When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.
I have a large collection of VGA cables and proprietary phone charging cables.
If you have a Samsung PCB115UBE USB cable for an old SCH-A870 I will seriously give you money for it right now
Guy got a whole hoard of old geeks going through their cable stashes right now 😋
I hope so, my only alternative to get my old data off this phone is desoldering the NAND chip lol
i bet that motorola cable is gold. : D
Me too! A whole milk crate full! Everyone thinks its a waste of space until I bust out the exact obscure/ancient cable they need.
I have an old 6 volt lantern that uses a battery that is 6 inches wide, 4 inches tall, and 3 inches deep.
If I turn it on it gives you almost enough light to actually see where you are going and the battery lasts for about 2 hours.
With two 18650s I could replace that battery for a package 2/3 the size of a pack of cigarettes and run that light for a day or so.
If I replace the bulb in it with an LED equivalent I could probably stretch that out to nearly a week.
Ouch I remember thouse fat 4.5 volt battery who had like 2 long tongues, going into those old flashlights, glowing in the dark at best with a super small incandescent lamp.
These?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:4,5V-AA-battery.jpg
I’d forgotten that they existed. I used to use them for something, maybe powering a Lego or meccano motor.
Yes that’s the one!
They were expensive and didn’t work for long IIRC :-)
My record player has the ability to record cassette audio onto USB.
Mine too!
Sliding ruler for doing multiplications (1). Still have it for nostalgia or post-apocalyptic scenarios.
You just beat me to it! Still got my slide rule in my desk, right next to the digital calipers.
TI-89 graphing calculator
There’s an app for that now
Ti-83 plus silver edition, baybee! I learned to code (badly) on that bad boy.
- CLS
- PRINT “Same,”
- PRINT “BASIC was my first programming language.”
- GOTO 1
Look at this guy who doesn’t number his commands by tens! Such confidence!
Exactly! And a TON of labels with single character names. GOTO E
They’re still using the successor TI-84 in high school and it still costs around $100.
Same, but different calculator: I own an HP-48SX, but now I just use HP-48GX emulated in an Android app.
I still have to use the calculator when taking exams. If I pull out a phone it’s an automatic fail.
A large reel to reel tape recorder.
A few early pentium laptops that no longer turn on.
If you are interested in fixing those I might be able to help.
The most common reason is the internal CMOS battery exploding or needing replacement.
Of that era, it could well be capacitor plague.
literally the same combo here, but my reel to reel is a rebranded “viking” telefunken unit
Rewritable CDs? Technically I can still use them, but I don’t really expect to use them and I wonder if they are still worth keeping.
I got rid of mine with my most recent move. Why bother bringing them with me.
Depending on their age and how you stored them they might not even work anymore
Not mine personally, but my town still has some hitching posts and mounting blocks
Birmingham Alabama has a zeppelin mooring building.
Pretty cool! I’ve actually been to the site where the Hindenburg went up in flames. There’s a small museum there with pieces of the actual blimp in it, including a tiny piece of the Nazi flag that was painted on the tail portion. Felt pretty odd for me to see that in person.
Mooring to the top of tall buildings didn’t generally work well in practice
Chicago has one, but it’s never been used
Maybe they kept it around in hope of making it a flying saucer dock, as in old Popular Mechanics cover art.
Reminds me of another thing: you see these boot scrapers all across european cities (1) They’re usually victorian era, and were used to clean horse shit from your shoes before entering a house.
Owie the photo contains errors :-(
You’re right :(
There are those kind of things everywhere where I live, took me some time to find out what it was for:
My hometown did, too! Even Chicago still has a couple.
In Amish country, you’ll see horses hitched up at Costco.
I have an ISA soundcard around here somewhere.
You will only take my Gravis Ultrasound Max from my stiff cold dead hands.
Not before.
I moved heaven and earth to find and buy one back in the day. We will never part ways. I don’t have had a system to put it in for the last 22 years. I dont care. It’s resting in its box untill… I dont know, the rapture or something. It’s mine.
I had one!
my old ISA graphics card would like a word. :p
Film canisters. People saved the plastic canisters photo film came in because they were so well made, waterproof, airtight, and ubiquitous. They were used in all kinds of DIY designs. I’ve heard some companies still make them, without the film, for people who need them for crafts. I still have some in the junk drawer.
I used to keep weed in them
If you have a local photo shop that still develops film they will gladly give them to you for free. I have about 20 sitting around and rhey do come in handy. The shops just throw them away anyway.
A coat with a phone pocket. If you have something shaped like a Nokia 3210, you can actually use that pocket. Modern phones are the exact wrong shape to fit in there.
A Minidisc player. First, music went to mp3 players and then it went completely online. Fortunately I sold that thing while it still had some value.
A battery powered GPS device. It’s just for navigating in the forest, and nothing else. It doesn’t even have a map, so it’s pretty useless while driving.
I have a hoodie with a little tunnel sewed in it to route your headphone wire down to the phone pocket.
Oh, and some backpacks have a hole for headphones. I guess you’re supposed to keep a CD player in there or something.
Those have a modern use too. I keep my power bank in the bag and use it to charge my phone on the go.
That would have been handy when playing pokemon go.
What does that GPS display? A direction?
A direction and coordinates most likely. You can use the paper map for the rest. It makes sense in some scenarios, mostly doesn’t anymore.
Most of the ones I’ve seen actually had a map but the problem is that since it has no internet connection it can’t update when changes happen in real life.
Therefore you have to go and find new and updated maps for it and a lot of them cannot be updated either due to new maps not being released for them anymore or the manufacturers expectation that there aren’t enough of those devices in service anymore for a map release to make sense.
Oh I just looked it up and I was way behind on the technology leap those devices did! I was thinking of LCD 3 row displays. Nice to see those are available now!
Those were popular for geocaching before smartphones became ubiquitous and you could just use a geocaching app.
With a regular GPS that has a map you could usually not navigate to a precise off-road location, even if the GPS allowed you to enter the exact coordinates it would just navigate you to the nearest street on the map.
With these simple GPS devices you would just get a compass pointing to your goal and it would allow you to reach the precise coordinates you entered
Here’s one way you could have used it. You drive your car to a remote location. You grab your rifle and your dog, and go hunting. You mark the location of your car on the GPS and start walking. In the evening, you can use the GPS to find your way back to the car. You could also go hiking and use the GPS to find your way back.
The whole point is to mark locations and later find your way back those locations. In the era of geocaching you would have made a custom point of interest and input the coordinates manually before actually visiting the location.
This device actually shows you lots of information you rarely need these days: direction, speed, distance, coordinates, signal strength, just to name a few.
I used it that way when I did desert hikes. Do food and water caches, mark them as waypoints. I would mark them on my topo too of course. Sure was nice on night hikes to pull out a backlit GPS instead of a topo map.
I have an old dial telephone from the 1940s. A couple years ago I saw an Arduino project to make them dial digitally, but it’s not the top item on my bucket list.
Jaz drive (and the isa scsi card) and several tapes.
Thanks for reminding me that I can’t trust my own memory and that they were NOT called Jazz drives
Woah, so you’re the other person who bought a Jaz drive! I knew we’d meet eventually.
My school had them everywhere back then. At one point, I owned 2 jaz drives, several Zip drives, and countless disks for each. I later worked the phones during Iomega’s click of death scandal. Yeah, I’m old.
I had Zip and Jaz drives as well. A couple years ago a guy at work was doing some weird project where he neede a bunch of zip disks, so I gave him my box of them and he transferred my data to a couple DVDs. Found a lot of photos, old forgotten code of mine, and D&D scenarios I had written and never played. Homebrew spells, magic items, etc… which I’m now using in my campaign. Great treasure trove!
Scientific calculator.
I got a graphing one from TI. It was really expensive and was marginally useful during college. Then I had a cheap one that just did numbers.
And those were way better than sliding rulers.
I have a sony mini cassette video camera. Got a new battery for it and works like a dream. Really fun to record modern events in that format.
I also have a Sears VHS video camera. Working on getting a battery for that.
A functional electric Smith Corona typewriter
8mm slide projector
Too many CRTS
It’s a good time being a Junkman
