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Arsenic Lupin posted:In the 1950s, people worried a lot. (I wonder why?) One of the things they worried about was that watching TV in a dark room would cause eyestrain. The solution? The TV lamp. It sat on the top of the TV and cast a dim glow on the wall behind it; this supposedly protected your eyes by lowering the contrast between the bright TV and the room, without making it harder to see the TV. Wow, that might explain a couple weird old lamps I found at my grandparents’ house when we were cleaning it out. They had one very similar to that owl one and it seemed completely useless
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Dec 5, 2019 19:45
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Buttcoin purse posted:Remember Dr. Sbaitso? I can't remember but assume there was other text to speech software included too. Dr. Sbaitso loving ruled. Was that the one with the graphic of the talking parrot? So much time spent giggling like an idiot at making it say cusses. So much time.
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Dec 5, 2019 19:57
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Arsenic Lupin posted:In the 1950s, people worried a lot. (I wonder why?) One of the things they worried about was that watching TV in a dark room would cause eyestrain. The solution? The TV lamp. It sat on the top of the TV and cast a dim glow on the wall behind it; this supposedly protected your eyes by lowering the contrast between the bright TV and the room, without making it harder to see the TV. When I was a little kid those things were everywhere but I had no idea that they were lamps until now. I thought they were just ugly sculptures!
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Dec 5, 2019 20:23
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Neito posted:Now there's a name I haven't heard in quite a while...
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Dec 5, 2019 20:24
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Dick Trauma posted:When I was a little kid those things were everywhere but I had no idea that they were lamps until now. I thought they were just ugly sculptures! I know I've seen them before, and yeah, I figured it was just something to add a little bit more decor to the old ornate console TVs that some people had.
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Dec 5, 2019 20:36
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Arsenic Lupin posted:In the 1950s, people worried a lot. (I wonder why?) One of the things they worried about was that watching TV in a dark room would cause eyestrain. The solution? The TV lamp. It sat on the top of the TV and cast a dim glow on the wall behind it; this supposedly protected your eyes by lowering the contrast between the bright TV and the room, without making it harder to see the TV. The Soviet military did studies about eyestrain and painted the instrument panels of their aircraft, submarines and tanks in an odd blue/green colour for this reason:  They were also quite fond of the old system of panel lighting where the markings on the dials were painted in radium and a UV blacklight in the roof would make the markings glow without requiring floodlights or back-lighting - a technique that allowed you get radiation exposure and sunburn while flying in the middle of the night. It was a method banned in the US in the late 60s (having been effectively obsoleted by workplace safety requirements before that) but the USSR was still building aircraft with radium dials (and weird blue instrument panels) well into the 1980s.
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Dec 5, 2019 21:14
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twistedmentat posted:That's exactly it. Yea i can see why seeing its depth would be hard based on that information. Had no idea it was a projection tv, i always saw them as huge crazy things. In one of the flats I was in as a student, we had one of those big fuckers. The lamps worked but didn't focus so you couldn't watch anything. We put a glass plate in the bottom and used it as a liquor cabinet.
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Dec 5, 2019 21:37
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https://twitter.com/spindlypete/status/1118711994796765186
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Dec 5, 2019 22:07
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I still do burn them occasionally for work. Some computers aren't allowed flash drives or network connections. I always feel terribly wasteful doing it for a measly 15MB PDF folder
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Dec 5, 2019 22:27
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I had a CD burned for me this very morning. It has X-rays of my shoulder with a plate and a literal dozen screws in it. Hopefully that's the last one.
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Dec 5, 2019 22:29
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I've been burning some Sega Saturn games on CDs a couple months ago
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Dec 5, 2019 23:46
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It's been a little over a year for my last CD burn, that's when I got a new car to replace the 2005 and its in-dash CD changer. The new car can read a USB stick full of mp3 folders, but it seems to read the files in the order they're recorded in the flash drive's allocation table, not in alphabetical order or anything that would make sense to the user. If you drag-and-drop a folder (say an album) onto the stick from your computer, the play order ends up shuffled. If you add another file later, it always ends up at the end of the playlist no matter what it's named. I ended up writing a little python script to clear the usb to start it fresh, and then write all the folders and files to it, one at a time in the correct order, so that they end up playing in the correct order in the car. It beats burning CDs but I'm very disappointed in whoever it was at Honda that programmed the stereo interface. Powered Descent has a new favorite as of 23:56 on Dec 5, 2019 |
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Dec 5, 2019 23:51
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twistedmentat posted:That's exactly it. Yea i can see why seeing its depth would be hard based on that information. Had no idea it was a projection tv, i always saw them as huge crazy things. My brother had one of these when I was a kid, except the three light box was outside the TV, like a few feet away. I remember sitting on it playing NES Baseball. (with him, it was big Cocaine Dealer Energy)
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Dec 5, 2019 23:55
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Powered Descent posted:The new car can read a USB stick full of mp3 folders, but it seems to read the files in the order they're recorded in the flash drive's allocation table, not in alphabetical order or anything that would make sense to the user.
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Dec 6, 2019 00:17
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Even if I don't have a telly: OWL!
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Dec 6, 2019 00:45
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Armacham posted:Not even obsolete! Bias Lighting is definitely still a thing. https://lifehacker.com/why-bias-lighting-increases-your-tvs-contrast-and-saves-1695117890 Basically when grading pictures your eye will subconsciously adapt to what's on screen vs your surroundings. So back when people fitted out suites in wood panelling and making it all nice and fancy, the brain would start subconsciously subtracting the warm tones and you'd end up making your shots extra warm trying to compensate. What most suites nowadays will have is what looks like a fluro tube on the ground. This isn't fancy mood lighting but is a bias light to stop your iris compensating for prominent colours in a room, like if you have a big red poster or the room is white or black.
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Dec 6, 2019 00:54
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Great, now I'm going to have to burn another CD! I did actually burn an audio cd just a few years back to play in the car. The stock stereo wouldn't play CD-Rs 
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Dec 6, 2019 01:46
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Pastry of the Year posted:I had never heard of the (Tandy) Memorex VIS before today, but this promo video for it is extremely 90s and very bonkers: Thank you for helping me understand just what the hell I was seeing in Radio Shack when I was five years old.
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Dec 6, 2019 01:47
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Phanatic posted:I had one of these: The AWE32 was the best old Creative sound card. I had one salvaged out of a scrapped computer that had two 32mb SIMMs installed for 64 MB, although the original installer must not have realized half of that was inaccessible.
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Dec 6, 2019 01:47
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Flipperwaldt posted:Very common garbage implementation. I've had tvs, dvd players with usb ports and mp3 players that did that. And car on board entertainment, yeah. Bonus for crapping out at more than a thousand files and still taking over two minutes to scan a usb drive if you kept it below that. In my mom's car you could shuffle all, but the first track it would play on startup was always the first file in the allocation table. Utter poo poo. Probably they use readdir(3) to list files. Sorting is hard, guys!
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Dec 6, 2019 02:08
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mobby_6kl posted:Great, now I'm going to have to burn another CD! Then I discovered images. Trying to think when I bonafide did a CD. I have a feeling it was a bunch of music for a family member at least a decade ago. Once external drives were a thing I moved off from CDs. I don't miss lugging giant drives and power bricks around in backpacks.
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Dec 6, 2019 03:01
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I have a 2015 Honda with a CD Player in it, but it also plays off of a flash drive. When I drive my five year old around, my music selection becomes... not my own, so there's a CD-R with MP3s I can quickly toggle to for the My Little Pony soundtrack, without hunting for it on the slow-rear end piece of garbage that is the car's music player interface. So yeah, I burned a CD-R in the last six months, but danged if I could do it now: I have no idea where my spare CD-Rs are.
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Dec 6, 2019 04:09
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I had to loving BUY a pack of cds when I tried to replay a few old games on my modchiped PS1. Then I had to burn them at like 4x speed because everything else produced errors due to the poo poo media.Flipperwaldt posted:Bonus for crapping out at more than a thousand files and still taking over two minutes to scan a usb drive if you kept it below that. In my mom's car you could shuffle all, but the first track it would play on startup was always the first file in the allocation table. Utter poo poo. Lol at my purchasing at 32Gig flash drive and realizing it capped out at 2500 files.
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Dec 6, 2019 04:15
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FilthyImp posted:Same on my Chevy. I have to swap out the first song every few months or else I get sick of it. It's for purely alphabetical reasons, but: Vampire Weekend's A-Punk? I never liked it, but my wife does, so I tolerated it. Until we took an 8-hour (each way) road trip. Every loving time we stopped the car and started driving again, that lovely, lovely song would play from her phone. I went from dislike to outright hatred of that song. We couldn't play music from my phone because Android lyfe + no aux cord in the rental. But her iPhone could connect without any problems! 
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Dec 6, 2019 04:26
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Arsenic Lupin posted:In the 1950s, people worried a lot. (I wonder why?) One of the things they worried about was that watching TV in a dark room would cause eyestrain. The solution? The TV lamp. It sat on the top of the TV and cast a dim glow on the wall behind it; this supposedly protected your eyes by lowering the contrast between the bright TV and the room, without making it harder to see the TV. Even in the 1980s, larger TVs had a lightbulb socket with its own switch on the back. Like a built in TV-lamp.
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Dec 6, 2019 14:23
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axolotl farmer posted:Even in the 1980s, larger TVs had a lightbulb socket with its own switch on the back. Like a built in TV-lamp. I had a lot of big 80s TVs in the early 2000s (because you could always get a new one for free when one broke down, provided you could carry it) and never saw one.
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Dec 6, 2019 15:09
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Watching nero burn a cd, keeping a close eye on the buffer bar. Oh poo poo, the buffer's getting smaller and smaller! Is it because the cd is close to being finished or because trillian is doing something??? 
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Dec 6, 2019 15:15
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Burning CDs always gave me flashbacks to earlier times of hiding behind the bed while waiting for a game to load because loving ANYTHING could apparently trigger the dread ?LOAD ERROR.
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Dec 6, 2019 15:27
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I stopped burning CDs when I got a car with a bluetooth stereo, and for the most part it behaves perfectly - even if I listen to a different playlist at home or work, the car usually picks up where it left off. Every once in a while, usually after an iOS update, it stops listing tracks on my dashboard computer or breaks the ability to select tracks (next/prev almost always work though). And sometimes it decides to start from the first track in my library alphabetically, which is Abbaon Fat Track by Tricky. A good song on a good album but usually not what I want to listen to. That's almost certainly my phone's fault though. I did burn a CD for work for a few months ago. I don't even remember what the point was, or why a USB flash drive wasn't an option. SLOSifl has a new favorite as of 15:32 on Dec 6, 2019 |
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Dec 6, 2019 15:30
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My mom has a fuckoff huge projector TV, I'll get a picture of it later today. She also has it consistently installed in upstairs bedrooms, which must have been really fun for the moving guys over the years.
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Dec 6, 2019 15:34
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SLOSifl posted:I stopped burning CDs when I got a car with a bluetooth stereo, and for the most part it behaves perfectly - even if I listen to a different playlist at home or work, the car usually picks up where it left off. Every once in a while, usually after an iOS update, it stops listing tracks on my dashboard computer or breaks the ability to select tracks (next/prev almost always work though). I suspect that I stopped around 2014 when I got a smart phone for the first time. A few years prior (I wanna say 2007) I had a revelation that most of my CDs were maybe not rare, but uncommon and not easy to acquire, so whenever I wanted to listen to one in my car, I would just make a copy of it so I wouldn't care if someone stole my copied CDs. That particular car I had back then also had a habit of not ejecting CDs every time, so if a CDR stayed in there forever it also wasn't a big deal.
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Dec 6, 2019 15:46
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I'm transferring data off of thousands of burnt CDs for work right now. Bless the people who entrusted their life's work to metal films on plastic discs in paper sleeves. I'm surprised I can still read nearly all of them.
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Dec 6, 2019 18:39
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People don't understand about "digital rot". CDs are not an archival format.
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Dec 6, 2019 18:48
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Isn't "carved into rock somewhere out of the wind and rain" still the most permanent option for recording things?
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Dec 6, 2019 19:04
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That's why they invented the M-Disc!
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Dec 6, 2019 19:04
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Phy posted:Isn't "carved into rock somewhere out of the wind and rain" still the most permanent option for recording things? Millennia from now, explorers will locate a chamber, deep in the earth, and wonder about the message left carved in the walls. " Surely, this pattern of 0s and 1s had some sort of ritual, religious association."
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Dec 6, 2019 19:23
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e:^^^Get out of my head.Phy posted:Isn't "carved into rock somewhere out of the wind and rain" still the most permanent option for recording things? Somewhere in the deepest cave humanity has explored, carved in solid rock by feel alone, forever unseen and uncommented upon, is a lonely reminder of our struggle against death, against time. All the shining glory of our artistry on Earth, in the heavens and beyond, will lose it's luster, crumble, and be erased before it. One thing has remained and will remain. An archetypal depiction of a forgotten troglodyte: nearly hairless, smooth and strangely muscled, it's one eye sightless.
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Dec 6, 2019 19:23
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SLOSifl posted:
Every few weeks I would randomly rename certain tracks with AAAA at the beginning of the title just so they would be the first song to play whenever my phone decided to do that because I would get sick of whatever the first alphabetical song in my library was. With CarPlay, I don't seem to have that problem anymore, but I was reminded of it a couple of days ago when I had my library set to random and "AAAA-Natural One - Folk Implosion" started playing.
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Dec 6, 2019 19:24
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Phy posted:Isn't "carved into rock somewhere out of the wind and rain" still the most permanent option for recording things? If you can swing it, billions of miles away from the nearest wind and rain is even better. Here's a data archive from 1977 that'll last a while. Its musical selections, audio clips, and images will still be perfectly intact long after the Sun has burned out.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record Peruse the contents yourself: http://goldenrecord.org
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Dec 6, 2019 19:31
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I like the Pioneer plaques a bit more, no record grooves but it's got a drawing of naked people and that pulsar diagram so we basically sent nudes and directions to our house
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Dec 6, 2019 19:37
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