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Totally Reasonable posted:Tone dialers themselves were pretty much DOA, but they were rather big sellers (for Redboxing purposes) until 5A ESS phone systems started rolling out, which made the money signalling digital. About the same time, everyone bought a mobile and welp. My grandmother had one of those. She never saw the point in paying the extra 37 cents a month for touch-tone, but my mom bought her one so she could bank by phone. A few years ago my mom and aunt got together and got her modern phones and service, but she was using rotary phones well into this century (and still had one on the back screen porch until she died last year in case anybody called while she was out tending her plants). Slide rules, typewriters, and wristwatches have already been mentioned, but I kind of collect them, so have some more:    I've given a couple to friends and bought a few since this picture/last time I counted them, but I had 13 then. As others said, great for filling out forms and such. You can still get ribbons for the manuals (sold for printing calculators, you have to rewind it onto the spools that came with the typewriter) and film cartridges for the Selectrics at any decent office-supply store. Slide rules, well, rule.  I've even got one on my watch! It's surprisingly useful for quick-and-dirty multiplication/division/conversions when I'm too lazy to pull my phone out. If it's too much for the slide rule on my watch, I have a TI-83 emulator on my phone. I also have one of these, and used it for most of my college photo classes:  Film is dead. 4x5 film went out back in the early '70s when 35mm got decent. I even have a Polaroid back for it, and used it for proofing in studio shots for class (I graduated the year before Polaroid stopped making film). If digital backs weren't $45k, I'd still use it. I was also in the last color photo class at my college that made prints with enlargers; the next year they took out the color darkroom and went all-digital for that class. I work for a newspaper. Well, I got laid off, but I still shoot football for them and fill in when somebody's on vacation. Ink-on-paper daily news is pretty much obsolete and failing these days, isn't it? Here's the (already itself obsolete) equivalent of the Speed Graphic that I currently use at work:  Oddly enough, they weigh about the same, and MSRPs were fairly similar when you account for inflation. Edit: When I'm at the office tomorrow, I'll try to find and photograph an example of the first DSLRs the newspaper had. I forget the name of it, but it was a top-end-at-the-time Canon 35mm body with a Kodak-branded sensor/computery bit bolted to the back and underside. 1.3 glorious megapixels, heavier than the Graflex, poo poo color reproduction, and used PCMCIA hard drives for storage. But good enough image quality for newsprint, and a hell of a lot faster to process than film. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 02:26 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 02:15
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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mr. stefan posted:Not as much as someone might think. For frontline professional work, yeah, digital is pretty much all in charge, but fine art photographers still like film because the emulsion handles highlights and range differently than a digital sensor. Yeah, I should've specified. Artists are a weird bunch. Film is dead in the sense that it's only used in fine art these days. I forgot to take a picture of the old Kodak/Canon boat anchor, but as somebody said, it's this beast, the EOS DC3:  On a similar note, one of my coworkers made the score of the century yesterday: he had 15 minutes to kill between assignments, so he pulled in to an estate sale he drove by. He saw a nice name-brand camera bag, and he's been needing a new bag, so he decided to take a look at it. Opened it up, and sure enough it was full of old gear. A set of old manual-focus lenses -- Nikon 50mm f/1.8, 28 f/2.8, and a similarly awesome 105mm, all looking brand new. Then he got to the camera body itself, an F3/T. he didn't know how much it was worth, but he knew it was worth something, so he asked how much they wanted for it. "$40." He somehow kept himself from laughing. "Well,I really just wanted the bag..." "How about $20 for all of it?" "A'ight." When he got back to the office he searched eBay for it, and it's worth a bit more than that. Like, a couple orders of magnitude more. (Edit: he's keeping the lenses, and used the 50mm on his D700 to shoot an assignment in a bar with available light later that day.) DicktheCat posted:If you ever have too many, I will totally buy one off of you. I collect the damned things. A word of warning to any aspiring typewriter collectors: manual machines, unless completely rusted out, can be returned to running condition with a liberal dousing of WD-40, because the main problem is the grease drying out and clogging the mechanism. But don't buy a Selectric unless you can test it and it works perfectly -- when those break, they really break. I had a small Selectric II (the size of the blue original model pictured), and the little steel drivebelt that moves the ball broke. That really can't be fixed. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 17:42 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 20, 2012 17:32
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8th-samurai posted:If that 105mm is a f/2.5 it is literally one of the best lenses Nikon has ever made. I think it is. This was clearly the collection of a rich old dude who had more money than sense; the titanium F3 is so valuable nowadays because newspapers bought most of them and, well, newspaper photographers  .I wish my dad had been less frugal back in '76 -- he gave me his similarly mint, similarly top-end Olympus kit (OM-1, with one of the best 50mm f/1.8s ever made, 28mm f/3.5, 70-150mm zoom) but Olympus hasn't seen fit to make a DSLR that takes the old lenses like Nikon did.
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Oct 20, 2012 17:55
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I want one of those chairs with an iPad in place of the control panel.Arsenic Lupin posted:In the Gaylord Model C system,
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Jul 13, 2013 06:56
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nocal posted:cell phone processors This post made me mentally compare my Snapdragon-powered phone to the Crays that Jurassic Park made such a big deal of 20 years ago. And that got me thinking about how cool it would be to build a Beowulf cluster out of HTC Evos -- it would fit in a single standard ATX case and run on a single mains power outlet, especially if you strip them to the motherboards. Seems feasible; Android is Linux-based, so the software's already mostly written, right? Then I started thinking about the other end of the scale. The singularity is here, all it'll take to push it over the edge and have the machines rise up and murder us all is for Google to swap out the OS on their servers. And when the Terminators come for us, they will most likely be doing the Gangnam Style dance. Because with 1.75 billion views, there's gotta be the equivalent of an entire airplane hangar full of servers dedicated to that video.
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Jul 19, 2013 21:37
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Pham Nuwen posted:Ok allow me to Dang. Groda posted:Those were Thinking Machines.
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Jul 20, 2013 21:00
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for a moment. The term "Beowulf cluster" is bullshit. It just refers to a bunch of networked Linux machines running an MPI program.
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DNova posted:No that silly-rear end gui shown in the movie was from real life. Yeah, like the Cray-1, it was cutting-edge real life tech that was glorified in the book. Crichton would cry if he could read this thread. He always picked the awesome tech that eventually lost. Arsenic Lupin posted:That form factor of disk drive had more than you'd think in common with a washing machine. If the disks became unbalanced -- as, for instance, when part of the disk broke off -- the drives would walk across the room, very noisily indeed, until they came to the length of their cables. Merriment, by which I mean cursing, ensued. Head crashes were also quite audible. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 21:09 on Jul 20, 2013 |
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Jul 20, 2013 21:06
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Terminal chat reminded me, I bought one of these for a few dollars at a Goodwill a few years ago: It's not a tablet, it's a thin client that runs your XP desktop over wifi. I got it partially working -- it used 802.11a, and my router really only worked in 802.11g/n. Even when it did hold a connection and was able to log in, it didn't have the battery or the stand that turned it into a regular monitor, so it was pretty useless.
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Aug 10, 2013 14:12
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Zonekeeper posted:Assuming I wasn't listening to a simulcast, this could be the explanation! This happened when I was like 5, so I'm probably forgetting most of the details - the part that sticks out was the same audio coming out of my clock radio and TV at once. I can't find a cite, but I remember reading that the reason broadcast TV started at channel 3 back in the day is because the lower end overlaps with police/taxi 2-way radio bands. Similarly, FM transmitters for MP3 players (to use your iPod without a tape deck or aux in, were big a from the late '90s up until a few years ago when new cars started coming with USB or at least 3.5mm input jacks) and some wireless headsets step on the bottom end of the FM band. I'll be listening to NPR and pass an older car or pull up to the McDonald's window, and it'll go to static. Edit: AM radio is 153kHz-26Mhz, FM is 88-108MHz, two-way radios and TV channels 1-6 are in between (CB, for example, is around 27MHz), and TV channels 7 and above are above FM. So TV channels 6 and 7 could be picked up at the ends of an FM dial if they overstepped their bandwidth or your radio had some slop in the tuner. Wikipedia has charts if you want specifics. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 16:05 on Sep 22, 2013 |
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Sep 22, 2013 15:47
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I have a few film cameras: The Pair of Olympuses (Olympii?) on the right and the 4x5 Speed Graphic on the left are what I used in my college career (I've shot spot news for the school paper with the Speed Graphic, on Polaroid I had for large-format class), the others are gifts/cool-looking cheap ebay purchases that I've maybe put one roll of film through. I also at one point had a Yashica-Mat TLR, but recently sold it to a Dorkroom goon because film is dead. sirbeefalot posted:RIT, with its huge photography program in the city where consumer film and cameras were born and raised, recently removed (well, converted to hilariously small offices) a huge portion of the freshman b/w darkrooms and I think all but like 2 color film processing machines. Big, big difference from even 10 years ago when my wife graduated from the program. I think I was in the last color photo class at my alma mater to actually use the enlargers, about ten years ago. Some of my classmates got great deals on enlargers and one guy bought the color print developing machine. Then I went to the university Mark Seliger claims to have graduated from (his former teachers refuse to acknowledge his existence, and won't say why*) and the color printing was all digital, though they still had film scanners. Still shot 4x5 slide film with Polaroids to check exposure in the commercial class, though. Dick Trauma posted:Like most analog to digital changes there's a visceral aspect to the experience that's missing, but in this case I think something's definitely lost. Bobby Digital posted:My ex teaches high school photography and they do a film unit complete with darkroom. razorrozar posted:Are tech companies missing a trick by letting you buy one generalized $300 device instead of a bunch of specialized $150 devices? On a similar note, I remember when the Kindle came out, and I thought it was amazing, because it could get wikipedia over the 3g at no additional charge. It was basically the hitchhiker's guide. Now I have a phone that has more CPU speed and RAM (and the entire internet) than the high-end-of-middlin' desktop computer I had when the Kindle came out, and my $500-two-years-ago bottom-end Lenovo (in name only) laptop will run any game that came out before this month. *aside from the time in Photoshop class when I turned in some weird-rear end poo poo, and the prof said "Heh. You're a lot like Seliger," as his only comment and moved on, and I got an A on the assignment. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 13:38 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 13:34
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Geoj posted:As long as you aren't stupid and directly ingest it photo chemicals are about as dangerous as most household cleaners. Yeah, it was more making fun of OSHA -- on the first day, the teacher gave us the spiel about OSHA regs: "you're supposed to wear an apron and use tongs and gloves, these things are provided if you want 'em, but you're students so technically not required to abide by OSHA regs." It did a number on my white cotton towel, though. Did y'alls photo classes require you to have a towel at all times in the darkroom? Geoj posted:C-41 process is the most common (especially now with film circling the drain) and the previous statements about photo chemistry being relatively harmless definitely apply to it. Yes there are some exotic mediums that generate some nasty poo poo but your average hobbyist level darkroom isn't going to use them. On a tangent, I like to think Jell-O has increased in quality lately -- back in the day, it was the stuff that wasn't up to Kodak's standards. Also, remember when every grocery store had a photo lab, or at least a kiosk to drop your film for sendoff processing? When I was in college during that time during the transition to digital, I shot for the school paper. The paper was all done on computers, but decent digital cameras were still too expensive for the average student, so we'd shoot color film and take it to the grocery store down the street with a 1-hour photo, get the film processed with no prints (took half the time and was half the price), then scan the negatives. Edit: the one full-color issue we did a year, we had to paste up on a lightbox old-school, to be photographed -- the school's print shop only bid B&W with spot color, we farmed out the printing of the full-color issue to the local small-town newspaper that couldn't afford to upgrade to computerized layout. On a similar note, the newspaper building I work in was built in 1984ish, and literally half the building is abandoned -- one wing is the advertising offices and newsroom, the other wing is the old photo lab/typesetting/litho spaces, where three light switches still worked when I started there in '04: the lobby of the photo department, the studio, and the hallway between them, because we still used the studio. Now the studio is in the archive room off the back of the newsroom, so I'm pretty sure they've pulled all the breakers to the film wing. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 13:58 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 13:53
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Elliotw2 posted:The good news is that if you have about an hour, you can flash the firmware to a CF card and slot that in with zero modification since they shipped with either Microdrives or CF cards. And they were fragile as poo poo. The newspaper I work for had a couple of 1GB microdrives back in the day when CF cards only went up to 256MB. The quarter-gig was enough for a Nikon D1, but the Microdrives were available for extended assignments, though most of us ended up buying extra CF cards with our own money because we didn't trust the Microdrives. A D1 will shrug off a 3-foot drop onto concrete, a Microdrive shits itself if you move the camera while it's writing. And God help you if you have an OG iPod and take it jogging in one of those bicep holsters.  (My hosting, also the first GIS result for any combination of "hamster" and "microdrive") HardDisk posted:D'awww Ultimate Mango posted:Stand alone GPS units will go here soon. Between in car systems and phone apps there isn't much need (they will still exit for marine and aeronautics and such of course, but the portable unitaskers need to due). On the other other hand, newer cellphones also use GLONASS as well as GPS. Which is ... really just a gimmick, but it's cool. And if Putin starts WW3, and your phone survives, and you can rig up a bicycle generator to charge it, you can still get a pointer no matter which side's satellites survive! On that note, I learned to use a map and compass in Boy Scouts and JROTC. In this day of GPS, old-fashioned orienteering is pretty much obsolete, but I hope they still teach it in case your batteries run out. I still have one of these that I stole from the US Government:  With that and a USGS topographic map at one of those scales, I can, for example, call in artillery fire to close enough. Code Jockey posted:I miss old MacOS. All the discussion of RS232 made me wonder if anything still uses the ol' parallel port (i.e. the old-school printer plug). Speaking of plugs that are dying/dead, I wouldn't be surprised if new builds stop including RJ11 jacks in the walls in the next few years. Who still has a landline phone? I have a spool of Cat5 and a hookup for terminals/borrowing a crimp tool, was wondering how to fish it through the house, but then realized I can just tie it to the phone lines and yank them out, because I'm never going to use 'em.
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May 15, 2015 01:22
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I love it. Totally nostalgia for school probably, but I miss playing that world map jigsaw puzzle thing.
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Land lines are very reliable and are also useful for things like small, internal phone networks in an office or some such. Sometimes you want that reliability and security over using cell phones for everything.  It'll definitely be one of those things like RS232 that sticks around in business settings well after it's effectively dead in the residential/consumer market, though (it'll still be used way out in the sticks forever because the wires are already there, but us city slickers are rapidly transitioning to mobile phones and cable/fiber internet).Konstantin posted:DSL modems also use RJ11, and they aren't going away anytime soon. There needs to be some way to get wired Internet into the home until the wireless companies actually offer decent data plans, and it's good enough. Speaking of wireless, about half the hotels I stay in have ethernet jacks in the walls, and maybe a third of those still have the ethernet hooked up to anything. That's one place wi-fi has fully taken over. Lazlo Nibble posted:I remember seeing that on later-era DEC hardware. VT100s were more fun—the keyboard connected over a coiled black cable with a standard 1/4" stereo plug on the end. You couldn't make the design more "1970s" with anything short of a full-on Bicentennial-themed red, white and blue version. Also the fact that somebody felt the need to add "looks like ethernet but smaller" to describe RJ11 instead of just "phone plug" supports my idea that it's on its way out. Edit: though I guess he may be explaining for the benefit of the Europeans among us, with their weird-rear end phone plugs. There's the jokes about the Polish, but there's always some truth in stereotypes:  A Polish phone plug. Note that it's just an adapter for an RJ11, because seriously. WTF, Poland? Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 01:05 on May 16, 2015 |
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May 16, 2015 00:50
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Krispy Kareem posted:Someday I'll figure out how to use a sliderule. I have my father's on a shelf in my office. The standard slide rule (as opposed to the single-purpose ones like the nuke yield calculator) does multiplication/division, and square/cube roots. Here's a beginner's guide on how to use one. My dad spent a solid week in high school math class learning how to use a slide rule. I had a TI-83, and cheated on tests by putting plaintext cheat notes into it as programs .I have a few:  Aluminum 10" Pickett 1010ES, bamboo 6" Post 1444K, and stainless steel Seiko Chronograph with a modified E6B on the bezel. The vintage ones are just cool collectibles to play with, but I actually use the one on my wristwatch sometimes. Though for anything requiring actual precision I fire up the TI-83 emulator on my phone. SubG posted:Speaking of which, here's a few handheld calculators. These are all HPs
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May 20, 2015 03:23
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And the debug mode on soda vending machines! You have to physically open up the machine and press buttons on the inside to make it dispense without paying or change the price, but hitting the product selection buttons in a certain order (4-2-3-1, where 1 is the one at the top) would show the temperature, sales numbers, etc. on the little LCD screen that showed the price.sinking belle posted:Reminds me of the service menus you could access with button sequences in Sony Ericsson phones circa 2002. I used to love surreptitiously accessing them on people's phones when they left them unattended and setting them to constantly vibrate because I was an antisocial little poo poo.
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Jun 16, 2015 12:49
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They also make Bluetooth versions, but they're all cheaply made. True hipsters get an actual ancient phone with a six-pound Bakelite receiver and cut/solder a Bluetooth earpiece into it. (Note: I have not personally done that. But I've seriously considered it.) If you're going to be using it a lot, consider getting one of these:  It must have sucked to be a receptionist or telemarketer before headsets were a thing. I mean, it still sucks, but at least now you don't gently caress up your neck. pookel posted:My smartphone likes to think that my cheek is trying to use the touchscreen, and turn itself off in the middle of calls. On a tangent, my grandmother never upgraded to touchtone service. She didn't even have a phone with buttons until she had her first stroke in 2007, when Mom and my aunt took over paying her bills and bought her a cordless landline setup and a cell (the latter to keep on her at all times in case she fell or something). Grandmother's one concession to semi-modern telephony was getting one of these so she could use her bank-by-phone:  Which, if I'd gotten into playing with electronics a bit earlier, was apparently really easy to convert into a blue box. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXZMgHKhefk Both the pocket dialers and phreaking are obsolete now. I don't even have a landline, and I've seen maybe one payphone in the last five years. And, as the guy in the video says, if you do manage to find one the telcos upgraded the backend to make 'em phreak-proof around 1995. Super Waffle posted:I've had to dial the area code for even local numbers since the mid 90's, is this not a thing everywhere? Magnus Praeda just lives out in BFE and only has one area code in their area.
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Jun 17, 2015 05:36
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When I was a kid, in the mid-'80s, we had a console TV with an ultrasonic remote. Y'know how some people call a TV remote "the clicker"? It's because of those -- pushing the buttons would drop a hammer on a tuning fork inside, with an audible click. My favorite toy when I was a toddler was a bit of chain (I was an easily-amused child, and as you can tell from the TV, we weren't exactly rich), and sometimes when I jangled the chain it would change the TV channel. Also one of my uncles used to be a TV repairman. The shop he worked for went out of business in the early '90s, when it got to the point that it didn't cost much more to buy a new, better TV than to have him fix the old one. Jerry Cotton posted:I had a mid-80s domestic (I'm thinking Finlux but maybe it was a Salora In other news, remember when laptops didn't have onboard wifi and had PCMCIA slots, and you used an 802.11b PC card? The hotel I'm at does.  They still have the same internet provider, amazingly, which is presumably why they haven't refreshed the ten-year-old signage.
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Jul 27, 2015 23:33
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) sub-30"* CRT TV up until 2010 or something and boy howdy did switching over from the analogue tuner to an external digital tuner in 2007 change it from "TV with lovely picture" to "TV with great picture." Only reason I got an LCD was that a lot of Xbox 360 games on a smallish CRT through RGB had pretty much unreadable text.
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RC and Moon Pie posted:It may not have been a Motorola, but it was quite similar to this: My parents had those back in the day. Amusingly, when I bought a 1992 F150 in 2004, it had the part that's in the bag permanently mounted behind the driver's seat. Exact same model my mom had at one point. KozmoNaut posted:These swivel belt clips were the absolute business for the 5110 etc. GreenNight posted:I want to be this guy.  We also had an ancient diazo machine kept around as a curiosity:  Had to open all the windows when demonstrating it, because the hose to the jug of ammonia was a bit leaky.
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Aug 9, 2015 03:02
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Exit Strategy posted:I've always wanted to put a modern machine into an F1XD, entirely so that I could drive a pair of VR goggles as a display and show up to ren faires as a confused console jockey. El Estrago Bonito posted:Don't be this guy. He has to exist, because people going to LARPs and Ren Faires for the first time think he's hilarious, but no one likes the guy who keeps showing up as marty McFly, or Dr.Who or the cast of Star Trek, or the characters from Sliders. Fooley posted:I think phones/tablets are closer to how he always described people having a computer with them all the time though. I know a few companies are trying to make modular phones, which would allow you to keep the same base unit if you liked it. quote:obsolete IM clients Both are from back in the mid-'90s when a desktop computer cost $1800, with $400 instant rebate if you signed a contract for four years of dialup internet at $30/month. Edit: My mom still pays the monthly subscription to use the AOL client (or did until it went under, if it has). Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 01:24 on Aug 27, 2015 |
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Aug 27, 2015 01:20
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Geoj posted:Unless he's cleaning C4 with blasting caps or similar explosive triggers this would be perfectly safe. 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.
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Nov 7, 2015 11:33
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I don't remember if I got it from this thread or not, but here's ALL the Radio Shack catalogs. Man, I really need to go get the TRS-80 out of my parents' attic. My uncle used it for his business, and gave it to us around 1990 when he got a modern computer. I played text adventure games loaded from cassettes on it.
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Dec 28, 2015 01:18
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Samizdata posted:Hell, a few years back we had a hell of an ice storm where I live. Power was out for days and days. We (my housemates and I) had a LOT of electronics, so I didn't feel comfortable leaving the house and camping out at a friend's like the housemates did. I couldn't use any of the electronics and was living by candlelight, but at least I could cook and take a hot shower... Both my and my gran's houses had gas furnaces, but the controls and fans are electric, so that wouldn't help when the power was out. Grandparents also had a gas fireplace, fake logs and all. That was kinda weird in retrospect, having had a couple of places with actual fireplaces since I moved out on my own. I suppose it made sense at the time, rather than having a blank wall and one of those gas heaters in the corner of the living room in those pre-TV days. The house my parents built for themselves has all electric appliances, but they ran a gas pipe to the living room in case they did want to later install a fake fireplace. xlevus posted:It's a bit counter to the thread, but what happened to municipal heating? Tubesock Holocaust posted:You might want to add those seatbelts mounted to the door. The idea was that you left the belt buckled and whenever you wanted to get in or out of the car, you could just open the door and slide underneath the belt. I think all of the early (pre-96) W-body GM cars had that setup. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 02:43 on Jan 9, 2016 |
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Jan 9, 2016 01:53
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One could argue that the book itself is obsolete, but I was flipping through the 1960 edition of my city's phone book (was $3 at an antiques store, and good for modern archaeology stuff), and there's this in the Yellow Pages (which are not noticeably different color from the front section of the book): Why even bother? It's fuckin' 1960, there's only the one telco and you've heard of them, as a person in 1960 holding their book in your hands. You'd think they'd put that up front with the "how to operate a telephone" instructions. I guess they had to keep the operators free for long-distance and emergency calls (911 not having been invented yet). The one in the middle, though. You'd expect it to be the same as the other two. And you'd be half right:  There's also the number for the regional office so you can register your trademark with Ma Bell. And they hosed up their own ad! You can see how the lines around the ads are supposed to look -- a bit sloppy around the corners, because they were hand-drawn, but still it's most of a right angle -- and for the ad for the national system, they somehow did that thing at the bottom left of the second picture. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 05:17 on Feb 6, 2016 |
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Feb 6, 2016 05:08
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Platystemon posted:Are you sure it’s not a printing error? The rest of the page is fine, so yes. It's a paste-up error, which is itself appropriate material for the thread. Back in the dark ages when cameras used film (circa 2003 at the college newspaper I shot for), before PageMaker and InDesign, you'd do your layouts with scissors, glue, and a lightbox (well, by my time technology had progressed to Scotch tape), then send the completed page to the print shop where they'd photograph it on film the size of the eventual broadsheet and use that to make the printing plates (photolithography). As far as I can tell, the bulk of the ad was supplied as clipart by Ma Bell, and the city directories were to drop in the name and number of their regional office (also readymade clipart) at the bottom, and the guy pasting it up was either drunk or lazy and missed the alignment. Edit: I kinda want to make a thread just of scans of that 1960 phone book, if only because the art in the ads is wonderful. What would be the appropriate subforum for such a thing? Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 05:57 on Feb 6, 2016 |
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Feb 6, 2016 05:49
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Phanatic posted:Jesus Christ just looking at the thumbnail gave me flashbacks to high school. I got all my CDs at Sam's Club, so they all came in plain blue or yellow longboxes  (and would've been censored if I'd listened to decent music at the time.)
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Feb 13, 2016 02:01
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twistedmentat posted:I've been watching LGR, and his oddware videos are filled with lots of weird stuff and two stuck out to me I had one of those. Well, mine was a later, cheaper knockoff (ironically, the cheap one I had had a steel ball). Like the said, the angle you had to hold it at was odd and the buttons were in an awkward spot -- it's like the inventor held a pen in a slightly different way than most people, and designed it to his ergonomics without thinking he might be the weird one. The main thing, though, was that the ball was smooth -- it didn't have the tacky rubbery coating like a real mouse ball, with predictable results. Sure, it was super-accurate ... when the ball rolled instead of just sliding. And the rollers didn't have any grippy coating either, so even if the ball moved, it might not turn the cranks inside. That must be why the photos on all the Pro boxes are of people using it on their leg, because it really only worked when pressed into a soft surface (the old 1/4"-thick neoprene mousepads worked, but it needed a lot more pressure than you'd expect, more akin to a cheap off-brand crayon than a pencil or pen). It sure as hell wouldn't work on a bare desktop like in the original box art.
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Apr 8, 2016 12:12
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Wanamingo posted:Lightguns, you say? This thing's fuckin' sweet and is everything that gun wanted to be (i.e., as close to the real thing as possible). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3UCBycRw60 Hilariously obsolete: Of course the Model M is the god-tier desktop keyboard, and the Thinkpad nipple is best built-in mouse solution (trackpads IME are universally crap), so why not combine the two? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rHOAX4FlB4 Oh right, if you've got a big enough desk for an M, you've probably got plenty of room for a standalone mouse. Though it'd be perfect for the portable desktop PC build I've been considering (desktop guts, LCD monitor,and real keyboard built into a briefcase -- I spend more time at hotels than home, so my computer needs to be portable, but I only use it at my desk either way, so I don't really need a laptop. OTOH, I guess that idea's obsolete -- made sense back when LCDs first got cheap and laptops were still significantly less powerful than desktops, but now a $600 lappy is a desktop replacement for all but the newest high-end gaming.
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Apr 8, 2016 14:07
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:IIRC, there were more than half a dozen games that supported it. Battle Clash was actually really cool--you could specifically target the arms and legs of your opponents and destroy them, which changed their abilities and strategies. That is, if you could ever get the goddamn Super Scope calibrated correctly Fair enough. The game that came with it was no longer in the box when I got it, and gently caress trying to track down a copy of one of the few that worked with it (keep in mind I got the thing around 2007). Humphreys posted:Or Nintendo's other rifle:
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Apr 10, 2016 00:57
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El Estrago Bonito posted:Also great for trolls: Reminds me of that one Achievement Hunter video where one of the guys said "Xbox turn off," and the other five screamed "NO! NO! NONONO!" for a solid ten seconds until one said "oh, wait, we're all holding controllers, we can just push the button to cancel."
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Apr 10, 2016 20:50
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Toast Museum posted:Do they actually make anything besides YouTube videos? Their site is, uh, light on information. The current best guess I've heard is that it's a design/animation/whatever student's portfolio work.
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May 21, 2016 02:29
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Lazlo Nibble posted:Does this really mean what it seems to mean? Did the early days of home recording have a body count?? Have you seen Inglourious Basterds? Film/tape at the time was literally cordite in sheet form. Also cordite was advertised as "slow-burning" as opposed to, say, TNT (it just burns really fast, rather than supersonically detonating, you see. That's the difference between "low" (gun propellant) and "high" (the filler for artillery shells) explosives..
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Jun 17, 2016 02:04
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Buttcoin purse posted:And I guess twitter encourages people to stick to short words, so that's great. Melvil Dewey may yet be vindicated by the Twitter generation. (There have been several attempts to make English spelling make more sense, but Dewey, as you can see from how he chose to spell his first name, was a bit of an extremist. I guess that counts for the thread, since English is still a mess.)
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Jul 7, 2016 02:46
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pienipple posted:On the other hand they have a grand total of one safety feature (the seatbelt) and just barely enough power to get moving. If you have to drive it over 30 mph the rattling drowns out everything, and actually attaining highway speeds is iffy. Last time the LLV came up in AI, we got into discussing the fact that it's on a Chevy S10 frame, and the possibility of putting an LLV body on a Syclone/Typhoon chassis/engine, or using one of the SBC V8 swap kits made for the S10. 
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Jul 9, 2016 03:48
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pienipple posted:If you get rear ended too hard the roof tends to crush down into the cabin. Onto the driver. No crumple zones, you see. Or, more charitably, one big crumple zone! Cf. the kerfuffle a few years ago re: cop cars (i.e. Ford Crown Victorias, which had 80% or more market share at the time) bursting into flame when rear-ended. It was played up in the news as if it were Pinto II, but actually the Crown Vic's gas tank is above the rear axle, probably the safest place possible; most any car will catch fire when it gets an 18-wheeler up the rear end at 70+mph, it's just that Highway Patrol cars parked on the shoulder are vastly more likely to get rear-ended by a 40-ton truck doing highway speeds, and the majority of them were Crown Vics, so the stats were a bit skewed. Edit: apparently the Crown Vic's genre of fullsize body-on-frame sedans is obsolete now, they stopped building 'em in 2011, so the only cop car now is the Dodge Charger. Ford tried to sell a V6 AWD Taurus as a cop car, it's not selling too well against the Mopar which is available with a V8. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 05:27 on Jul 9, 2016 |
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Jul 9, 2016 05:16
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Sentient Data posted:I bet it could be a great little programming box I have an EeePC T91MT, its name on the network is "hackybox" because that's pretty much all it's good for. It's got a 1ghz CPU, 2gb RAM, and it won't really do Youtube/Netflix.
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Jul 9, 2016 05:58
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WebDog posted:I've seen some people actually punch out the chips from their card while others line parts of their wallet with alfoil. My mom actually bought and still uses those aluminized mylar sleeves for her credit cards, even before she got cards with chips. 
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Jul 10, 2016 05:02
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Re: faxes count as legal signature: I heard/read somewhere long ago (back when faxes were still A Thing) that non-photo blue was at one time used for signing things specifically to prevent fraud via photographic reproduction methods. Probably just a legend, but otoh, it's pretty easy to cut a signature out of another document and glue it to the fake page and it'll pass for fax purposes. Anybody else worked in a newspaper shop with physical pasteup? That's obsolete. My college paper circa 2003 did all the work in InDesign or whatever, then printed the copy and arranged it with scissors and Scotch tape on on a lightbox running the width of one wall of the "newsroom", then sent it off to the local small-town weekly newspaper that was still running '50s equipment for photographing and printing the pages. The annual special edition with color photos was done all-digital and printed by the big-city daily newspaper up the road. Also obsolete but won't admit it, just like the whole fax-machine industry: dead-tree newspapers, and print media in general. Old people keep them going, but once they die off, it's over. Edit: one time about ten years ago, I went to the local mall (malls, also obsolete even then), and wandered into, IIRC, JC Penney. They had a table piled high with catalogs at the door, and so I picked one up on the way out, because why not? I may have wanted to buy something from them in the future. Cue a clerk yelling "Hey! Put that back, it's only free if you buy something!" Turns out the store's print catalog, a 600-page advertisement for the store, was being sold for $5 in the store with no signage to warn me of the fact that they expected me to pay for it. I can understand charging $5 to get a catalog mailed to you, that poo poo's heavy, but you'd think the ones in the entryway of the physical store would be free in order to encourage people to come back. Nope! Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 06:58 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 06:41
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Maxwell Lord posted:Print book sales rose last year. Newspapers are clearly in trouble- they were designed to be quick disposable media and nothing does quick and disposable better than the Internet- but forecasting the death of print overall has always seemed hasty to me. Yeah, TV network news in the '60s was the death knell of the newspaper, yet I somehow managed to get a degree and a job in print photojournalism in 2000-2013 (got laid off in '13 because I was the weekend and vacation photog, but the paper's still putting out a new edition every day).
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Aug 2, 2016 06:53
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Platystemon posted:Spielberg very deliberately tried to match the look of Robert Capa’s photos. A mistake in the darkroom gave them a unique look. Except Spielberg did the opposite of that, shorter shutter angle than normal for the framerate, getting close to but not quite the Ridley Scott strobe effect of real small shutter angle. Saving Private Ryan just looks crisp, and you're thinking "did I just see that?" As opposed to the Scott brothers, who take that effect a bit too far and it looks like stop-motion (cf. Gladiator.) But it's the same general thing. As opposed to Capa's stills, which are blurred all to hell and back. Spielberg still nails the chaos of Capa's photos, but the other way 'round.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:44
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Taerkar posted:64MB was cutting edge when I had mine, and it could play music too!   We were cautioned to be very gentle with them. Didn't the original iPods have those, and were marketed to joggers, leading to a rather high rate of breakage? For comparison, my current DSLR has two 32GB thumbnail-sized SD cards in it, that cost me as much combined as a a thousandth the space (and 1/50th the number of photos it could hold) as a 32MB card did back then. Throw the microSD card from the GoPro (with its adapter) into the rotation, and I have 96GB of storage for the big camera in like a sixth the physical size of two CF cards (a third the footprint, half as thick). Moore's Law is amazing, even if it did kinda run up against the laws of physics and flatten off lately. To be honest, I prefer CF cards, they're easier to keep track of when you have spares, and small enough to be considered of negligible size for carrying around. OTOH, the only time I handle the pair of 32GB cards is putting them into the computer to process images, there's no swapping them on the fly -- I pretty much only dump them to a HDD and format them once a year. As opposed to every day or two for that 256MB CF card. Compare that to 35mm film, which was the standard when I got started in photography -- for you kids, a 35mm can is about the size of a C battery and holds 24-39 frames (marketed as 24 and 36, but you can squeeze out a few extra if the camera is small and you're careful with loading):  And I own a 4x5 (that's the dimensions of the film in inches) camera, which holds two frames in a half-inch-thick plank:  Pull out the used one, slam in an unexposed one (press cameras had angled lips like the magwells on competition pistols to help guide it in), pull the dark slide, pres butan, replace the dark slide (no guide chute for the thin plastic card's slot), pull the holder out, flip, and reinsert it, pull the slide, press butan, replace slide, repeat. There was, late in the life of the 4x5 press cameras, a six-shot quick-change film holder that telescoped out to shuffle the sheets of film like flipping through a stack of papers. Pull the dark slide, then pump it like a sideways shotgun to move the exposed frame to the back and drop a fresh one into position. Though if you didn't pull it hard enough you could jam it, and if you pulled too hard it'd come apart. And the loading procedure was a bit complicated, to put it mildly -- remember, that's performed by feel in complete darkness. Anybody want an effortpost on the various film/digital formats? Teaser: Why DSLRs that cost less than $used car get a bonus with long lenses:  Also one of the Demigods of Photography was once fired by Life magazine for preferring a "miniature" camera -- W. Eugene Smith was an early adopter of 35mm when 4x5 Speed Graphics were the standard. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 15:54 on Mar 16, 2017 |
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Mar 16, 2017 15:46
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