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Last Chance posted:I remember something called ChaCha that did this. I answered questions for a few bucks at a time for a while during college and it barely paid anything but it was sort of fun. Looks like Google killed off their SMS search in 2013. https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/12/google-kills-sms-search/
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Aug 14, 2016 05:26
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Last Chance posted:I remember something called ChaCha that did this. I answered questions for a few bucks at a time for a while during college and it barely paid anything but it was sort of fun. ChaCha is what I was thinking of - it was free to ask questions edit: Oh gently caress it's still around http://www.chacha.com/
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Aug 14, 2016 05:26
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How about a deep relic post from the shortwave thread? I picked up this interesting little Zenith Portable tube radio a couple of weeks ago. The 1953 L507 Meridian was basically the Poor man's version of the H500 Transoceanic. The Meridian sold for $89 while the Transoceanic H500 sold for around $150. It didn't sell well and as a result is quite rare today. The L507 Meridian covers the AM broadcast band along with two bands covering 1-6MHZ and 6-18MHZ shortwave. Unlike the H500, the Meridian didn't have a complex pushbutton band selection coil stack, but rather a basic rotary bandswitch. Despite being Zenith's low end shortwave portable in the US market, the Meridian was apparently exported to Cuba, Central and South America, North Africa, and The Mideast.  After a Recap, restringing the dial cord, and building a battery pack for it, it plays great. The original Electrolytic capacitor can tested like new on all sections on my ESR tester, and the radio played with no AC hum after the paper capacitors were replaced, so it will stay for the time being.  The 1L6 tube was weak, so I replaced it with one of the solid state versions available on eBay. The SS 1l6 provides better sensitivity and selectivity on the upper Shortwave bands. Also the power cord is twisted all to heck, but the insulation is still pliable, and since I tend I run my old tube portables almost exclusively on batteries, It'll get replaced later. The Radio runs on 6 cheapass Dollar Tree carbon zinc D cells for the filament supply and 10 NIMH 9v's in series for the Plate supply. The filament draw is so low that the D cells last for almost a month of regular listening. My next move is to use a 12V Sealed Lead Acid battery from an emergency lighting system with a 9V regulator or a diode dropper to take the place of the D Cells. Now I can bring Radio Havana Cuba, Brother Stair, and Alex Jones with me wherever I go!
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Aug 14, 2016 10:42
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Old radio fact: some of these old radios have a "hot chassis" problem where metal parts of the radio can become electrified which could result in a nasty shock or electrocution. http://www.geojohn.org/Radios/MyRadios/Safety.html
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Aug 14, 2016 11:18
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Surprisingly not too bad, here's the first 5 seasons of M.A.S.H: You can also do a double-sided DVD that you have to flip over - I assume that simply doubles the capacity - which is something I've seen for TV series. Also, I'm pretty sure you can reduce quality to fit more on a DVD if you want, which might make sense for M*A*S*H since I guess the original media isn't great quality. I guess with VHS you could get VCRs that supported "long play" to fit 2x more on a tape, and there were 4x options too, but I never saw any commercially available tapes that depended on that. CaptainSarcastic posted:I never had to deal with Starforce, but my main desktop for years was running Windows XP 64-bit. You and I must be a significant percentage of the people who ever ran that OS. I remember hearing at the time that not many drivers were available for 64-bit and to stay away from it. No big deal, I only had 1GB of RAM in my XP machine anyway, and in fact started out with 256MB I think 
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Aug 14, 2016 11:27
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Buttcoin purse posted:You can also do a double-sided DVD that you have to flip over The production companies that use these are assholes. No one conforms to a standard of which side to put the ring label. I have two copies of 'Lock Stock and two Smoking Barrels' that changed the sides of the labels to denote which side was 4:3 and 16:9. 50-50 chance of getting it right. 1--% of getting it wrong. EVERY time.
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Aug 14, 2016 12:25
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Hot drat Techmoan always finds the best hifi junk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJo13FP4UpI
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Aug 14, 2016 13:21
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error1 posted:Hot drat Techmoan always finds the best hifi junk This is awesome, looking at the mechanism go and realizing it's just an insane Rube Goldberg machine for playing tapes, cooked up by some batshit Japanese engineer 
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Aug 14, 2016 13:44
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Buttcoin purse posted:You can also do a double-sided DVD that you have to flip over - I assume that simply doubles the capacity - which is something I've seen for TV series. Also, I'm pretty sure you can reduce quality to fit more on a DVD if you want, which might make sense for M*A*S*H since I guess the original media isn't great quality. I guess with VHS you could get VCRs that supported "long play" to fit 2x more on a tape, and there were 4x options too, but I never saw any commercially available tapes that depended on that. Shows like MASH are the easiest to make into BluRay since they were all filmed on actual film and there's no real special effects to deal with. Re: XP 64. The only people I knew who used it were people who refused to use Vista for whatever reason. Sure it sucked at the very beginning but it was a pretty decent OS until 7 came out; XP 64 was just garbage overall since no one made any drivers for it.
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Aug 14, 2016 14:19
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error1 posted:Hot drat Techmoan always finds the best hifi junk He is quite good at the way he explains stuff. Although I do think that as much audiophile bashing that he does - he secretly is one. But he should never stop, it's amazing how half of his videos are random poo poo electronics (mainly dash cameras) and the other half are technology relics.
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Aug 14, 2016 14:43
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Humphreys posted:But he should never stop, it's amazing how half of his videos are random poo poo electronics (mainly dash cameras) and the other half are technology relics. I think he said in one of those videos that he does those "other" tech videos because they tend to get more hits then some of his obscure retro tech ones. So the ad revenue from those videos can pay for the retro ones. But yeah, his videos are great.
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Aug 14, 2016 14:50
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Drastic Actions posted:I think he said in one of those videos that he does those "other" tech videos because they tend to get more hits then some of his obscure retro tech ones. So the ad revenue from those videos can pay for the retro ones. Makes sense - if and when I buy random lovely electronics - I tend to check for reviews. Might aswell have someone competent in it making the videos.
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Aug 14, 2016 15:06
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VHS board games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iesu1mydmMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeuddGu5LMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ensf-S035x0 I guess stuff like Scene It became the VHS replacement as DVD board games tended to be quiz based. Interestingly the UK VHS collector market is mostly powered by the era of Video Nasties where a bunch of movies got banned and subsequently became collector items.
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Aug 14, 2016 16:03
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WebDog posted:VHS board games. I had this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oImVASR_XKM And this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57aseKvPvNE They both loving sucked
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Aug 14, 2016 16:06
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EugeneJ posted:ChaCha is what I was thinking of - it was free to ask questions The KGB offered this service too. No, not the actual Russians, the Knowledge Generation Bureau. You probably remember them for their ads. That, or the fact that they got sued for not paying their "agents" properly, which ended up being the start of their demise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxJmt_J-4jU
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Aug 14, 2016 16:08
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Buttcoin purse posted:You can also do a double-sided DVD that you have to flip over My copy of Goodfellas was like this. You had to flip it right as Karen was ringing all the apartments saying that Janice Rossi was a whore.
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Aug 14, 2016 16:32
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WebDog posted:VHS board games. Have you EXPERIENCED BIJ? EXPERIENCE BIJ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3N91VDtWL0
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Aug 14, 2016 16:52
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Those text based information services are actually still huge with farmers and stuff in rural africa where 3g and lte still are rare. I saw a documentary on this recently, forgot where though. One services "headquarters" were a wood shack with a dude sitting at a desk with a bunch of old dumbphones and a computer
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Aug 14, 2016 16:56
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Aix posted:Those text based information services are actually still huge with farmers and stuff in rural africa where 3g and lte still are rare. I saw a documentary on this recently, forgot where though. One services "headquarters" were a wood shack with a dude sitting at a desk with a bunch of old dumbphones and a computer Back before Internet service was really available out where we lived my dad leased a special terminal from a company called DTN. It received (via satellite, I believe) weather forecasts, corn prices, and other data of interest to farmers. The terminal itself was just a CRT with a few navigation buttons build onto the base. Can't find any pictures but it was pretty neat circa, oh, 1995.
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Aug 14, 2016 17:04
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I went to Tornado Terrys about 6 weeks ago because he has a handful of good pinball machines and it's about 25 minutes from my mansion.
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Aug 14, 2016 17:18
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error1 posted:Hot drat Techmoan always finds the best hifi junk What I wonder is how that machine counts. Techmoan guy points out a black box as the thing that does the counting, but how would an analog machine know how to skip X steps if you program it to play tapes 7, 9 and 13 in that order?
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Aug 14, 2016 18:37
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ChaCha is probably my favorite tech relic because I worked there for about a year and made pretty decent bank doing it. When I say I worked there, I was technically an independent contractor but I was one of the guys answering the questions. I could see the writing on the wall going into it, because it was a service with a weird sweet spot - cell phones were ubiquitous to the point where pretty much every high school kid already had one, but smart phones hadn't taken off yet. Phones already had internet capability, though, and so I think everyone knew it was a matter of time before anyone could just google with their phone. When I started, you made ten cents per question, double that once you got "verified" (basically a quality control person would check your answers for proper accreditation and to make sure they're right and so on). I was verified after a few days, and consistently made the emails praising top "guides" from there on. When I started, the chacha guide gig was a godsend. I'd owned my own used cd / record store until the end of November 2007, when I closed the place in preparation for my daughter being born in December. (It was my dream job, but it wasn't exactly raking in the bucks... iTunes and piracy made independent music shops a difficult proposition even back then, and the vinyl Renaissance hadn't quite hit Columbus, Georgia back then.) The owner of a small record label told me about chacha, which he was doing after hours for beer money, essentially. I've always been a "jack of all trades, master of none" kind of guy and so chacha was right up my alley. I could find the answer to most any question quickly and efficiently. When I started, which would've been September 2008 (I just went and checked, God bless gmail), the questions were there constantly. You essentially added a toolbar to your browser that gave you questions to answer, and as quickly as I could answer them there'd be another. It was a great way for me to feel productive - closing my record store had been a big blow to my ego, and I constantly worried about being a drain on my wife's finances. Being able to contribute, a little at first and then more when chacha began paying more for specialized questions (I think, but don't quote me on this, that mathematics questions paid up to a dollar!), helped me maintain my sanity and sense of worth as a stay at home dad. Those were great months. Watching my child grow, being able to pop into "work" whenever she went down for a nap, it was fun times. And you'd get all kinds of questions - from kids obviously cheating on tests to what time restaurants were open to things like "what's <kids name> like" - a kid obviously googling themselves via text message. We were encouraged to be personable (as much as you can be via text with someone you don't know) and I honestly thought it was a really cool service. These days of course you can just google something yourself, and if you run into something you can't figure out, Auburn University will still let you ask Foy.
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Aug 14, 2016 18:53
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axolotl farmer posted:What I wonder is how that machine counts. There's a million ways you could implement it, I don't know if it's counting so much as it knows its position and compares it to the buttons one at a time as it turns until it matches one that's pressed it, and in continuous mode it just does it forever, and in one cycle mode there's basically a "21" button that tells it to stop. edit: I'm actually watching the video now, let's see how it works!
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Aug 14, 2016 19:00
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axolotl farmer posted:What I wonder is how that machine counts. There's plenty of ways to count things. Since there's one button that counts each tape, and another button that gets hit after the last tape, there's probably some bit of circuitry in there that is able to be pulsed a certain number of times until it triggers the pressing of the other button. Having to count to a certain number could just be preloading some pulses until it will reset once it gets to 20 again.
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Aug 14, 2016 19:11
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wyntyr posted:ChaCha is probably my favorite tech relic because I worked there for about a year and made pretty decent bank doing it. I used to send ChaCha philosophical questions for laughs. I'm sorry.
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Aug 14, 2016 19:35
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Return Of JimmyJars posted:I used to send ChaCha philosophical questions for laughs. I'm sorry. Nah, I liked those questions. Basically I liked answering anything other than the questions that were obviously people trying to cheat on a test.
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Aug 14, 2016 19:38
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Random Stranger posted:Yesterday I received a text. What is the technical reason they are no longer supporting that phone? Spite? Also did they say which phone they are giving you? I remember when Verizon phones didn't have SIM slots.
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Aug 14, 2016 21:20
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Maybe they are shutting down their 2g radios.
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Aug 14, 2016 21:41
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Random Stranger posted:Yesterday I received a text. I bet you could still use it with other companies or a MVNO like FreedomPop
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Aug 14, 2016 21:43
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Cojawfee posted:Maybe they are shutting down their 2g radios. Or they just don't want to maintain 10 year old towers when they can start building out 5Gz
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Aug 14, 2016 21:48
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Cojawfee posted:Re: XP 64. The only people I knew who used it were people who refused to use Vista for whatever reason. Sure it sucked at the very beginning but it was a pretty decent OS until 7 came out; XP 64 was just garbage overall since no one made any drivers for it. XP 64 was not garbage, at least not when I was using it from 2008 to 2015. The only things I had any driver issues with was wireless cards, and even there 3 out of my 4 available cards worked. It was my gaming rig for a number of those years, and it handled the job nicely.
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Aug 14, 2016 21:50
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Yesterday my video card driver crashed and Windows 10 restarted it without crashing. That's some poo poo right there.
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Aug 14, 2016 21:55
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Germstore posted:Yesterday my video card driver crashed and Windows 10 restarted it without crashing. That's some poo poo right there.
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Aug 14, 2016 22:03
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Cojawfee posted:Maybe they are shutting down their 2g radios. That sucks because there's plenty of places in the middle of nowhere that I get 1x, so no data but I can call the police when a roving gang of hillbillies start gangstalking me.
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Aug 14, 2016 22:09
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Flipperwaldt posted:Welcome to 2012! Not my fault my computer hasn't crashed in 4 years. 
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Aug 14, 2016 22:14
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:What is the technical reason they are no longer supporting that phone? Spite? I think it's that they're shutting off 2G service. The freebie phone they gave me was an M3620, though with a trusty phone dead there's nothing tying me to a basic phone anymore.
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Aug 14, 2016 22:43
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Humphreys posted:The production companies that use these are assholes. No one conforms to a standard of which side to put the ring label. I have two copies of 'Lock Stock and two Smoking Barrels' that changed the sides of the labels to denote which side was 4:3 and 16:9. 50-50 chance of getting it right. 1--% of getting it wrong. EVERY time. Oh yeah I forgot about that. Not enough room for them to write "this side up for.." or "this side down for.." 
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Aug 15, 2016 04:48
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Buttcoin purse posted:Oh yeah I forgot about that. Not enough room for them to write "this side up for.." or "this side down for.." Oh, the two copies I have say 4:3 and 16:9 on alternate sides. Both copies however are opposite on which side. They don't say 'this side up' though.
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Aug 15, 2016 09:39
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Way back in the late 80's, early 90's there was a computer game that seemed to be loaded on all the computers in my elementary school's computer lab. It was called "island" and was a text entry game where you were trapped on a desert island and you had to fish for food, send out messages in bottles, or swim in shark infested water to collect planks to form a raft. You had to keep yourself fed and watered and either get rescued (via messages in bottles) or make a raft before a hurricane demolished the island. Has anyone else heard of this game and know the name of it? Because I think it comprises my most formative early computer game experiences
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Aug 15, 2016 11:23
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Serrath posted:Way back in the late 80's, early 90's there was a computer game that seemed to be loaded on all the computers in my elementary school's computer lab. It was called "island" and was a text entry game where you were trapped on a desert island and you had to fish for food, send out messages in bottles, or swim in shark infested water to collect planks to form a raft. You had to keep yourself fed and watered and either get rescued (via messages in bottles) or make a raft before a hurricane demolished the island. Was it this? http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=3842&d=30
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Aug 15, 2016 12:11
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