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Code Jockey posted:That's nuts. I spent $300 on my 20" professional RGB monitor (because I'm that guy), the giant consumer CRTs show up at my local thrift stores for like $50! Yea my friend was clearing out his parents basement after they moved into an apartment, and had given him the house so he and his wife can start a family. Obviously if you live in a house for 50 years you're going to accumulate junk. He put out an ad saying "free giant rear end heavy crt tv, best offer" on some local selling fb group and someone offered 300bux for it. The guy said he was a serious retro gamer and had been looking for one of those big rear end tvs that were basically a chest of drawers with a screen in them for ages and wanted to make sure he got it. Something like that, but fully boxed in and with carvings. It still worked fine too apparently. Oh man searching for that image showed me this one Okay thats a lot of money in AV gear, but using cinder blocks to make the stand is hilarious. But holy poo poo I want one of those standing record players. I would like any record player that works, but all the decent ones are the price of like a ps4, and that seems way too much to just listen to like reissues of Violator on.
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# ? May 19, 2019 08:35 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 13:00 |
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rndmnmbr posted:Currently rocking a 27" AOC i too have a 27" alexandra ocasio-cortez
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# ? May 19, 2019 08:49 |
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Platystemon posted:Someone on Reddit posted an essay about the evolution of the UK’s telephone numbering scheme. It's more interesting than it sounds because some of it is poo poo he made up so he could wave his walking stick at all this modern tomfoolery. For example, after Phone Day all UK numbers became a standard 11 digits long whereas previously London numbers had been only 10 digits. All the trouble with the 02x numbers, and previously the 011x numbers, arose because an extra digit needed to be added to do this. The only major fuckup in the system is that nobody thought to give 01121 to the first city in line and 01122 to the next, and likewise with the regions of London 0207 and 0208, to have as many locations as possible on 5-digit area codes. The effects of Cardiff being 029 and everyone getting two extra digits on their number is just a knock-on effect of that because they kept doing it. One thing neither the Reddit rant or the colossally unfunny dickheads mentioned was automatic exchanges, which rolled out in 1922 and created the system used until STD was implemented. These subdivided the large cities with a junction system by allocating a different three-letter code to every sub-exchange, which you could then dial with rotary pulses. In Manchester, for example, all numbers in Prestwich would begin with 773 (PRE), all Whitefield numbers would begin with 944 (WHI) and all Radcliffe numbers would begin with 723 (RAD). This meant that you could dial 773xxxx from anywhere in Manchester and be directly connected to Prestwich xxxx without passing through an operator. It's worth reading the Wiki page on telephony in Manchester, actually. Manchester has been close to the cutting edge all the way back to 1877, when the UK's first telephone engineers opened shop.
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# ? May 19, 2019 09:45 |
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I bought things:
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# ? May 20, 2019 08:48 |
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Jedit posted:It's more interesting than it sounds because some of it is poo poo he made up so he could wave his walking stick at all this modern tomfoolery. For example, after Phone Day all UK numbers became a standard 11 digits long whereas previously London numbers had been only 10 digits It's weird to be cheerleading the UK phone network, but you're right that it's a pretty logical system now - which is impressive given that it has organically grown on the original system using 'Hello, Operator, what number please?' What is obsolete is giving a poo poo about your phone number: quote:PhONEday was a change to the telephone dialing plan in the United Kingdom on 16 April 1995. It changed geographic area codes and some telephone numbers. In most areas a "1" was added to the dialling code. In Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield the area codes were replaced with new codes and the subscriber numbers gained an extra digit. The PhONEday changes also made provision for new ranges of subscriber numbers in those five cities. A £16m advertising campaign, and an eight-month period of parallel running during which old and new codes were active, preceded the change.[1] PhONEday followed a change made in May 1990 when the old London area code 01 had been released from use, permitting all United Kingdom geographic numbers to begin with this prefix. Originally planned in 1991 to take place in 1994,[2] in 1992 the change was postponed until 1995.[2] I think I can remember 4 telephone numbers now - I genuinely find it easier to google a business name on my phone and one-press dial it than I do to remember how to dial a number using android. And my personal contacts all exist in my address book - those that I actully call, rather than WhatsApp. Humphreys posted:I bought things:
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# ? May 20, 2019 09:41 |
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Shut up Meg posted:Do you, in fact, own a HD-DVD player? Kinda have two. One is the XBox 360 HD-DVD External Drive. The 'kinda' is my Super/multi/mega/omgwtfbbq combo drive in my PC that does CD/DVD/HDDVD/BD. I kinda hosed it the other night flashing the wrong firmware onto it in a vain attempt to test the HDDVD functionality (I could browse the folder structure fine but couldn't play video)
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# ? May 20, 2019 09:45 |
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My Blade Runner deluxe box set is HDDVD.
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# ? May 20, 2019 12:11 |
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Okay that is spooky: it was my memory of sitting down with an ebay-fresh copy of Bladerunner in the best cut, only to start swearing at my bluray player before I noticed that the case was red.
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# ? May 20, 2019 12:57 |
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Holy loving god drat! This has sound, you must turn it on. https://i.imgur.com/VfqnTd7.mp4 Full Scale Johnny 5 Project https://imgur.com/gallery/WxfZ41h
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# ? May 20, 2019 13:14 |
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Shut up Meg posted:Okay that is spooky: it was my memory of sitting down with an ebay-fresh copy of Bladerunner in the best cut, only to start swearing at my bluray player before I noticed that the case was red. Unless I'm out of touch, there is never a best version of the ending available.
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# ? May 20, 2019 14:02 |
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Humphreys posted:Unless I'm out of touch, there is never a best version of the ending available. Power goes out right after Roy gives his speech. That's the best ending available.
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# ? May 20, 2019 14:28 |
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Is shadowmask another word for CRT or just some kind of sorcery? It's a part of a color CRT. It's a metal sheet with a bunch of tiny holes in it. The beams from the electron guns are way too spread out to hit individual pixels, the sheet blocks the beam except where the pixels the guns are supposed to hit are. Trinitrons don't use them, they use an aperture grille instead. Instead of a metal sheet it's a bunch of vertically-running wires with narrow gaps between them. Phosphors are arranged differently as well but it's basically doing the same thing, but you can have a narrower dot pitch (distance between adjacent same-colored pixels). Downside is that the wires aren't as solid as a shadow mask which can result in vibration issues so Trinitrons have a couple of horizontal wires to hold everything in place and you can see them running across the screen if you look hard. When I was a salesdroid I loved people splashing out on really expensive Trinitron displays like a 40" XBR and returning it the next week because they were pixel-peeping and saw the wires. I remember that Packard Bell computers were generally pretty poo poo, but they had a line of monitors that were actually Trinitrons, which both looked wonderful and were waay less expensive than the same thing with a Sony label on it. I just went looking for details and holy poo poo I had no idea Packard Bell was still around.
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# ? May 20, 2019 14:38 |
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In Europe pretty much every TV since the 80s have had scart RGB inputs, while in the US the best input was S-video, with component inputs on very high-end models. That's why console modding, upscalers and PVMs are such a big deal over there, while here I just need a €20 scart cable, and I'm all set with something that will cost hundreds of dollars on the other side of the Atlantic.
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# ? May 20, 2019 16:38 |
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Yeah but European TVs were all 50hz and had hosed up versions of the games.
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# ? May 20, 2019 16:48 |
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DoctorWhat posted:Yeah but European TVs were all 50hz and had hosed up versions of the games. Not to mention that the UK and Germany had really loving weird censorship laws, making almost everything non-Nintendo become hot mess of hatchet jobs. In Nordics, you basically had to pirate the Fallout 1 (and later 2) because what we got on a disc was a UK-censored version with US 1.03 patch preinstalled, loving some quest lines which broke things in the story. This more or less only because the Brits decided that the possibility to shoot kids or the more explosive types of deaths were too much. So obsolete tech: regionally localized games (even though they still exist on some places).
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# ? May 20, 2019 17:10 |
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Shut up Meg posted:I have a lot of affection for dot matrix printers and I've just realised why: This is one of the reasons why they still see a ton of use, really. They're generally pretty simple, rugged machines that you don't have to reload very often. Your average joe probably doesn't have much use for one but if you're printing crap out on an industrial scale and it doesn't need to be pretty then you get a dot matrix.
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# ? May 20, 2019 18:10 |
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Phanatic posted:It's a part of a color CRT. It's a metal sheet with a bunch of tiny holes in it. The beams from the electron guns are way too spread out to hit individual pixels, the sheet blocks the beam except where the pixels the guns are supposed to hit are. Dell had a line of Trinitrons that were really good.
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# ? May 20, 2019 19:00 |
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Mr-Spain posted:Dell had a line of Trinitrons that were really good. I snagged a big old Trinitron monitor at a fire sale for $50, I loved that monitor until the day the picture shrank to the size of a postage stamp.
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# ? May 20, 2019 19:02 |
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Vanagoon posted:Holy loving god drat! This is perfect, now install an AI.
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# ? May 20, 2019 19:11 |
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Krispy Wafer posted:Pencil smudged or became faint. You needed that poo poo inked. Pencil is just about the only writing implement that never fades.
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# ? May 21, 2019 03:20 |
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Mr-Spain posted:Dell had a line of Trinitrons that were really good. I have one! It's a... 20"? Dell Trinitron CRT w/RGBHV BNC connections on the back alongside the VGA connector. Fantastic picture on that thing still, and it's a zillion years old now.
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# ? May 21, 2019 08:57 |
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Jerry Cotton posted:Pencil is just about the only writing implement that never fades. I don’t trust this newfangled pencil hooey. Give me a chisel any day.
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# ? May 21, 2019 09:10 |
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Platystemon posted:I don’t trust this newfangled pencil hooey.
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# ? May 21, 2019 12:00 |
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Not really obsolete but checking this 18 year old 4K monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlaxgiszfEo
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# ? May 28, 2019 08:54 |
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Today I learned about the Elcaset and of course Technomoan did a piece on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkGMJBqZawA
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# ? May 28, 2019 14:32 |
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I love that style of ad. Anyone know the fonts they used for it?
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# ? May 28, 2019 15:22 |
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Empress Brosephine posted:I love that style of ad. Anyone know the fonts they used for it? some variation of Franklin Condensed or Fuller Sans Condensed, probably. For the headline text, anyway.
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# ? May 28, 2019 15:31 |
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Thanks
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# ? May 30, 2019 00:31 |
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Cross posting from the Tech Relics thread: Haven't seen this mentioned in a while. The DeathStar HDD that failed so hard that it would lathe the magnetic coating off the platters: https://www.astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/index.html
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# ? Jun 2, 2019 18:29 |
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Vanagoon posted:Cross posting from the Tech Relics thread: I had an HP desktop with one of these and it would make some gnarly noises on startup but it never ever failed.
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# ? Jun 2, 2019 19:44 |
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Vanagoon posted:Cross posting from the Tech Relics thread: This is from 2003. Are personal pages at universities archived forever?
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# ? Jun 2, 2019 19:53 |
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Until someone with the same name gets a position, yeah
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# ? Jun 2, 2019 19:56 |
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Unperson_47 posted:This is from 2003. Are personal pages at universities archived forever? You're complaining about this in the obsolete technology thread? I think it's always good to come across an old fashioned page that's just text and images. No javascript and tracking crap and advertisements or any of that horseshit. That's real obsolete and failed technology in this day and age, pages that aren't loaded down with as much bullshit as possible so someone can make a buck. Edit: Anything that still exists on the "live internet" and doesn't have to be dug up at archive.org is always a good thing, I think.
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# ? Jun 2, 2019 19:57 |
Vanagoon posted:You're complaining about this in the obsolete technology thread? you can make some really beautiful pages with modern html/js and no tracking poo poo and we never see it bc we live in hellworld
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# ? Jun 2, 2019 19:58 |
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Tunicate posted:Until someone with the same name gets a position, yeah They might have changed the name policy to something like first initial concatenated with surname, making Ken’s directory safe.
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# ? Jun 2, 2019 20:52 |
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Vanagoon posted:You're complaining about this in the obsolete technology thread? Not complaining at all! Just curious as I have seen so many of them.
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# ? Jun 2, 2019 21:03 |
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They might have changed to a different URL scheme too, and just left the old "domain.com/~username" pages as-is.
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# ? Jun 2, 2019 21:21 |
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the college I dropped out of in the early 00s didn't clean up old .edu email addresses, going back to the 70s, until a few years ago I mean the last thing I used it for was to sign up for facebook over a decade ago, when you had to be a college student to use it, so whatever, but it was a small 'aw man' e: because I listed my gmail as a backup address with the university, since cleaning the email addresses, they send me Alumni Association donation requests- lol I dropped out of that school twice and then pretended to be a student for a couple years so I could keep doing a radio show
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# ? Jun 2, 2019 22:00 |
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Vanagoon posted:I think it's always good to come across an old fashioned page that's just text and images. No javascript and tracking crap and advertisements or any of that horseshit. Remember that time someone deleted some obscure little function from npm and it broke half the sites on the internet? https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code/
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# ? Jun 2, 2019 23:19 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 13:00 |
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Peanut Butler posted:I dropped out of that school twice and then pretended to be a student for a couple years so I could keep doing a radio show Gonna need to hear this story.
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# ? Jun 3, 2019 02:33 |