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Moo the cow
Apr 30, 2020

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

A few of those players worked, right? I watched the abridged version and it seemed like he got something out of the pile? I found the abridged version kind of confusing.

Likewise.

If I wanted to see someone sort through a pile of old consumer electronics, with no idea if they worked or not and fail to get any of them working - I'd sort my own cupboards out.

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Pastry of the Year
Apr 12, 2013

On the subject of portable music players l, I had a Rio Karma and I adored that little thing; it served me well for years and I'm sure it's in one of the four thousand boxes in the basement and I know using it now would be a completely impractical affectation, but it was just such a pleasing object, a perfect little piece of design.

T-man
Aug 22, 2010


Talk shit, get bzzzt.

the second hand thrill of going to goodwill and googling to see if any of the vintage calculators are worth more online than they want at the store, then discovering that this store obviously puts all the good stuff online and overpriced.

(goodwill is a Bad Company don't shop there)

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

Humphreys posted:

There's a few reasons why PS/2 over USB for keyboards and mouse are a thing. I'd explain, but Linus did a good video covering it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWkvzycD5PE

am I the only person who finds that voice really grating?

Mercedes Colomar
Nov 1, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Pretty good posted:

Asked for a 10GB third gen ipod for my birthday in 2003, received this



It was... okay? I got a hand me down discman for a birthday in 2000 and this thing was technically a step up from that in that it supported mp3 CDs, but around the same time my home life fell apart and the family computer with the CD burner + my mp3 collection got sold off so by the time I finally got to gently caress around with burned discs a year and a half later it was embarrassingly obsolete.

At least it had good skip protection so I could walk around town clutching it in one hand listening to Dream Theater without it cutting out every ten seconds, unlike the piece of poo poo it replaced.

Is the little scrollwheel at the front an AM/FM tuner? I think I had that thing. I remember the red and the ATRAC3PLUS on the top. Didn't mean a dang thing of course.

Powered Descent
Jul 13, 2008

We haven't had that spirit here since 1969.

Moo the cow posted:

Likewise.

If I wanted to see someone sort through a pile of old consumer electronics, with no idea if they worked or not and fail to get any of them working - I'd sort my own cupboards out.

I have the opposite problem. Everything works.

:thunk: *I'm sorting through the electronics closet, and coming across a very very old laptop. Angel and devil appear on my shoulders.*

:angel: That thing is SO old. It's useless. Chuck it.
:devil: But it works fine! Why would you get rid of a perfectly good laptop?
:angel: It's a Pentium III.
:devil: Here, plug it in. See? It still boots up.
:angel: ...That's Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.
:devil: I bet it'd still run modern Debian just fine!
:angel: I remember this thing can't even boot from USB, you'd need to find a CD-ROM drive that fits that weird Dell port on the side.
:devil: And that drive has got to be somewhere in this closet! I'm telling you, this thing would make a great light-duty server!
:angel: For what?
:devil: Um... for that printer back there with no network adapter!
:angel: That's a whole separate fight. Besides, we already have Raspberry Pis for anything like that.
:devil: Trust me, as soon as you pitch it, you'll find a use for it.
:angel: I bet it uses as much power as every other computer in the house combined.
:devil: Even so.
:thunk: Well... I mean, it's not broken. *Puts in "keep" stack*
:angel: You know what, don't come crying to me when your piles of junk fall over and smother you while you sleep.

an actual frog
Mar 1, 2007


HEH, HEH, HEH!

Powered Descent posted:

:devil: Trust me, as soon as you pitch it, you'll find a use for it.
Aint that the truth. One of these days I'll run into a problem that can only be solved using a laptop with serial, parallel, pcmcia, a floppy disk drive, fast ethernet and USB (1.1!). One of these days...

Cojawfee
May 31, 2006
I think the US is dumb for not using Celsius
I took apart a USB hub to figure out why it wasn't powering on and was doing continuity testing on various bits and the capacitors didn't look blown and everything seemed fine but it wouldn't work so I threw away the plastic case for it and planned on recycling the PCB at some point. Until I realized a week or so later that I had another 5V wall wart that fit the plug and it worked just fine. As soon as you throw something away, you need it.

Horace
Apr 17, 2007

Gone Skiin'

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

A few of those players worked, right? I watched the abridged version and it seemed like he got something out of the pile? I found the abridged version kind of confusing.

He managed to get more than half of them working. His conclusion was that they came from a lost property office and had been stored somewhere damp.

Mister Kingdom
Dec 14, 2005

And the tears that fall
On the city wall
Will fade away
With the rays of morning light

Tunicate posted:

am I the only person who finds that voice really grating?

Nope. I avoid his videos becauase of his voice and presentation.

Wasabi the J
Jan 23, 2008

MOM WAS RIGHT

Mister Kingdom posted:

Nope. I avoid his videos becauase of his voice and presentation.

I enjoy when JayzTwoCents does the Linus voice and fucks around with something.

I view LTT as a computer hardware based reality TV show.

cyberbug
Sep 30, 2004

The name is Carl Seltz...
insurance inspector.
I just burned a backup of my oldest set of digital photos on a BD-RE disk. I have now used 60% of the first and only 5-pack of disks I bought... yeah that drive might have not been the smartest buy. I can remember it cost 400 back in the day. It was faster and more convenient than a tape drive but I obviously switched to some other backup strategies soon after. But hey, I still have it and it works so why not?

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Why do on-topic Youtubers always gently caress around with SCSI? They never get it to work, and they never have any actual reason to use it. There's a reason why it never broke into personal computers.

In the machines I have with SCSI, there is no IDE controller, so there is kind of no alternative. Besides, the SGI is 80-pin, which is easier than SATA - just stuff the drive in there and it'll work, with power and data over a single backplane plug. For old PCs and the like, I guess performance? Old IDE was sort of trash.

Creature
Mar 9, 2009

We've already seen a dead horse

Pretty good posted:

Asked for a 10GB third gen ipod for my birthday in 2003, received this



It was... okay? I got a hand me down discman for a birthday in 2000 and this thing was technically a step up from that in that it supported mp3 CDs, but around the same time my home life fell apart and the family computer with the CD burner + my mp3 collection got sold off so by the time I finally got to gently caress around with burned discs a year and a half later it was embarrassingly obsolete.

At least it had good skip protection so I could walk around town clutching it in one hand listening to Dream Theater without it cutting out every ten seconds, unlike the piece of poo poo it replaced.

I loved this Discman. I had this exact model for a few years before upgrading to a 4th gen iPod for Christmas 2004.

I didn’t go anywhere without the discman and a folder of CDs back then, so I saved space by making MP3 CDs of my favourite bands. It was the best. The only downside was how long it took to rip CDs and manually tag each file and folder so that they’d display correctly on that teeny little display.

Unperson_47
Oct 14, 2007



I watched that entire Techmoan Minidisc roundup and I gotta say the gumstick batteries are really appealing for some reason. I've never heard of them before that video and now I just want to hold one.

less than three
Aug 9, 2007



Fallen Rib

Unperson_47 posted:

I watched that entire Techmoan Minidisc roundup and I gotta say the gumstick batteries are really appealing for some reason. I've never heard of them before that video and now I just want to hold one.

I forgot about them until his new videos. My MD player lasted a million hours on a single charge with that battery.

You Am I
May 20, 2001

Me @ your poasting

Unperson_47 posted:

I watched that entire Techmoan Minidisc roundup and I gotta say the gumstick batteries are really appealing for some reason. I've never heard of them before that video and now I just want to hold one.

Those styles of batteries are being repurposed for small quad/drones these days

twistedmentat
Nov 21, 2003

Its my party
and I'll die if
I want to
Something I much prefer Google Play or Spotify with over MP3 players, even Ipods, is that the software you use to put songs on them is always terrible. Also sitting down and putting each CD in your drive, transferring the songs onto the computer and having the software convert the songs into whatever exclusive format it used.

I actually wonder where my minidisk player went. I have the Mp3 player I got after it, but not a hint of where the MD player went.

Cojawfee
May 31, 2006
I think the US is dumb for not using Celsius
While I never had a minidisc player, I think it's really cool. I love formats where it seems like a lot of thought went into it and people had some really good ideas, but it just happened at the wrong time and something more convenient happened at the same time or soon after.

Unperson_47
Oct 14, 2007



Cojawfee posted:

While I never had a minidisc player, I think it's really cool. I love formats where it seems like a lot of thought went into it

Same. I also think the minidiscs themselves look cool. I really liked that one in the Techmoan video that was striped with pastel colors.

barbecue at the folks
Jul 20, 2007


Minidiscs were the future. And I guess they still are, the transparent tiny discs just yell 'the year 20xx' to me in a way that no tiny thumb drive ever will.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

barbecue at the folks posted:

Minidiscs were the future. And I guess they still are, the transparent tiny discs just yell 'the year 20xx' to me in a way that no tiny thumb drive ever will.

CF cards are a bit 20xx. They just need cooler labels and possibly other colours. Maybe transparent?

Buttcoin purse
Apr 24, 2014

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Why do on-topic Youtubers always gently caress around with SCSI? They never get it to work, and they never have any actual reason to use it. There's a reason why it never broke into personal computers.

I don't watch too much YouTube stuff so I don't know what examples you're talking about, but you can do some cool stuff with SCSI. Sure it's not as easy to use as USB but then USB is relatively modern, so for quite a while SCSI was kind of the peak of cross-platform solution for accessing storage and other things, wasn't it?

:siren: With the right combination of SCSI cards and software which I can't necessarily explain why it works and others don't, :siren: I can get one old PC to boot from what it thinks is an external SCSI disk but is actually a second PC with a disk image on it. Maybe I should make a YouTube video of that. Maybe I should have also made a YouTube video of when I killed one of my Macs by turning on an external SCSI disk while the Mac was running, and it started making the twilight zone theme, but I think people would have been disappointed that I didn't actually cry or scream on camera :cry:

I suppose that for people who are used to things being simple and just working so they can figure it out on-camera, SCSI is likely to exceed their threshold for how much they feel like trying?

twistedmentat posted:

Something I much prefer Google Play or Spotify with over MP3 players, even Ipods, is that the software you use to put songs on them is always terrible.

Much like DVD players where the cheap no-name ones are actually "better" because you can skip the stuff you don't want to see, my cheap store-brand MP3 player just presented itself as a USB mass storage device :smuggo:

BattleMaster
Aug 14, 2000

barbecue at the folks posted:

Minidiscs were the future. And I guess they still are, the transparent tiny discs just yell 'the year 20xx' to me in a way that no tiny thumb drive ever will.

I have never seen a minidisc in purpose and for a long time I thought they were made up because I had only seen them used as futuristic props in 90s sci-fi TV shows.

Pretty good
Apr 16, 2007



Manuel Calavera posted:

Is the little scrollwheel at the front an AM/FM tuner? I think I had that thing. I remember the red and the ATRAC3PLUS on the top. Didn't mean a dang thing of course.
I don't remember it having a radio, pretty sure it was a jog wheel for navigating directories/scrolling through lists of tracks/etc

mobby_6kl
Aug 9, 2009

I remember staring at MD players in window shops, they looked like something out of Johnny Mnemonic. Never had one though, my parents didn't want to get me one and by the time I could buy it myself, it was mostly mp3s. I wouldn't want a box of 50 players but I'd get a working recorder for :10bux: to gently caress around with.

Unperson_47 posted:

I watched that entire Techmoan Minidisc roundup and I gotta say the gumstick batteries are really appealing for some reason. I've never heard of them before that video and now I just want to hold one.
I've had them in an MP3 CD player.



They are actually very satisfying to handle, I think it's this boxy shape and high density, so they feel like little gold bullions in the hand. Unfortunately I left these in the player for a decade and they're hosed now, but replacements are quite expensive just to stick them in a player I'm not going to use.

mobby_6kl has a new favorite as of 12:35 on May 25, 2020

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

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


I have zero reason to do what I'm now working on but I have a PSX Action Replay dongle, and it has a LPT port on the back. Now I want to make sure I can send codes etc. Now I'm playing the game with PCMCIA cards. Why do I bother.
(Also for those playing at home - I bricked my Mega Drive Mini changing the NAND to a bigger one. At least so far.)

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Why do on-topic Youtubers always gently caress around with SCSI? They never get it to work, and they never have any actual reason to use it. There's a reason why it never broke into personal computers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6HfEgCbMb0

And:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGjnsKOoxi8

Are you watching everything I am going it in advance?

Humphreys has a new favorite as of 14:36 on May 25, 2020

Hirayuki
Mar 28, 2010


Buttcoin purse posted:

Much like DVD players where the cheap no-name ones are actually "better" because you can skip the stuff you don't want to see, my cheap store-brand MP3 player just presented itself as a USB mass storage device :smuggo:
It didn't take me long to find a way to use Winamp to put music on my first-gen iPod mini; even if it wasn't exactly like mounting an external drive, it was still far simpler and less infuriating than using iTunes.

Moo the cow
Apr 30, 2020

Buttcoin purse posted:

Much like DVD players where the cheap no-name ones are actually "better" because you can skip the stuff you don't want to see,

"Yeah, you can skip that scene. Sure, fast-forward that bit. Region-lock? Nah. Want to watch a VCD, no problem. Hey, let's include .wmv playback, you never know. Music playback? mp3, AAC, .ogg, sure we can throw in a few otehrs there. Pictures? might as well: jpg, gif, jp2000 and all those propriety ones you've never used'

Mercedes Colomar
Nov 1, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Pretty good posted:

I don't remember it having a radio, pretty sure it was a jog wheel for navigating directories/scrolling through lists of tracks/etc

I couldn't remember either haha, it just looked like a radio tuner.

LifeSunDeath
Jan 4, 2007

still gay rights and smoke weed every day

This is really interesting. Had no clue that all those early rom rips weren't just homebrew hackers, but actually industrial piracy products. Reminds me of the greatest/stupidest rom program I'm sure we all used:

legooolas
Jul 30, 2004

Hirayuki posted:

It didn't take me long to find a way to use Winamp to put music on my first-gen iPod mini; even if it wasn't exactly like mounting an external drive, it was still far simpler and less infuriating than using iTunes.

I have a first gen 5GB iPod and was using it on a Windows PC with some third-party software as the first thing I did, as I didn't have a Mac then. I think it was called xTunes or something like that? Was the flakiest piece of software I've ever used, and regularly crashed the entire PC :bang: (so I'm probably wrong on the name of the software, having tried to blank it from my mind!)

legooolas
Jul 30, 2004

several posted:

SCSI chat

SCSI was certainly less painful than the terrible IDE interfaces which were on soundcards for a long while. Maybe SCSI CD drives were also a thing before IDE ones? I certainly remember using a SCSI CD drive on PCs at school in 1994-ish, which also had caddies (with giant sprung sliding openings like a huge floppy disk) instead of a drawer for the disc.
We certainly didn't have many of them as they were rather expensive IIRC...

Negostrike
Aug 15, 2015


Horace posted:

I found these in an old magazine. These things were everywhere (until downloadable ringtones arrived), advertised on TV even. You had to sign up to an expensive subscription service and then get one per week or whatever.



I spoilered them for mild NSFW, since apparently Snoopy rape was one of the hottest trends of the time.

I mean, I would perfectly understand if it were a pair of tits, maybe a pussy, a dick whatever. But why Snoopy in particular? :psyduck:

Also I find amusing that they actually printed it on a magazine.

FilthyImp
Sep 30, 2002

Anime Deviant
I had a classmate that had an MD player and it was indeed so much cooler than all of our CD Walkmen.

The little AA Battery-sized control stick/readout you could clip to your backpack or shirt? :aaaaa:

When my school's theatre dept got a grant to modernize in 2000, they bought a ProTools computer and a MD deck to master on. :krad:

stevewm
May 10, 2005

legooolas posted:

SCSI was certainly less painful than the terrible IDE interfaces which were on soundcards for a long while. Maybe SCSI CD drives were also a thing before IDE ones? I certainly remember using a SCSI CD drive on PCs at school in 1994-ish, which also had caddies (with giant sprung sliding openings like a huge floppy disk) instead of a drawer for the disc.
We certainly didn't have many of them as they were rather expensive IIRC...

Early IDE could only do disk drives. So it was common for early CD drives to have either SCSI or a proprietary interface that was often provided on sound cards of the day. The CD interface on soundcards used the same 40-pin IDE connector, but it was not IDE. The 40-pin connector variety was generally called the Panasonic interface, while Sony also had their own that used the same connector as 3.5" floppy disks. Creative used to sell a bundle they called the "CD Blaster" which was a SB16 card bundled with a CD-ROM drive using the Panasonic interface.

ATAPI was later added to IDE which allowed non-hardisk devices to work over IDE. Fun fact, ATAPI is just SCSI commands encapsulated/packetised to be sent over IDE.

Peanut Butler
Jul 25, 2003



Moo the cow posted:

"Yeah, you can skip that scene. Sure, fast-forward that bit. Region-lock? Nah. Want to watch a VCD, no problem. Hey, let's include .wmv playback, you never know. Music playback? mp3, AAC, .ogg, sure we can throw in a few otehrs there. Pictures? might as well: jpg, gif, jp2000 and all those propriety ones you've never used'

when most DVD players were still like $400, I had a $100 one that could play some .avi container files right offa whatever disc I burned em to

was super disappointed that PS2 USB didn't work like this out of the box, was again disappointed when my first LCD TV's USB port was for firmware flashing only-

but manufacturers seem to have given up that anti-piracy measure, last couple TVs I've had just let you play whatever off of USB, to say nothing of how most of em support Plex without having to crack anything

JnnyThndrs
May 29, 2001

HERE ARE THE FUCKING TOWELS
SCSI could do things other than mass storage as well - SCSI scanners were the poo poo all the way up to USB 2.0, there are SCSI network adaptors, even SCSI floppy drives. For quite a long time, SCSI was the only decently fast way of getting data in and out of a PC and/or Mac and it was platform-agnostic as well.

I never had a whole lot of trouble getting things to work - just make sure your chain is terminated at the end and device ID’s are unique and you’re good.

empty baggie
Oct 22, 2003

Peanut Butler posted:

when most DVD players were still like $400, I had a $100 one that could play some .avi container files right offa whatever disc I burned em to

...was again disappointed when my first LCD TV's USB port was for firmware flashing only-


I had this exact same experience. Sometime around 2002 I bought the cheapest DVD player Wal-Mart sold, and it would play everything I threw at it. Around 6 or 7 years later when I dropped way more money than I should have on a really nice Sharp Aquos, I was surprised that the only USB port was for firmware updates only.

My current main TV is an LG C9, and I'm honestly not really sure what ports it has since I only use one HDMI port to connect my AVR. How times have changed.

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Plinkey
Aug 4, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

Moo the cow posted:

"Yeah, you can skip that scene. Sure, fast-forward that bit. Region-lock? Nah. Want to watch a VCD, no problem. Hey, let's include .wmv playback, you never know. Music playback? mp3, AAC, .ogg, sure we can throw in a few otehrs there. Pictures? might as well: jpg, gif, jp2000 and all those propriety ones you've never used'

I think I had the same DVD player, was it some no name brand sold at circuit city or best buy? I actually did research so that I got one that would play vcd back in like 2000ish.

APEX maybe? I think it was like 59.99 or so when I got it.

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