in formation." In 1977 the US government offered to sell the RAF the then in-development E-3 Sentry, but with the British government pretty much held hostage by the trade unions (who brought down 3 governments in 5 years in the 1970s by calling general strikes) there was no way the RAF was going to buy some decadent imperialist capitalist AWACS, when we had perfectly good socialist aircraft of our own. Except we didn't. The biggest airframe we had was the VC-10, and its T-Tail configuration made it unsuitable for a radome, so we decided to use some surplus Nimrod anti-submarine aircraft, based on the Comet airframe that first flew in the same year as the Shackleton it was supposed to replace. The government decided that this would be a joint venture between BAe, who built the aircraft, and GEC Marconi, who would build the radar and systems. This helpfully ensured that when anything went wrong, the two companies would blame each other and nothing would get resolved. And things did go wrong. A lot: - Rather than a big radome on top like almost all over AWACS aircraft, the Nimrod AEW3 had one radome at the front and one at the back, that were supposed to scan in sync. Of course this almost never worked properly. - Each radome produced a vast amount of data, more than was strictly needed, that often got out of sync and tended to drop packets. - The computer that was supposed to co-ordinate all this data, as well as navigate the plane and run all the other systems, had a grand total of 2.4Mb of storage space. On average, it would crash every 2 hours, which was a nuisance, as it took 2.5 hours to boot up, using cassette tape. - The cooling system used the aircraft's fuel to dissipate heat and stopped working if the aircraft went down to less than half fuel. There was no room for an in-flight refuelling probe, so the aircraft could only stay aloft for a couple of hours at a time with its radar actually switched on - The radar was so dysfunctional that the only way it could detect any aircraft at all was using the IFF transponders - but only the ones carried by NATO aircraft. In other words it couldn't detect Soviet planes which was kinda the whole point. - The Nimrod airframe was much smaller than the E3. Hop over to AI's aircraft thread for stories about how overweight, cramped and hot the E3 is to work in. Now imagine cramming all that equipment and the people to run it into an aircraft 2/3 the size and powered by engines a generation older. Yeah. By 1987 and a decade of failure, the government, now under Thatcher, had had enough and cancelled the project, with £1 billion (in 1987 money) down the toilet. We sheepishly returned to the Americans and ordered the E-3. The 1951-vintage Shackleton rattled on until 1991, when the RAF's long-overdue E3s came onstream.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 12:22 |
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two forty posted:Bombardier is far too French Canadian to be able to do anything without major problems. They proudly state that they're the only manufacturer of planes and trains- maybe because everyone else was smart enough to pick one or the other? I caught a game there maybe 4 or 5 years before they left. There was a long crease in the outfield turf like a poorly laid carpet. Must have made chasing pop-ups more interesting. It wasn't a bad stadium by any means, but by that time they has pretty much given up.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 17:08 |
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Cracked has a neat write up of The Hexagon, an early spy satellite that used film.quote:It physically fired parachute-buckets full of film over the Pacific, where they were snagged by C-130 Herculeses in midair. That's using a $70 million plane as a combination of hunting falcon and carrier pigeon. Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-coolest-things-weve-ever-sent-into-orbit_p2/#ixzz2YIRsbB00
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 20:47 |
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Dick Trauma posted:I don't think I've seen this yet. It was a regular in Popular Science/Popular Mechanics back in the late 1970s: the BONE FONE! Huh. With the name, I was really expecting something different
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 22:28 |
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leidend posted:The CFL team in Montreal chooses to play at McGill university (25k capacity) instead of the Olympic stadium (66k). They play their playoff games at the Olympic stadium. For those times when they need more than 25k of seating.
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# ? Jul 6, 2013 22:41 |
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Throwdown posted:Cracked has a neat write up of The Hexagon, an early spy satellite that used film. That's not even the best part. The satellites were basically disposable cameras. quote:What happens when you use all four canisters? If you're the USAF, you toss the most advanced space optical system ever constructed like a Big Mac wrapper and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new one. Twenty times. The Hexagon was 20 meters of solid future, including 11 tons of the most advanced space optical gear ever constructed, and it was designed to pop off four film canisters and then self-destruct into remote regions of the ocean to make sure that humanity didn't even accidentally learn anything.
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 01:22 |
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Dick Trauma posted:I don't think I've seen this yet. It was a regular in Popular Science/Popular Mechanics back in the late 1970s: the BONE FONE! I actually saw one of these in a thrift store a few years back. I remembered the ads (my dad was a charter subscriber to OMNI, which was full of crap like this) and would have bought it, but the "washable" spandex sleeve was nasty as hell. The thing was really heavy too, to keep it from falling off if you went jogging with it. They predate the Walkman craze by a year or two, though I'm pretty sure there was a cassette version at one point, with a loading mechanism that worked like a car's tape deck. Once portable headphones became a thing there was basically no point in the Bone Fone.
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 08:46 |
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The whole thing about shoddy doors on trains boggles my mind as I managed to program a system to handled fingers getting trapped in doors on a vending machine using a goddam PIC processor and it didn't sporadically crash after 3 uses. This was the first year of my degree course ffs.
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 13:48 |
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:The whole thing about shoddy doors on trains boggles my mind as I managed to program a system to handled fingers getting trapped in doors on a vending machine using a goddam PIC processor and it didn't sporadically crash after 3 uses. This was the first year of my degree course ffs.
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 15:51 |
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:The whole thing about shoddy doors on trains boggles my mind as I managed to program a system to handled fingers getting trapped in doors on a vending machine using a goddam PIC processor and it didn't sporadically crash after 3 uses. This was the first year of my degree course ffs. Unfortunately in the world of government projects, the lowest bidder rules put you with the most amazing companies.
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 16:10 |
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Yeah but come on. They're doors not space ships.
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 16:11 |
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DNova posted:Yeah but come on. They're doors not space ships. Like that matters.
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 16:21 |
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So the Bone Phone was bone conductive sound? Like the new Google Glass? It wasn't obsolete, it was ahead of its time.
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 18:27 |
Throat mikes and bone transducers have been in use (mostly in the military) for almost 80 years.
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 19:04 |
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Krispy Kareem posted:So the Bone Phone was bone conductive sound? Like the new Google Glass? Actually no, it was just some speakers built into a giant vibrating horse collar for humans.
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 19:22 |
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I do remember about 10-13 years ago there was a lollipop company that came out with a device that had a built-in radio and it would hold your sucker at stem. When you tuned it in and turned to a radio station, if you rest the sucker portion on your teeth you could 'hear/feel' the music in your ears. It was relatively decent sounding, all things considered. I bought one on clearance as a goof but never really used it all that much because I could just wear headphones. It even came with a plastic 'sucker' so you didn't have to constantly have a lollipop rotting your teeth just to secretly listen to the radio. http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1999-08-12/lifestyle/9908110421_1_pop-radio-lollipop-teeth I don't think they make them anymore, but I can hardly imaging sugar and vibrations being all that good for teeth on a prolonged basis.
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 22:49 |
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JediTalentAgent posted:I do remember about 10-13 years ago there was a lollipop company that came out with a device that had a built-in radio and it would hold your sucker at stem. When you tuned it in and turned to a radio station, if you rest the sucker portion on your teeth you could 'hear/feel' the music in your ears. It was relatively decent sounding, all things considered. I bought one on clearance as a goof but never really used it all that much because I could just wear headphones. It even came with a plastic 'sucker' so you didn't have to constantly have a lollipop rotting your teeth just to secretly listen to the radio. Oh, drat! I remember this! It was like the most technologically advanced of the "inventive candies" at the time. Push pops? So 90's. Ring pops? Pretty basic. Baby bottle pops? Wonder balls? Gimmicky. RADIO LOLLIPOP??? You have my preteen attention
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# ? Jul 7, 2013 23:56 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 22:51 |
I guess this qualifies. I got it for Christmas in 1980/81 or thereabouts. Still works. You can only eat dots while moving from left to right.
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# ? Jul 8, 2013 00:04 |