Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Fezz
Aug 31, 2001

You should feel ashamed.
It sounds like this douchenozzle models his lifestyle choices after Data.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

AlphaKretin
Dec 25, 2014

A vase to face encounter.

...Vase to meet you?

...

GARVASE DAY!

It'll probably be too late by the time I get a reply if the answer is yes, but will anything bad happen if I clean a bunch of C64 stuff with disinfectant wipes? Pics coming when I'm done. :)

RandomPauI
Nov 24, 2006


Grimey Drawer

AlphaKretin posted:

It'll probably be too late by the time I get a reply if the answer is yes, but will anything bad happen if I clean a bunch of C64 stuff with disinfectant wipes? Pics coming when I'm done. :)

I read that as C4 and dreaded both the inevitable explosion during the cleaning and whatever your nefarious intent was.

Xinlum
Apr 12, 2009

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Dark Knight

nihilistic_fish posted:

I would think making GBS threads water would not help with water usage issues unless he was using his liquid shits to run the toilet or something... unless I am missing something?

Now I'm stuck with the mental image of flushing a toilet only for the bowl to fill with shitwater.

Geoj
May 28, 2008

BITTER POOR PERSON

RandomPauI posted:

I read that as C4 and dreaded both the inevitable explosion during the cleaning and whatever your nefarious intent was.

Unless he's cleaning C4 with blasting caps or similar explosive triggers this would be perfectly safe.

Another entry for this thread: volatile explosives that can be set off by physical contact or chemical reaction with other substances generally considered inert.

KozmoNaut
Apr 23, 2008

Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle


Wanamingo posted:

Doing the laundry also takes water, so instead of normal clothes he wears nothing but disposable jumpsuits that he orders from China.

He seems obsessed with reducing his own localized water usage, but he's also completely oblivious to the water and resources used to manufacture and ship his disposable clothes from China, or the water used in the production of his toothpaste and dry deodorant.

He proudly boasts about "0L virtual water usage", but he's not even accounting for a tenth of the actual behind-the-scenes water usage. He's a total crackpot.

Zopotantor
Feb 24, 2013

...und ist er drin dann lassen wir ihn niemals wieder raus...

Geoj posted:

Another entry for this thread: volatile explosives that can be set off by physical contact or chemical reaction with other substances generally considered inert.

That's not obsolete technology because there are research groups specializing in that kind of stuff. Also, there's a thread.

AlphaKretin
Dec 25, 2014

A vase to face encounter.

...Vase to meet you?

...

GARVASE DAY!

At hostpital lost fingat post mote later

...is what I would be saying if I was playing with C4 and not C64. :v: I promised pics and here they are: (huge phone pic warning)


I am not a professional photographer, to say the least.
That thing cut off in the lower right corner is another two floppy drives, and not in the picture are another two dot matrix printers, three cases full of floppies and various power supplies. All for 100 bucks!

E: oh yeah, and a busted CRT monitor.

AlphaKretin has a new favorite as of 10:38 on Nov 1, 2015

ZALGO!
Dec 4, 2006

These are the end times. We've got to be prepared! ZALGO!
I bet most of you were unaware that Radio Shack released their own video game console, well more accurately their parent company Tandy released one under the Memorex brand which was owned by Tandy at the time.
I'm talking about the Memorex Video Information System, released in 1992 exclusively through Radio Shack. It was a CD based system produced around the time where lots of people were convinced that interactive FMV games were the future of gaming, a concept which would become outdated itself around the release of the Playstation a few years later. There's not much to say about it really, it had a 286 Intel processor and it's own custom version of Windows 3.1. The best way to describe it is imagine the Phillips CD-I but worse, if you can imagine such a thing. The games were basically what you'd expect from such a system; tons of edutainment titles, that Sherlock Holmes FMV game that seemed to have made its way to every CD-ROM device at the time, I think a golf game or too. It was a huge failure, due to the lack of decent games and the asking price of $699 (in 1992 dollars) certainly did not help. The rumor is that Radio Shack employees would say that the VIS actually stood for "Virtually Impossible to Sell". So it got relegated to the dustbin of video game history and it only sought out today by serious collectors for its relative obscurity. But for one moment yes, Radio Shack had its own video game console.



EDIT: Apparently there was a promo video released for it,and it's the most 90's thing you've ever seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cayU_2iM07c

ZALGO! has a new favorite as of 15:34 on Nov 1, 2015

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

AlphaKretin posted:

At hostpital lost fingat post mote later

...is what I would be saying if I was playing with C4 and not C64. :v: I promised pics and here they are: (huge phone pic warning)


I am not a professional photographer, to say the least.
That thing cut off in the lower right corner is another two floppy drives, and not in the picture are another two dot matrix printers, three cases full of floppies and various power supplies. All for 100 bucks!

E: oh yeah, and a busted CRT monitor.

In addition to disinfectant wipes, I've used a little bleach and cleaning solution on old, grimy yellow cases. I fixed up and re-sold my uncle's old PC that he said "kept shutting off" (chain smoker, had the PC for 3-4 years, never cleaned up after himself), that thing was the worst. He smoked so much weed and cigarettes that there was build-up in the fans, preventing them spinning at all. Bleach, alcohol, a toothbrush and a few hours later, drat thing looked and ran like brand loving new. Bought a new CPU fan, new chipset fan/heatsinks, put in a bigger hard drive and sold it for a couple hundred bucks. Mr. Clean eraser pads work pretty well too, a little bleach/water mix and one of those sponges and the grime just wipes away with almost no effort.

Trabant
Nov 26, 2011

All systems nominal.

ZALGO! posted:

it had a 286 Intel processor and it's own custom version of Windows 3.1.

It's the inspiration for XBox One!

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


Anyway to try to kickstart this thread again. I read an article on hackaday a week or so back about nuclear planes.
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/02/making-the-case-for-nuclear-aircraft/

Thought this was an awesome photo of the reactor:



There are some issues with going nuclear with planes - you need very dense materials to shield the core from the cargo which goes against everything else in aircraft design, along with the dangers of attacks or crashes on the ground population. No in the way of a big nuclear mushroom cloud but fallout, or the potential fallout causing panic in the population which can cost a lot of lives.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

as a person who never leaves my house i've done pretty well for myself.

Humphreys posted:

Anyway to try to kickstart this thread again. I read an article on hackaday a week or so back about nuclear planes.

The æronautics thread had a discussion a while ago concerning the most powerful single‐engine plane. Someone brought up the fact that a nuclear‐powered plane would arguably have qualified as “single engine”.

It’s probably for the best that the programmes were cancelled early, but it certainly was an interesting idea.

Grumbletron 4000
Nov 30, 2002

Where you want it, bitch.
College Slice
There was a B-36 that flew with an operational reactor. It wasn't used for propulsion though. For experimental purposes only. Apparently the lead shielding necessary to prevent the crew from being lethally irradiated was extremely heavy and our government decided the whole thing was a terrible idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_NB-36H

There was, however project Pluto. A mad science missile powered by a nuclear reactor. It was a nightmare of a weapon that would use its nuclear ramjet to fly over Russia, drop its arsenal of bombs and then cruise merrily across the countryside spraying insane amounts of radiation out of its rear end. It was tested on the ground quite successfully. The world can be glad that the ICBM came along and made the damned thing obsolete before it ever took the the skies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

Not Evans
Aug 2, 2007

Tobias, have you been flogging Simpsons prop replicas on the internet again?

Zonekeeper posted:

Ha, speaking of using VCRs for video editing, I just remembered that my old Mario Paint player's guide had an entire section on making animated music videos with Mario Paint, two VCRs and, an audio line-in.




I know the idea of a guide for Mario Paint sounds weird, but it wasn't really a traditional game guide. It mainly gave pointers on technique and composition, tips for using the animation and composition tools, provided many pages of stamp templates for sprite art, and gave examples of novel uses of the game for stuff like the music videos.

Does this guy have a brother named Phil, by any chance? Might go by "Tandy"?

Dick Trauma
Nov 30, 2007

God damn it, you've got to be kind.

ZALGO! posted:

EDIT: Apparently there was a promo video released for it,and it's the most 90's thing you've ever seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cayU_2iM07c

I'm usually not impressed by these claims but jesus christ that truly was awful.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Geoj posted:

Unless he's cleaning C4 with blasting caps or similar explosive triggers this would be perfectly safe.

Another entry for this thread: volatile explosives that can be set off by physical contact or chemical reaction with other substances generally considered inert.

You can use C4 as fuel for your camp stove, it's perfectly safe* even when on fire.

*explodey-wise, anyway. The smoke will probably give you all kinds of exotic cancers, though.

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


Dick Trauma posted:

I'm usually not impressed by these claims but jesus christ that truly was awful.

There must have been a typo when the script was given to the VO artists.

"Make a sound like a bird fapping"

ryonguy
Jun 27, 2013

Grumbletron 4000 posted:

There was a B-36 that flew with an operational reactor. It wasn't used for propulsion though. For experimental purposes only. Apparently the lead shielding necessary to prevent the crew from being lethally irradiated was extremely heavy and our government decided the whole thing was a terrible idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_NB-36H

There was, however project Pluto. A mad science missile powered by a nuclear reactor. It was a nightmare of a weapon that would use its nuclear ramjet to fly over Russia, drop its arsenal of bombs and then cruise merrily across the countryside spraying insane amounts of radiation out of its rear end. It was tested on the ground quite successfully. The world can be glad that the ICBM came along and made the damned thing obsolete before it ever took the the skies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Enjoy!

T-man
Aug 22, 2010


Talk shit, get bzzzt.

Dick Trauma posted:

I'm usually not impressed by these claims but jesus christ that truly was awful.

Kidder... EATERUPUS???

Grumbletron 4000
Nov 30, 2002

Where you want it, bitch.
College Slice

Thank you so much! I came across a link to that awhile back, maybe in the excellent airpower cold war thread but I haven't been able to find it since. Anybody that likes some good cold war fiction with a heaping helping of eldritch horror on the side needs to read that immediately!

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


Dave Jones from the EEVBlog put up a video about an on-going documentary series about the history of the electronics industry (particularly in Australia) and wow even this first video released which is a 'Roll Call' of who are going to be interviewed is impressive!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwF8y9ejDZw

(and I had completely forgotten about the Microbee - Australia's first home built computer!)

Groke
Jul 27, 2007
New Adventures In Mom Strength

Grumbletron 4000 posted:

There was, however project Pluto. A mad science missile powered by a nuclear reactor. It was a nightmare of a weapon that would use its nuclear ramjet to fly over Russia, drop its arsenal of bombs and then cruise merrily across the countryside spraying insane amounts of radiation out of its rear end. It was tested on the ground quite successfully. The world can be glad that the ICBM came along and made the damned thing obsolete before it ever took the the skies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

Project Pluto always comes up in threads even vaguely similar to this one. Pretty much my favourite bit of Cold War psychosis, and proof good enough that Dr. Strangelove just barely qualifies as fiction.

I mean, anything of which you can accurately and with a straight face say "The world can be glad that the ICBM came along and made the damned thing obsolete..." has to rank pretty drat high in the history of bad ideas.

big parcheesi player
Apr 1, 2014

Also, I can kill you with my brain.
Apparently Sony still was making these.

mints
Aug 15, 2001

Living on past glories

I threw out boxes of Betamax dubbed movies a few years back. Hadn't had a player in ages and was not really interested in finding one to keep stuff recorded from HBO and what not alive for anymore years.

Wish I'd have had a VCR to pull old World Cup matches off though.

empty baggie
Oct 22, 2003


From my understanding, Betamax was still used at places like news stations for decades after VHS won the home video wars, and wasn't deemed obsolete until digital took over.

Instant Sunrise
Apr 12, 2007


The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

empty baggie posted:

From my understanding, Betamax was still used at places like news stations for decades after VHS won the home video wars, and wasn't deemed obsolete until digital took over.

That's Betacam SP, not Betamax. Betacam SP uses a much stronger and more durable tape formula, and runs the tape through the heads a lot faster.

JnnyThndrs
May 29, 2001

HERE ARE THE FUCKING TOWELS

empty baggie posted:

From my understanding, Betamax was still used at places like news stations for decades after VHS won the home video wars, and wasn't deemed obsolete until digital took over.

You're probably thinking of Betacam, that's a pro format that hung on until everything went digital in the industry

E: goddamn it

Code Jockey
Jan 24, 2006

69420 basic bytes free
Oh huh, I always thought Betamax was the one still being used in TV studios. Thanks, thread!

Pingiivi
Mar 26, 2010

Straight into the iris!
I haven't seen Betacam SP around except as old master tapes. It's analog, the footage looks pretty bad and you'll need a time base corrector or a deck with a built in TBC if you want to use them in a digital environment. Digital Betacam is still in use in some places that deal with SD stuff.

Truck Stop Daddy
Apr 17, 2013

A janitor cleans the bathroom

Muldoon
Betacam SP masters were very common in the 80s and early 90s, for TV stuff/docus etc. A ton of them keep showing up at the archive where I work. They look quite alright if we consider the contemporary U-matic HB masters (and the state they usually are in these days)... or the preceding 1" C tape reels :cry:

Screened a DCP made from a Betacam source at a small cinema not so long ago (out of lack of a better copy), and I can assure you it looks like poo poo on a big screen.

e:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8CbG30G1Zg

Actually the main problem with 1" C, 2" quad, etc. these days is not always the reels themselves but lack of functioning equipment to do anything with it. I have a small stack of Type C reels on my desk, that I can't do anything with yet. Tape heads have been out of production for a long while. The combined lifespan of allthe remaining tape heads for these formats are probably shorter than the time it would take to digitize all the undigitized tapes left in the world :(

Here's some cool guides/cheat sheets for assessment of the most common formats:
http://www.arts.texas.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/video.pdf
https://psap.library.illinois.edu/format-id-guide/videotape

Truck Stop Daddy has a new favorite as of 10:31 on Nov 11, 2015

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

Today I read an article about a guy who works at the National Library of Germany and whose job it is to rip their CD collection, one at a time. They set it up so everything's automated. He just puts the CD into a custom machine, presses a button, and it does the rest. One CD takes 27 seconds. Their CD collection, by definition, consists of every CD anyone has ever published in the country. And as soon as he's done, they'll have to start thinking about how to keep the data readable for the future. It's one of the most "memento mori" jobs I ever heard of.

Apparently cardboard CD sleeves, and probably digipaks by expansion, are actually super bad for CDs from an archiving point of view, because acids in the paper affect the plastic.

Trabant
Nov 26, 2011

All systems nominal.
Because I'm a sucker for old photos, here are some of Ye Olde Computer Shoppes (from here):










which somehow brings back memories of roaming CompUSA in late 90s for the latest, unreliable, obsolete-the-next-minute way to expand storage and eventually settling on...



Suck it, Ziphavers :smuggo:

Exit Strategy
Dec 10, 2010

by sebmojo

Trabant posted:

which somehow brings back memories of roaming CompUSA in late 90s for the latest, unreliable, obsolete-the-next-minute way to expand storage and eventually settling on...



Suck it, Ziphavers :smuggo:

Now I'm just remembering my old stack of size-of-a-modern-laptop SCSI-1 HDDs that I used to store my porn on and disconnect from the family computer when I was done.

Dick Trauma
Nov 30, 2007

God damn it, you've got to be kind.
Cromemco joysticks? :gonk:

Glad I didn't pop up in any of those pictures. :ninja:

Trabant
Nov 26, 2011

All systems nominal.

Exit Strategy posted:

Now I'm just remembering my old stack of size-of-a-modern-laptop SCSI-1 HDDs that I used to store my porn on and disconnect from the family computer when I was done.

Sharing a computer really helped develop good opsec habits.

Code Jockey
Jan 24, 2006

69420 basic bytes free

Reminds me a lot of a computer shop back in my hometown, from aeons ago of course. Great post.

I miss that era. A lot. I miss old computer shops, especially the super messy ones. Cables everywhere, dismantled PCs all over the place, brown fake wood walls, drop ceilings with buzzy fluorescent lights, while I wait to hear what's wrong with my 486. :allears:

It blows my mind how much easier it is to work on PCs now, how easy they are to modify/upgrade, and how available hardware is [and how much choice we have]. Kind of sad to see old school mom and pop computer shops die off, but so it goes.

e. Meant to quote this:

But that other one I quoted actually reminds me of a different computer shop that, I believe, might still be open. I think they survive off of servicing business PCs anymore, but I once payed them a hilarious amount of money for what was probably like 16 megs of RAM

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli
In Australia you'd either end up in a Dick Smith's store or a Tandy's - basically the Aussie Radioshack where they started off selling CB radios and kit systems along with regular electronics like phones and so on.

Dick Smiths would sell Tandy clones, so the Dick Smith System 80 was riffling a TRS-80. The ads of the day are pretty fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNqwdosmMJw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G55tsSN6eKw

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


Trabant posted:

Sharing a computer really helped develop good opsec habits.

I remember myself and a friend had a sneakernet of porn distribution in my younger days.

As my mother tended to travel a lot for her work, she always had meetups with my friends parents who had moved away or were penpals.

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule delivering floppies to my friends when she visited. I told her it was "easier and cheaper than printing a letter and mailing it seeing as you are going that way anyway!"

Now for the opsec the discs were actually opened and the platter was covered in paper to prevent anyone reading it that didn't know that you had to remove the paper to read it.

loving pioneers!

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

moller
Jan 10, 2007

Swan stole my music and framed me!

Humphreys posted:

I remember myself and a friend had a sneakernet of porn distribution in my younger days.

As my mother tended to travel a lot for her work, she always had meetups with my friends parents who had moved away or were penpals.

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule delivering floppies to my friends when she visited. I told her it was "easier and cheaper than printing a letter and mailing it seeing as you are going that way anyway!"

Now for the opsec the discs were actually opened and the platter was covered in paper to prevent anyone reading it that didn't know that you had to remove the paper to read it.

loving pioneers!

Leisure Suit Larry? Text files? ASCII art? A single digit quantity of static 32/64 color gifs?

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply