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Cojawfee posted:Depending on when you recorded them, they are worthless. Syndicated episodes of Seinfeld at one point were sped up and cut to fit in more commercials. it was the mid 90's while the show was still on the air but yeah i know
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Apr 21, 2020 19:06
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Data Graham posted:Yeah, a rotary control for scrolling or volume (see OG iPod for example) is a wonderful thing. Jog wheels for controlling tapes and turntables though, that's a different beast. They're for moving at precisely controlled speeds backward or forward through audio or video, like for editing or DJ'ing. A lot of the cheap VCRs had what looked like a jog wheel but worked like you describe - it would just be a bump for one speed forward or reverse. Better units had wheels that would indeed let you go as slow as frame by frame and scale the speed to wheel speed. It was fun messing around with that as a kid.
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Apr 21, 2020 19:22
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I have a hard time believing that an infrared based remote could effectively use a jog wheel
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Apr 21, 2020 19:30
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Iron Crowned posted:I have a hard time believing that an infrared based remote could effectively use a jog wheel the one i had was something like this, not the exact model, but it had a similar wheel both on the face of the unit and the remote:  the indentation was for frame by frame in either direction, the outside was a springloaded wheel that'd snap back to the middle but you could twist left and right to get i believe 4 variable speeds in either direction it worked well enough
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Apr 21, 2020 19:38
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Jog wheels were good with CAV laserdiscs, given you could do variable speed slow motion and fast forward. Can't say I've used it that often, but it still feels pretty impressive. Step play on those discs, now I use that quite a bit, especially with bonus photo content.
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Apr 21, 2020 19:41
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That Sony phone with the wheel was also the first phone I had that let you store more than 10 numbers in it. I think it could do 99. Which basically heralded the end of my being able to memorize phone numbers.
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Apr 21, 2020 19:48
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Yeah, I remember two-part ring controls like those. They kept their popularity through the CAV laserdisc era, but the cheapo VCRs just aped the look. I seem to remember it was a monumentally complicated and expensive mechanism in a top-end VCR that had decent freeze-frame and scrubbing capability, which is why it was such an aspirational thing on the entry-level units' remotes. And even the good ones would have been better off with separate dedicated FF/Rew buttons because 99% of the time that's all you wanted.
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Apr 21, 2020 19:49
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open24hours posted:I remember that, what an interesting story. Thank you! I remembered it being in that video but at the beginning, so it kept tripping me up when I didn't see it. I guess when he posted it early for Patreon it had it in there but decided to remove it after.
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Apr 21, 2020 19:54
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Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:That Sony phone with the wheel was also the first phone I had that let you store more than 10 numbers in it. I think it could do 99. Which basically heralded the end of my being able to memorize phone numbers. Even if you had a newer fancy phone with is own phone book, perhaps even allowing to add more than one phone number per contact (home landline, work phone, mobile), you'd be in poo poo when you got another phone, because transferring the numbers would involve copying them to the SIM card which didn't allow that and maybe had a 20 char all uppercase limit on the name associated with it.
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Apr 21, 2020 21:22
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I vaguely remember a short period where having a higher capacity SIM card was a selling point for providers, though it basically overlapped the period when it stopped mattering.
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Apr 22, 2020 06:08
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Fun fact: SIM cards are actually little computers, and you can install apps on them! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMII5G98AdM
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Apr 22, 2020 12:39
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I used to have a Siemens SF65 - It was mad, it sort of flipped and swivelled to become a 'proper' camera using the screen as a view finder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iig3PP4OFu4 It was really cool for the time, loved that phone
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Apr 22, 2020 14:26
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 A Nokia 3650 was my first real smartphone with an actual operating system that could install apps and work with a filesystem and things like that. It was mindblowing for its time even with its circular keypad (which ironically made T9 texting easier because there was no guessing which row you were on). It also ran ngage games, since they had the same internal hardware, so you could play Sonic the Hedgehog without the shame of sidetalkin. If I recall it also had a very basic NES emulator that ran pretty poorly but did enable me to play a shitload of tetris, which is really all you can ask for from a 2002 smartphone
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Apr 22, 2020 15:48
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PfsndsihY A fascinating look at something I'd never once thought about
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Apr 22, 2020 16:48
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My uncle worked his whole career in a maximum security prison and amongst his huge amount of absolutely bananas stories I remember him saying they were trialing PPD devices (tasers, mace, etc) that had (I'm guessing) RFID systems in them that would enable them to only work within a certain proximity to the CO's RFID wrist band. If the device got more than a couple feet from the CO's wrist strap, the device would deactivate and if it didnt return within a set amount of time, it would trigger the alarm system, a lockdown, crazy purple knockout gas, etc. Apparently they had issues with inmates getting ahold of PPD and turning them on the CO's
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Apr 22, 2020 17:02
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:
I remember wanting one so bad. That weird age of Nokia design where they experimented with all possible form factors before getting stuck with the unremarkable feature phone thing and stagnating.
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Apr 22, 2020 19:35
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Mr.Radar posted:Fun fact: SIM cards are actually little computers, and you can install apps on them! Does it run DOOM?
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Apr 22, 2020 20:08
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oohhboy posted:Does it run DOOM? Probably not, SIM cards only have tiny amounts of memory available for applications and their CPUs are extremely slow. Also, there's no way for them to output video 
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Apr 23, 2020 00:00
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Not with that attitude.
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Apr 23, 2020 00:19
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wa27 posted:I have a nice Hitachi VCR that has a real jog wheel and when I first used it, I couldn't believe I was using a VCR that could go frame-by-frame forward and backwards. Like, all my previous VCRs couldn't even pause a frame on the screen and have it look good. 10 years ago when I was working at an electronics recycler, we would get a lot of A/V gear that had already been obsolete for a decade, if not more. The kind of poo poo a local news station would have circa 1980-2000. Some of the VHS/SVHS/etc. players had a jog wheel that really worked. You could go one frame at a time, and they were sharp and crisp. I had absolutely no personal use for them, but they were so satisfying to use. Absolute, effortless control of the video playback.
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Apr 23, 2020 08:10
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WITCHCRAFT posted:10 years ago when I was working at an electronics recycler, we would get a lot of A/V gear that had already been obsolete for a decade, if not more. The kind of poo poo a local news station would have circa 1980-2000. Some of the VHS/SVHS/etc. players had a jog wheel that really worked. You could go one frame at a time, and they were sharp and crisp. I had absolutely no personal use for them, but they were so satisfying to use. Absolute, effortless control of the video playback. Man, think how many copies of Basic Instinct would have been saved from tape-stretch damage if every vcr used that technology.
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Apr 23, 2020 08:19
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Shut up Meg posted:Man, think how many copies of Basic Instinct would have been saved from tape-stretch damage if every vcr used that technology. I start thinking "All that effort for two seconds of blurry badly-lit beaver shot" and then I remember it was the early '90s. We really do have a feast of pornography freely available, it's difficult to remember that it wasn't always so.
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Apr 23, 2020 10:53
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Shut up Meg posted:Man, think how many copies of Basic Instinct would have been saved from tape-stretch damage if every vcr used that technology. I'm gearing up for weekend beers by having Thursday beers. Guess what I am inquiring on buying on laserdisc to show off the pausing feature with the jogdial remote...
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Apr 23, 2020 11:24
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Humphreys posted:I'm gearing up for weekend beers by having Thursday beers. Guess what I am inquiring on buying on laserdisc to show off the pausing feature with the jogdial remote... Who Framed Roger Rabbit? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/who-stripped-jessica-rabbit/ quote:An incident that occurs during the scene in which Jessica Rabbit is riding through Toon Town with Bob Hoskins in an animated cab. As the taxi runs into a lamp post, Jessica and Hoskins are both thrown from the car; Jessica lands spinning, which causes her red dress to start hiking up her body. For a few frames of Jessica’s second spin her underwear supposedly disappears, revealing Jessica’s unclothed nether regions.The frames in question are frames 2170-2172 on side 4 of the laserdisc version; in these frames Jessica’s pubic region is colored darker than the surrounding flesh-colored areas. Whether this coloration was intended to suggest nudity or was the result of a paint error is unknown. The intention might have been to paint the darker regions a color representative of underwear, but an error in the color markup chart produced some ambiguous images instead:
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Apr 23, 2020 11:29
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My Mum used to work part time at a video shop, a small independent one, I think just for something to do. So at aged 10 I had a bedroom plastered with huge posters, stuff like Cheech and Chong, Bad Taste, crazy retro classics. I'd get given like 10 of each, man that was wasted on me back then!
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Apr 23, 2020 12:35
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 back before video editing switched to pc nles, everyone used a controller similar to this one. rs232 obv. the jog wheels on these things were the absolute best - you could switch between scrubbing frame by frame and fast forwarding where the wheel seamlessly controlled the speed of the ff. theres still usb jog wheels around. they never went away, modern all-file based playouts still have jog wheels e: after having a closer look at that picture... i remember that controller, the wheels on it were atrocious lol. but most of the other ones are/were great! this one was drat fine: 
Aix has a new favorite as of 13:22 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 13:12
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Shut up Meg posted:Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I kinda knew you'd post that. I have a 4K file but couldnt be assed looking. I was talking about a LD of Basic Instict so I can show off the freezeframe stuff. I also legit like the movie.
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Apr 23, 2020 14:00
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I wish you could still interface those rs232 editing boards to premiere. I’d rock those in a heartbeat.
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Apr 23, 2020 14:42
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I just picked up a relic. It was missing the power/AV cords, so I have those on order. Always wanted to try one of these out back in the day, and this one turned up on eBay for cheap because it was missing the cables. Bonus was that the seller was only two blocks from my house. 
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Apr 24, 2020 07:31
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UnkleBoB posted:I just picked up a relic. It was missing the power/AV cords, so I have those on order. Always wanted to try one of these out back in the day, and this one turned up on eBay for cheap because it was missing the cables. Bonus was that the seller was only two blocks from my house. 
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Apr 24, 2020 13:47
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:I wish you could still interface those rs232 editing boards to premiere. I’d rock those in a heartbeat. This seems like it would be feasible for a programmer to do. You'd probably just need a (possibly USB) serial port. There would have to be some way to fake it to look like what Premiere expects.
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Apr 24, 2020 14:08
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Buttcoin purse posted:This seems like it would be feasible for a programmer to do. You'd probably just need a (possibly USB) serial port. There would have to be some way to fake it to look like what Premiere expects. Premiere can just work off of keyboard shortcuts if you want, so every button and basically everything but the jog wheels could be mapped to a keyboard key (basically using a serial->USB Keyboard dongle) and work perfect. The jog wheels could maybe even work if you set them to just repeat a key for each X degrees of rotation and then set premiere to skip Y frames per keypress?
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Apr 24, 2020 15:03
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Last time I dealt with rs232 I used EventGhost. It was pretty easy to use with my projector to send key press signals and receive states, no programming knowledge required, though I have no idea what protocol that keyboard uses or if it would work. Most motherboards sold today still have serial headers too. SCheeseman has a new favorite as of 15:14 on Apr 24, 2020 |
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Apr 24, 2020 15:10
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I was looking for something in my basement the other night and came across this big thicc monstrosity. Its a Toshiba T3200SX and its a "portable", really a "luggable" 386 and was my first "laptop" ever. I have great memories of playing Commander Keen on this and writing Turbo Pascal assignments with it for high school. Released in 1989 and being a 386, it was pretty ancient by the time I was in high school in the mid 90's, but actual laptops of the time were wildly expensive and way out of my reach. I can recall going to a classmate's house to work on a programming assignment and while he tapped away on his shiny new Pentium desktop, I sat on the floor (near an outlet of course) with this thing, writing terrible Pascal code and slowly roasting my lap. I loved it though, because I could just pick it up and move, which was a real game-changer during a time when actual laptops were only for business executives and smartphones were a decade or more away.  It had a whopping 80mb hard drive, if I recall, which I remember being loud as hell in the 90s and I was pretty sure it doesn't work today.  Look at all that expansion!!! More than anyone could possibly ever need (just like 640k of RAM). That plate on the back labeled EXP is for expansion, but not in the way you'd think (more on that later)  More options! A floppy drive! A PS2 port! Switchable printer ports! WELCOME TO THE FUTURE!! Also a reset button for some reason, despite the power button being easily accessible on the back and the reset button requiring something thin to poke in there   The actual expansion slots. Currently filled with more serial and parallel ports and a USR Sportster modem. That EXP plate on the back that I mentioned a couple of posts up? When you remove that, its how you get these cards out, they sort of pop up out of the ISA slots and out through that plate. Obviously you're quite limited by the space available in all axes, but this did mean you could do things like put a dedicated graphics card or ethernet card in. Mid 90's Jim Silly-Balls had no practical use for ethernet and dutifully used the USR Sportster to get on the internet.  Let's fire it up and see what happens! Oh, dead battery, of course  I forgot to mention that this is a gas plasma display. Red/Amber/Orange only. Despite being monochrome it's sharper and has better contrast and less ghosting than comparable LCDs of the time. Anyone stuck using an LCD in the late 80's/early 90's when this was made knows how terrible they are.  A quick trip to the BIOS where you can literally only set the date and the hard drive specs, and it boots!!  Mercifully it has the factory hard drive, whos values are preprogrammed into the BIOS, because there is no way in hell I could figure out sectors and platters and whatnot anymore in 2020. I used to know that stuff like the back of my hand.   Let's see what's on the hard drive. Commander Keen of course!! Loved that game back in the day. I did also see the Turbo Pascal IDE and compiler in the C:\ drive as well. This thing is literally a time capsule into my highschool computer life. As you can see the gas plasma display acts like a CRT and has a refresh rate that gets picked up by the camera  It also has Windows 3.1..........  Which immediately crapped out and required a reboot. Oh well, let's try again and hook up the RADIO SHACK SERIAL MOUSE (hell yeah) this time.  First things first, live that Hotdog Stand life.   Hmm it appears that monochrome red gas plasma displays are immune to the powers of Hotdog Stand Lets see what else is installed. mIRC! Unregistered, naturally. Set to connect to irc01.irc.aol.com. I completely forgot you could even connect to AOL chat rooms with a regular IRC client? Thats ~9 0 ' s I n t e r n e t S e c u r i t y~ for you  Also a thing called WinProbe? I don't remember this at all, but its apparently a monitoring program of some sort? I guess for when you're trying to squeeze every ounce of performance from your 386?   Lets see what the screensaver is. I guess I must have caught some poo poo for this machine back in the day, as the screensaver is set to marquee and it says "Hey, don't laugh, it gets on the internet!!!!". Fantastic  Aaaaaaand, I set a password on it because that's ~9 0 ' s I n t e r n e t S e c u r i t y~ for you. I have no clue what I would have used back then. Owned. Oh well.  Looking at the bottom of the machine reveals the best feature I forgot it had! THE HANDLE! Hell yeah. This thing had a cloth case, which was good because you had to tote the power cable around and a phone cable and usually an RJ11 gender changer and a bunch of bullshit to make it work like floppies and whatever back in the day, but when you had it out of the case it was nice to use the handle because man is this thing heavy.  Also it has a decidedly non-kensington lock on it that looks like it probably is just for a straight up padlock and also adult me realizes it would probably make a great bottle opener, since its steel and heavily anchored to the chassis. Teenage me did not realize this as my drinking was limited to clear alcohol that I could refill with water after I stole it from my parents. Anyway, thanks for reliving my terrible high school computing memories with me!
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Apr 24, 2020 15:46
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A free Pioneer CLD-D550 arrived in my freight today to try and fix: It's quite nice and clean but interesting errors. Will open and close fine. Open, insert CD, closes tray, read CD, acknowledge CD then press play and it derps and ejects. Open, insert LD, closes tray, read LD, acknowledge LD then press play and it TRYS to turn the drive motor and fails out. Breaking this thing down is gonna be fun and a LOT of screws.
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Apr 24, 2020 17:12
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:I was looking for something in my basement the other night and came across this big thicc monstrosity. Holy poo poo that thing is cool! Thank you for sharing it! Humphreys posted:A free Pioneer CLD-D550 arrived in my freight today to try and fix: Good luck with that! How common are drive motors? How hard would it be to find one that'd work?
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Apr 24, 2020 17:21
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Prepare to replace little rubber bands and capacitors!
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Apr 24, 2020 18:12
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UnkleBoB posted:I just picked up a relic. It was missing the power/AV cords, so I have those on order. Always wanted to try one of these out back in the day, and this one turned up on eBay for cheap because it was missing the cables. Bonus was that the seller was only two blocks from my house. Please post a trip report, I think about these once a year or so but they're still surprisingly expensive
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Apr 24, 2020 18:25
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Iron Crowned posted:Wait until you realize that houses would share phone lines well into the 1970's. They had a single phone to share among everyone in town, located in the general store. When a call came in, the store owner's son would get on a bicycle and bike over to the requested person's house and bring them back to the telephone. Or just deliver a message, if the caller didn't want to wait.
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Apr 24, 2020 18:54
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Collateral Damage posted:They had a single phone to share among everyone in town, located in the general store. When a call came in, the store owner's son would get on a bicycle and bike over to the requested person's house and bring them back to the telephone. Or just deliver a message, if the caller didn't want to wait. In like 1992 they started getting home phones and it was crazy.
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Apr 24, 2020 18:58
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