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lol yeah after that they started rolling out cable boxes with macrovision. for whatever reason the service level was programmed into the box by the head end of course that meant that you could just buy an oem cable box online and then program it yourself to allow all of the channels. i forget the specific model but i got some gray panasonic one, which was also my first experience with a comb filter 
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Nov 21, 2022 01:33
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Beeftweeter posted:lol yeah after that they started rolling out cable boxes with macrovision. for whatever reason the service level was programmed into the box by the head end the cable company in my parents' area kept their standard analog service going until 2017 or so, and a cable box always cost extra, so we never had a box at any point we did figure out that we could get watchable pay-per-view by setting it to the proper channel fiddling with the fine tuning controls on the vcr though
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Nov 21, 2022 01:44
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those jerrold boxes
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Nov 21, 2022 01:54
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free ad-supported isps and adblocking cracks/dialer authentication intercepts i guess there was a pretty long stretch where i didn't pay for a goddamned thing lol. this is what they took from us
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Nov 21, 2022 02:01
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the pinnacle of .com lols had to be alladvantage. literally money for nothing at first, people at school used to hook their mice to oscillating fans overnight. then came trembler.exe and the escalating arms race between the company and tools that faked usage. it culminated in SoA (sisterhood of angels), a program that spoofed usage and auto generated massive amounts of fake referral accounts. for a couple months, people made hundreds of dollars from this just by running the program at night. then came the "we can't prove that you've been scamming us, so we're paying you for the last month, but your account is henceforth terminated. gently caress off" letters. the company went out of business a month or two later The_Franz fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Nov 21, 2022 |
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Nov 21, 2022 02:14
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idk how you can talk about early cable tv w/o talking about these guys
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Nov 21, 2022 02:16
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rotor posted:idk how you can talk about early cable tv w/o talking about these guys this is what i remember 
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Nov 21, 2022 02:17
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rotor posted:idk how you can talk about early cable tv w/o talking about these guys hello old friend
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Nov 21, 2022 02:20
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Sniep posted:this is what i remember yeah this is what we had too. the oem panasonic one was maybe 10 years later but it looked almost identical, just gray instead of faux wood panels
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Nov 21, 2022 02:21
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i see rotor has me on ignore. we had that old school fake wood one with buttons, then later this one: 
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Nov 21, 2022 02:21
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nudgenudgetilt posted:those jerrold boxes man idk what they were called, i just posted the pic, dont hassle me
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Nov 21, 2022 02:24
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Sniep posted:this is what i remember thinking of how these things accreted the odors of the prior cable company customers’ homes and all smelled like cigarettes
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Nov 21, 2022 02:26
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Beeftweeter posted:yeah this is what we had too. the oem panasonic one was maybe 10 years later but it looked almost identical, just gray instead of faux wood panels yeah i def had the latter panasonic one too - i think they changed rooms as i was a kid, ended up the woodgrain one was in mom's room and then the kitchen i think got hte panasonic. living room tv i think had a vcr that did tv by that point. idk, but i def remember the boxes these mfers  then it got all built in and now I have apple TVs on every TV in my house lol. full circle to a device to handle the barrage of bullshit
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Nov 21, 2022 02:27
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Sniep posted:yeah i def had the latter panasonic one too - i think they changed rooms as i was a kid, ended up the woodgrain one was in mom's room and then the kitchen i think got hte panasonic. living room tv i think had a vcr that did tv by that point. idk, but i def remember the boxes holy poo poo nailed it
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Nov 21, 2022 02:29
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entering hella long decryption keys for the homebrew satcard 4 digits at a time (it piggybacked off the parental lock, which was the only input available)
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Nov 21, 2022 02:33
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rotor posted:idk how you can talk about early cable tv w/o talking about these guys left knob in the middle, button 32. that’s the Disney channel on that exact cable box that I haven’t used since 1985. that is permanently seared into my brain.
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Nov 21, 2022 03:19
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anyone else remember watching the prevue channel, waiting on new separators and times to push old separators and times out of the way?
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Nov 21, 2022 03:25
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nudgenudgetilt posted:anyone else remember watching the prevue channel, waiting on new separators and times to push old separators and times out of the way? of course. also vcr+ codes to record poo poo
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Nov 21, 2022 03:27
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rockyou.txt
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Nov 21, 2022 03:54
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kitten smoothie posted:thinking of how these things accreted the odors of the prior cable company customers’ homes and all smelled like cigarettes linear power supplies, as switchers were still new gizmos. hence they ran hot, as the tuner and decoder circuits needed more power than you'd think, and linears are at best 50% efficient. this bakes the tar onto the cable box
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Nov 21, 2022 03:57
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Early 2000s Korean online games. Ragnarok Online, Gundbound, Gunz: The Duel, etc. Pretty sure Gunbound was doing free-to-play with microtransactions a decade before mobile gaming ever did. Edit: I remember when we first got cable broadband internet, downloading the Ragnarok Online client at a rock solid 300 kbps thinking that was the fastest anyone would ever need to download anything. Pulcinella fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Nov 21, 2022 |
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Nov 21, 2022 04:03
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Pulcinella posted:Early 2000s Korean online games. Ragnarok Online, Gundbound, Gunz: The Duel, etc. Pretty sure Gunbound was doing free-to-play with microtransactions a decade before mobile gaming ever did. o poo poo i remember gunbound
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Nov 21, 2022 04:08
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The_Franz posted:the pinnacle of .com lols had to be alladvantage. literally money for nothing In 2010 ish, a friend of mine was running some script he made to continuously do Bing searches, because Microsoft was paying people per search to use it. nudgenudgetilt posted:anyone else remember watching the prevue channel, waiting on new separators and times to push old separators and times out of the way? I vaguely remember in the 90s a channel that I think was an oscilloscope at some local cable junction, which displayed some kind of sine wave or signal strength or something. I have no idea what it was for, I'm guessing for someone who worked at the cable company to help them diagnose issues, Not sure if this really counts as tech poo poo, but TV Guide, the weekly poo poo quality paper magazine that had the programming schedules for the networks for the week.
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Nov 21, 2022 04:08
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Volmarias posted:In 2010 ish, a friend of mine was running some script he made to continuously do Bing searches, because Microsoft was paying people per search to use it. they still do, you just need like 25,000 points now for anything worthwhile. before it was like 2,000 or something my original account got banned for using bingbot but i got like $500 in amazon gift cards before they did lol https://rewards.microsoft.com
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Nov 21, 2022 04:14
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Volmarias posted:In 2010 ish, a friend of mine was running some script he made to continuously do Bing searches, because Microsoft was paying people per search to use it. i think i remember seeing that once or twice on the community bulletin board channel. you'd also catch an amiga desktop there from time to time
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Nov 21, 2022 04:19
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i think that was an extremely local cctv feed actually. i remember it being on channel 80 or something and the quality would get noticeably worse at night
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Nov 21, 2022 04:21
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:the Disney channel check out the rich kid with premium cable channels
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Nov 21, 2022 04:29
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Sniep posted:this is what i remember my dad had one of these
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Nov 21, 2022 04:58
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we also had an enormous satellite dish (like 8-10 ft diameter) on a pole in our back yard that my dad also used for pirating TV, even though we still paid for cable. i think it was almost more about doing it than needing to do it. he was able to use it to hook me up with those crucial (mostly) descrambled ppv's during the wwf attitude era.
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Nov 21, 2022 05:00
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Beeftweeter posted:vcr+ codes to record poo poo oh man, i remember the family getting a vcr with ShowView code programming (regional name for VCR+). before that, we had a VCR that was programmed using a bar code reader in the remote and a programming sheet like this: 
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Nov 21, 2022 05:11
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TV-B-Gone
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Nov 21, 2022 05:20
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Volmarias posted:TV-B-Gone i had an app that did that with a phone that had an ir emitter several years ago. owned.
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Nov 21, 2022 05:25
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Midjack posted:i had an app that did that with a phone that had an ir emitter several years ago. owned. fuckin IrDA
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Nov 21, 2022 05:26
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Volmarias posted:TV-B-Gone my dad also had one of those tv remote control watches that I think worked just like this.
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Nov 21, 2022 05:26
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phone with ir emitter sounds sick
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Nov 21, 2022 05:27
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HELLOMYNAMEIS___ posted:oh man, i remember the family getting a vcr with ShowView code programming (regional name for VCR+). before that, we had a VCR that was programmed using a bar code reader in the remote and a programming sheet like this: whoa, i've never seen that before. fancy post hole digger posted:phone with ir emitter sounds sick my huawei mate 10 pro has one. its good
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Nov 21, 2022 05:29
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post hole digger posted:phone with ir emitter sounds sick they were yeah, there was a great palmos universal remote app back before harmony remotes existed
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Nov 21, 2022 05:42
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lol the handspring visor had the ir blaster on the side and that pissed me off in indescribable ways
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Nov 21, 2022 05:44
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rotor posted:they were yeah, there was a great palmos universal remote app back before harmony remotes existed Used my Palm to turn off the TV while it was playing a video during Drivers Ed and the instructor threatened everyone what would happen if he figured out who did it
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Nov 21, 2022 05:57
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which tech pub got one of those tvoff emitters and went around loving with the displays i want to say, the verge?
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Nov 21, 2022 06:00
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