Landerig posted:

I want to see Blu-Ray drives and writable media drop some more in price because I have a lot of videos recorded to DVD-R's that I'd love to consolidate onto a 30 GB disc. Just did a price check and they have gotten pretty cheap. Hmmm.

One downside to flash drives is as far as I know, you can't really write protect them. SD cards you can, but it's more a feature of the drive then the actual card. A disc is much harder to accidentally erase.

Also, aren't flash drives susceptible to magnets as well?

Pilsner posted:

A lot of people pay with plastic in Europe? Even obscure little shops in Southern Europe will accept a VISA. Where did you read that people pay with cash? Maybe you're thinking of Asia (or more specifically China).

Dick Trauma posted:

I haven't seen a residential or commercial fusebox in a long time. I'm wondering how common they still are. Everything I've worked with since the 1990s has been circuit breakers.

Jibo posted:

I just got a house that I almost didn't get because the drat thing had a 60 Amp fuse box that had been junctioned off of twice. The people living there had five TVs, three computers, two fridges, a mini fridge, washer and dryer, an electric range, and all their regular household poo poo running off of it, including 16 60 Watt bulbs in recessed lighting in the basement.

Thankfully they just agreed to get it updated before we moved in.


It cost ~$3,500 US to get ours upgraded.

axolotl farmer posted:

I found this in the computer room flotsam at work.



From that awkward time in the 1990s when CDRs were unknown and there was a market for >1,44M magnetic media. Zip drives were the most common ones.

This is one of the forgotten brands, I had never seen one before I found this in a pile of old junk.

The_Franz posted:

Until just a couple of years ago AT&T still charged an extra fee for touch-tone service on their business land-lines.

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

I kind of thought you could just do it with some kind of negative-feedback photoresistor setup like that, but he holds it up at the beginning and there doesn't seem to be any kind of light source, and the "sensors" seem to be white plastic blobs. I guess it's probably just this, though, maybe using IR instead. Thanks!

EDIT: There isn't even a light in the schematics you linked, I am an idiot

Totally Reasonable posted:

Impact Damage posted:

I've always had a soft spot for the Minolta RD-175:


Cost a mere $10,000 in 1995 and boasted a resolution of 1.75 megapixels. In order to achieve a full color image, light was split with a prism into three different sensors (two for green and one that was split across red and blue) and then recombined for a color image.

Sample Photos and an overview.

Then there's the Minolta RD-3000:


Cost about $4,500 in 2000, this time splitting the actual image captured in half with a prism, both halves going to two separate 1.5 mp sensors. The camera would then stitch the two halves together for a final 2.7 megapixel image.

Sample Photos and an in depth review.

Finally, while digging around looking for those two cameras I came across the Minolta Still Video Back SB-90S:



307.2 K glorious pixels!

Farbtoner posted:

In retrospect it is pretty ridiculous that we spent decades sitting in front of what was effectively a giant ray gun at work and at home.

Glitterbomber posted:

Didn't the dude behind Kellogg think that all his products would be best used shot up the rear end?

For a good hunk of modern life we were pretty sure, as a culture, that the secret to immortality was just finding the right mixture of something going up your butt.

Axeman Jim posted:

Fairly sure when I was last in Paris they were still using these for the exit turnstiles on the Metro.

Donkwich posted:

Does Europe still have a lot of paternosters? As an American I've always wanted to ride one, and I guess the reason they haven't brought them to the states is that they are lawsuit bait. Or they're actually dangerous as gently caress. I don't know.

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

Did any of you ever use a light pen?



We had one at my school that was horribly inaccurate, though it was probably uncalibrated all to hell.

Jasper Tin Neck posted:

Most countries dry clothes outside. The US doesn't because many home owners associations have rules against it on the grounds that it makes neighbourhoods look poor.

madlilnerd posted:

I never understood that. If you live somewhere sunny and you're not right next to the freeway or a dusty desert or a rendering plant, it makes way more sense to dry your clothes outside. They feel fresher, it's free, it's better for the environment because you're not wasting electricity, and I think it makes your clothes last longer (although they can get sun faded).

d3c0y2 posted:

You're aware that nearly every western nation has gas infrastructure, room for dryers and you still see a lot of hanging clothes out to dry.

Before I came away to University i'd never even used a dryer, back at the family home we always hung the clothes out in the back garden most days, or on the radiators if it was poo poo outside.

Pocket Billiards posted:

Maybe I'm daft, I didn't grow up in a place with natural gas supply, but I am living in one now. What the hell does 'natural gas infrastructure' have to do with drying your clothes? The gas only seems to be used for stoves, oven and hot water systems.

Mister Kingdom posted:

I bought my first computer (Leading Edge Model D) in 1988. It had two 5.25" floppy drives because I couldn't afford the 10Mb HD at $500.

Base Emitter posted:

So, anybody can lock you out of your car.

Killer robot posted:

On the second, it was interesting that way. That mentioned separate cord on the IDE drive was just an analog audio out that filtered through the sound card anyway. Playing CD audio like Redbook, the CD-ROM functioned just as an audio CD player rather than something delivering digital data at all.

Astroman posted:

Around the same time I found this badass pocket tv on clearance for like $20 at Caldor:

Backlit by the power of THE SUN (ie you had to shine a light at the back and watch it through a mirror) you could glimpse a very pixillated black and white tv image, but godammit, TV in my pocket! Some rear end in a top hat kid I went to school with swiped it from me when I slept over at his house right before I moved. If you're reading this, gently caress you.

Lowen SoDium posted:

That would be the Video Painter:



My sister and I had one of these growing up. We played the poo poo out of it.

Fuzz1111 posted:

I did this with a portable 2" CRT black and white TV and an original atari 2600 (the one with wood panelling and 6 switches). Only long enough to prove that it could work mind you as the TV took no less than 12 D size cells and ate through them fast.

I tried to find a picture of the TV but I can't remember the brand or model and infact I can't even find many of similar form factor (kinda like an oscilloscope).

You Are A Elf posted:

I remember an ad for something like this TV in an old National Geographic from 1980. I even remember it was some dude in a leather chair making GBS threads himself because a pirate on TV had a parrot that had flown off the screen into the man's living room implying the TV produced "life-like pictures that will look like they're in the room with you!" And the pirate on TV is all like

I've seen those color mirror projection TVs in action and they are quite sharp in the image department, but the ones I remember were giant console furniture TVs with plastic screens. You know, those '80s rear projection screens that aimed at the plastic screen and made crude images. I always thought (even as a kid) that they blew rear end and had terrible pictures. These things:



You had to be front and center and not a millimeter off from the exact dead center of the screen to see anything, because otherwise all you were going to see was black moving things if you were off to the side. They had a really dark and dim picture, and I remember you couldn't leave a VCR or video game on pause for more than a minute because the fear was that it would damage the bulbs and screen with burn-in. My friend had one when I was a kid, and he insisted that BIGGER = BETTER when it came to playing NES on it. Okay, so at the time I had this 19" Zenith TV from the early 70s that I had to hook the RF modulator to with one of these:



That is ubiquitous with 1970s and earlier TV sets and the then recent 1980s technology, and man, that TV had an awesome picture when playing NES on it. So what I was seeing on my old rear end TV with my NES looked like this:



Looked like this on my friend's 46" piece of poo poo TV with the same game:



gently caress my childhood friend, and gently caress those old school big screen projection TVs. I mean, the technology did get better because the early 2000s HDTVs with the same technology look mighty fine, but the early technology just sucked really bad and didn't account for BIGGER = BETTER at all.

You Are A Elf posted:

I'm sorry, I grew up poor and didn't see many big-screen TVs or even an HDTV until I was given my first 720p HDTV in 2006. Until then, I was using used CRTs. I have virtually no idea about the inner workings of large projection TVs, but I really meant the burn-in happened, not that it was a myth. People would just yell at you "DON'T PAUSE IT TOO LONG OR YOU'LL BURN THE IMAGE IN! " all the time, so you listened. I used to take apart old broken CRTs as a kid and found the inner workings fascinating since there were these Radio Shack comics I used to collect and read about how electronics work. Oh, and those comics were and are still boss.

By all means sperg away if someone's incorrect, but it's not really so much pendantic as it is condescending when you put "bulbs" in parentheses. Just say it didn't use bulbs to correct me instead of "'bulbs', heh " When you're a small kid and only see a projection TV like the ones I'm talking about maybe twice in your short childhood life, then try to remember back to how they worked, those miniature CRT screens sure do look like a red, green, and blue stage light vv

Qotile Swirl posted:

Maybe they weren't the most common type, I don't know, but CRT rear-projection HDTVs certainly did exist in that time period. My mother has one and still uses it. Bought it in 2002, I think.

Johnny Aztec posted:

I saw an example of something posted in this thread waay back. I was out at a flea market and saw a stack of something in the corner. Seemed like I had seen them before. Found me a stack of Video-discs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videodisc Essentially movies on vinyl, read with a needle in a plastic shell. Neat to find,never seen any in the wild before but essentially worthless. Even Star wars is only like 10 bucks on Ebay, and these were like 9 to 5, Gladiator, Heaven can wait, and some other forgettable 70's movies.

AlternateAccount posted:

319lbs, I can't imagine this tech went very far. http://www.hometheater.com/content/hitachi-ultravision-65xwx20b-rear-projection-crt-hdtv

Qotile Swirl posted:

I think this is the one my mom has. It's a beast of a thing, but the picture is very nice so long as you're sitting directly in front of it and the room isn't too bright. I think the difficulty posed by getting it out of the house is a large part of the reason why she still has it.

Jerry Cotton posted:

^^^ What he said

The only things that could replace phone calls are video phone calls (nope) and meeting in person. And since the telephone was basically invented to facilitate real-time voice communication in instances where meeting face-to-face was not feasible, welp...

If you think instant messaging, text chat, or e-mail serves the same purpose as voice communications then I don't know what to tell you.

Killer robot posted:

It's going into a relatively sealed compartment in the wall, razor blades don't rot or anything, and it would take many years of accumulation to fill the space. On the flip side, it means there's no need to put razors in the trash where they might cut people/bags/pets, and no need for a separate razor blade only trash dispenser that is either tiny or takes years to fill. A better question is, what kind of person has a genuine, rather than "this feels kinda counterintuitive", objection?