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TerryLennox posted:A bit off topic but whats with consumer electronics manufacturers choosing the most idiotically powerful LEDs in all devices? Air conditioning, computer cases, TVs, everything has its own LED that unless taped over, will put enough light on your bedroom to prevent sleep. The example of this that made me laugh out loud was when a friend unpacked his fancy audiophile-grade CD/stereo receiver. While helping him set it up, I found ring stickers included for the purpose of covering up the incredibly bright blue led behind the power button. Stickers!
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Jan 24, 2014 13:09
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I have a monitor that lets me dim, turn off, or even change the colour of its status LED. 
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Jan 24, 2014 13:19
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TerryLennox posted:A bit off topic but whats with consumer electronics manufacturers choosing the most idiotically powerful LEDs in all devices? Air conditioning, computer cases, TVs, everything has its own LED that unless taped over, will put enough light on your bedroom to prevent sleep. The brighter they are, the better they look in a brightly lit Best Buy or equivalent.
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Jan 24, 2014 13:21
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 LEDs are high tech and the more blue leds, the more high tech your device. What do you mean you want to go to sleep? High tech doesn't sleep.
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Jan 24, 2014 13:36
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TerryLennox posted:A bit off topic but whats with consumer electronics manufacturers choosing the most idiotically powerful LEDs in all devices? Air conditioning, computer cases, TVs, everything has its own LED that unless taped over, will put enough light on your bedroom to prevent sleep. Or you could just actually turn your electrical equipment off instead of spending money and killing the planet by leaving it on standby all night?
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Jan 24, 2014 14:19
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Mr. Flunchy posted:Just read this about the London Underground and thought of this thread: It turns out they used sugar (as Platystemon mentioned) to clean it up(via the Telegraph).
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Jan 24, 2014 14:44
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The_White_Crane posted:Or you could just actually turn your electrical equipment off instead of spending money and killing the planet by leaving it on standby all night? Or they could just stop encrusting every disposable consumer electronics device with as many LEDs as they can in an effort to sell more.
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Jan 24, 2014 15:00
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One Eye Open posted:It turns out they used sugar (as Platystemon mentioned) to clean it up(via the Telegraph). That is a seriously impressive cleanup. 
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Jan 24, 2014 15:44
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Mr. Flunchy posted:
You run to the nearest Tesco's and buy all the white granulated sugar they have and dump it in.
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Jan 24, 2014 16:47
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How did they get it out of all the wiring harnesses? Or did they mix up the before and after labels?
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Jan 24, 2014 16:55
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And here I was thinking that they would have to cut the equipment off at the top of the concrete with a grinder and then dig the ceiling out 3 feet higher and start fresh.
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Jan 24, 2014 20:42
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The_White_Crane posted:Or you could just actually turn your electrical equipment off instead of spending money and killing the planet by leaving it on standby all night? Yeah leaving your stuff on overnight is dumb, but I bought some nice speakers for watching movies and the LEDs ruined the whole watching movies in the dark experience until I covered them with electrical tape.
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Jan 24, 2014 22:29
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One solution to the overly-bright LED problem: Light Dims LED light blockers. http://www.lightdims.com/store.htm Edit: better link empty baggie has a new favorite as of 22:54 on Jan 24, 2014 |
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Jan 24, 2014 22:52
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I can't seem to find any photos or video of them, but in the early 90's American Greetings had kiosks in a number of places where you could create a custom card. The card would then be printed using X-Y pen plotter on card stock. You'd pay about double for the custom card vs an off-the-shelf card. Of course, home computers and printers eliminated the market. They were launched in 1992, and were already on the decline in 1996 according to this article: http://articles.latimes.com/1996-06-27/business/fi-18966_1_card-personalized-sales Also, previously in this thread we had some mall chat. Irondequoit Mall's management no longer heats the interior, and with Macy's closing in a month or two, Sears will be the only store remaining. The mall has flooded due to pipes bursting from the cold.
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Jan 24, 2014 23:15
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Guy Axlerod posted:Also, previously in this thread we had some mall chat. Irondequoit Mall's management no longer heats the interior, and with Macy's closing in a month or two, Sears will be the only store remaining. The mall has flooded due to pipes bursting from the cold. There's a mall around where I live that is still open but the only things actually open are the movie theater and the anchor stores. There are literally no other stores open. BUT you can still walk around the place and the tiny food court bizarrely still has like half of the restaurants open. In December I went in there and they had erected an elaborate Christmas display that I could baaarrreely see from over by where the theater is. Just weird to walk around the place- dim lighting, but there's still adult contemporary music being piped into the abandoned halls.
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Jan 24, 2014 23:24
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Our office is moving next week, so we're cleaning out all the miscellaneous crap that people have left here over the years. Somehow I found a Sega Dreamcast last week (haven't tested it out yet). But just as exciting, is this fine book from 1993!
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Jan 24, 2014 23:54
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The Internet's so easy, even a housewife can use it!
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Jan 25, 2014 00:02
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Pneub posted:The Internet's so easy, even a housewife can use it! Mom's on the Net! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BybbEBOeKM8&sns=em
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Jan 25, 2014 00:07
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Guy Axlerod posted:I can't seem to find any photos or video of them, but in the early 90's American Greetings had kiosks in a number of places where you could create a custom card. The card would then be printed using X-Y pen plotter on card stock. You'd pay about double for the custom card vs an off-the-shelf card. Holy poo poo, I completely forgot about these! I used to gently caress around with the one at my local Albertson's all the time while my dad did the grocery shopping. The appeal is that you could add text and have it printed on to personalize the card. Y'know, instead of just writing in it. It also printed out on one flat sheet with dotted lines telling you how to fold it, so it never folded or sat nicely like a proper greeting card would. They looked like poo poo. The only two designs I remember it had were Garfield and Ziggy.
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Jan 25, 2014 00:23
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Guy Axlerod posted:I can't seem to find any photos or video of them, but in the early 90's American Greetings had kiosks in a number of places where you could create a custom card. The card would then be printed using X-Y pen plotter on card stock. You'd pay about double for the custom card vs an off-the-shelf card. .
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Jan 25, 2014 00:35
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The main attraction for me was watching the pen plotter make it's magic. It worked in one color at a time, cross-hatching to create the shaded areas, slowly building an image. E: Different plotter, but holy poo poo this thing is fast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYGPSAD5L_k (For a pen plotter)
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Jan 25, 2014 01:58
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mystes posted:Or you could load Print Shop Deluxe in DOS and make a card on your monochrome dot matrix printer in the comfort of your own home Wasn't Print Shop the program that, whenever a new version came out, you couldn't just upgrade, but had to buy the whole program again?
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Jan 25, 2014 01:58
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Guy Axlerod posted:The main attraction for me was watching the pen plotter make it's magic. It worked in one color at a time, cross-hatching to create the shaded areas, slowly building an image. That video is... I wonder how the internal logic behind it worked, it was jumping all over the place until the very end.
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Jan 25, 2014 02:19
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I think these plotters follow a very basic set of instructions from the computer ie: GOTO X PEN DOWN GOTO Y PEN UP GOTO Z PEN DOWN etc.. So the random movement is probably a result of poor conversion from the original vector image to the plotter language. (user error)
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Jan 25, 2014 03:15
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Determining the path for the nib is a version of the travelling salesman problem. That means that it’s very difficult for a computer to come up with an optimal solution, but at the same time, it’s a heavily studied problem and the plotter software should be able to come up with a better solution than the one demonstrated in the video.
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Jan 25, 2014 03:44
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mystes posted:Or you could load Print Shop Deluxe in DOS and make a card on your monochrome dot matrix printer in the comfort of your own home I had Print Master on the Commodore 64 and my Okimate printer did have a color cartridge. It never worked properly.  
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Jan 25, 2014 04:03
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With those Card Kiosks, I seem to remember another issue was that they put in safeguards that restricted people from using certain words in the cards, too. I do also seem to recall that people had figured out ways to get around it that they system wouldn't have instantly blocked: Spaces between letters, spelling words vertically, etc. It might block: Eat poo poo!, but not: E S a h t i . t . !
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Jan 25, 2014 05:05
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I'm pretty sure they've still published editions of this in the last five years.
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Jan 25, 2014 05:15
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I was in a used bookstore a few weeks ago and they had one of those thick Internet Yellow Pages-type books that used to be pretty popular in the 90s on their shelf. I glanced at it really quickly and it looked like it was copyright 2006.
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Jan 25, 2014 05:16
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My first encounters with the internet were in school computer labs when the teacher would write a sentence-long URL on the whiteboard filled random letters, numbers and characters we didn't know the names of yet (both kinds of slashes even!) As students we would take 10 minutes tediously typing the URL into Netscape, then raise our hands to have the teacher proofread our work. Once all 30-odd screens had been check, we would all hit "return" in unison and wait several more minutes for the boring static page to load so we could fill in a worksheet. I bet they still do that the exact same way somewhere. How long until school is obsolete?
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Jan 25, 2014 05:48
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I remember reading "Internet for Dummies" when we'd first gotten our Internet connection in 1998 and realizing how horridly dated it was. It was written in 1993 and was mostly about dialing into BBS or terminals as WWW and Mosiac were only just being released.eddiewalker posted:I bet they still do that the exact same way somewhere. And then with the upgrades to PCs from grades 7 up, your first lessons were simple "This is a window, this is a minimize button". One whole lesson was spent getting a hotmail account. Which basically consisted of trying to find an email address that hadn't been taken, as the ISDN slowly loaded the "try again" page. Later years consisted of creating more word documents, access databases, coding HTML sites, some application with a little turtle you had to program around to move and Flash. Oh and touch typing on some ancient DOS program that was blue and yellow. We were given cardboard boxes to put over the keyboards so we couldn't look at our hands and cheat. Later on I deliberately picked "Practical Information Processing" as a subject, just to have a bludge lesson where you'd finish typing up some handwritten note after five minutes and surf the net for the rest of the lesson. Exam questions were also just as unsure to what to do. So the exam questions were; "point out what URLs are incorrect : Http//www.site.com" or you had to code a basic HTML page with a table. I recall the textbooks being atrocious as well. There was one we had to order, but never used, that was filled with the usual simplistic explanations of a CPU, modems and mice and adorned in the margins were "computer sillies" of stories of people holding up paper to the monitor to try and get it to print. The libray had some old curious, like how to code BASIC on a BBC Micro There was another released in the 11th grade that was actually written pretty well and seemed to be aware on how computers had affected our lifestyles with the chapters how computers were actually being used as opposed to just listing off theories. For example having an article on the history of the Emoticon or noting how in a Turing test someone decided a person they were chatting to was a computer as no one could have that much knowledge about some mundane topic.
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Jan 25, 2014 07:13
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Guy Axlerod posted:The main attraction for me was watching the pen plotter make it's magic. It worked in one color at a time, cross-hatching to create the shaded areas, slowly building an image.
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Jan 25, 2014 16:30
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GWBBQ posted:Apparently you can buy these refurbished for under $250. If every available surface wasn't buried in a pile of film cameras, slide projectors, and books, I'd get one. After not having thought about plotters for a couple decades they pop up in this thread; then Massdrop listed a new plotter (the Silhouette Cameo) that also comes with a cutting head for stencils and poo poo the next day. I guess there's still some market for plotters out there.
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Jan 25, 2014 16:37
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Internet Friend posted:After not having thought about plotters for a couple decades they pop up in this thread; then Massdrop listed a new plotter (the Silhouette Cameo) that also comes with a cutting head for stencils and poo poo the next day. I guess there's still some market for plotters out there. Go to an arts and crafts store some time. Cricut and Sizzix have been on the market for years, and Cricut has a huge line of cartridges programmed with various designs and fonts you can cut or draw with. They even have one for use on fondant for cake decorators.
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Jan 25, 2014 16:49
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The_White_Crane posted:Or you could just actually turn your electrical equipment off instead of spending money and killing the planet by leaving it on standby all night? Sometimes this isn't an option, though. fuckin air conditioner in summer, fuckin lack of central air conditioning, fuckin bright rear end temperature display
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Jan 25, 2014 17:12
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Shugojin posted:Sometimes this isn't an option, though. I don't know if it is true today, as it was 5, to 10 years ago, but I recall someone doing the math over at [H]ardforums and that is costs MORE to turn a PC/monitor on from a dead state, than it does to wake one up from hibernation. Plus, (again at the time) it was like 12 dollars a year in electrical costs to keep them all on standby. Hardly planet raping.
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Jan 25, 2014 19:43
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Johnny Aztec posted:I don't know if it is true today, as it was 5, to 10 years ago, but I recall someone doing the math over at [H]ardforums and that is costs MORE to turn a PC/monitor on from a dead state, than it does to wake one up from hibernation. Plus, (again at the time) it was like 12 dollars a year in electrical costs to keep them all on standby. Hardly planet raping. We have a ton more devices, yet electricity usage has declined for 3 straight years. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/u-s-home-electricity-use-declines-for-3rd-straight-year-1.2479249 The amount of energy an iPad uses is ridiculously small. My old Mattel handheld football game probably used more juice.
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Jan 25, 2014 20:11
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cobalt impurity posted:Go to an arts and crafts store some time. Cricut and Sizzix have been on the market for years, and Cricut has a huge line of cartridges programmed with various designs and fonts you can cut or draw with. They even have one for use on fondant for cake decorators. I also think of laser cutters, plasma cutters, waterjet cutters, and 3D printers as logical extensions of plotters.
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Jan 25, 2014 21:10
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Ron Burgundy posted:I think these plotters follow a very basic set of instructions from the computer ie: It actually seemed pretty good to me, there were a lot of small details in the spokes of the wheels that took a long time. If I had to guess, you send a regular old vector file of some sort (postscript, most likely) straight to the printer and it just does whatever you tell it to. So yeah, inefficient software is entirely to blame, but it's probably the program used to create the vectors. Fun fact which is also obsolete tech: Windows WMF/EMF image files. Guess what? They're actually specialized executable files that are comprised entirely of calls to various GDI32.dll drawing functions. As a result, they have been used multiple times as a vector for viruses and trojans - who is going to guess that an image file with the right filename extension is going to be one of those? The most recent was in Windows XP in 2005. That's like 10-15 years after the file format was last used extensively. Also, WMF/EMF files would likely be very easy to translate into postscript to send to a plotter, since all you have to do is decode the file and figure out which functions are being called, then send the same commands in postscript form. e: my boss at a previous job (workstudy at a computer desk in college) told me about the time some CS student had too much fun with the printer about a decade previous. They sent it a postscript file and it sat there for hours churning away not actually printing anything. He was going to kill the printjob, but noticed it was using an absurd amount of memory and since it was late at night and no one else was waiting for it, he was curious enough to just let it continue. Several hours later it finally printed something - one of the stereotypical "reflective mirror balls and cones in front of a picture" type images. The submitter had written a raytracer entirely in postscript. 
kastein has a new favorite as of 01:30 on Jan 26, 2014 |
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Jan 26, 2014 01:24
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Talk of printers reminded me that in the time of Dot-matrix there were also the daisy-wheel printers that were excellent if you wanted a consistent and 'typed-out' look to your work. I knew someone back in the 90s who argued, for example, that a dot-matrix printer's output didn't look 'professional' enough for a resume or a school report regardless of how good you did set it because if they sat there and REAAAALY looked hard, they could see the bumps of each dot.
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Jan 26, 2014 01:31
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