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SLOSifl posted:My idiot cat knocked down a box that's been there forever and this fell out: I had a similar one. Got it just before the iPhone could be grey imported… but this had HSDPA that saved me when the IT management of the company I was visiting could not arrange for VPN - so tethering was the only thing that worked. $3000 in roaming charges for three days lol
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May 20, 2022 10:24
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NEW LGR THRIFTS! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8_PuZmwH4k
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May 20, 2022 15:42
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Billy Ray Blowjob posted:This appears in a Red Letter Media episode, I think an early Best of the Worst?. The tape was the VHS Dogsitter on Wheel of the Worst. The only tape that ever expressly threatened to destroy their VCR was made to entertain dogs.
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May 20, 2022 21:42
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Obsolete? Yes! Failed? Absolutely! (but only the printer bit)  In the 1980s, Philips included Teletext on many of their TVs. They also developed a little thermal printer so you could print your teletext pages. It doesn't sound particularly useful to me, and as far as i know, only this series of TVs ever had a teletext printer. Useless it may be, but i still think it's cool  Commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vF_eseAMKc LimaBiker has a new favorite as of 21:44 on May 25, 2022 |
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May 25, 2022 21:40
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i used to read teletext every morning, it was what i used to keep up with the news, see some stocks and stuff
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May 25, 2022 21:44
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Yeah, teletext is awesome. Like the news channel's twitter but with less clutter and no ads.
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May 25, 2022 21:50
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Those old thermal printers were the worst. Even in the mid Eighties they were still terrible.
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May 25, 2022 22:35
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Around 1995, my father had a subscription to the DTN service (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTN_%28company%29). There was a little terminal that sat in our living room, consisting of a color monitor on top of a small box with a few rubber buttons on the front: arrow keys, select, back, that's basically it. IIRC it provided commodities information, weather, and a few agricultural news articles. I am completely unable to find a decent picture of the hardware, though. Edit: found a full-page ad in the December 1996 Progressive Farmer:  The weirdest thing was that it had a little speaker in the case, but I never heard it make any noise except when it would play Baxter Black On Monday, a weekly humorous radio column by this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baxter_Black Pham Nuwen has a new favorite as of 23:09 on May 25, 2022 |
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May 25, 2022 22:59
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LimaBiker posted:Yeah, teletext is awesome. Like the news channel's twitter but with less clutter and no ads. I remember there being a lot of dating hotlines on teletext.
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May 25, 2022 23:39
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Yeah, but not on the public broadcasting system here (the most used teletext news source). For the commercial broadcasters, you'd have to actively punch in the number for those. They wouldn't just pop up inbetween the news/weather/sports pages iirc. It took until 1988 until we had commercial TV via cable (people near the North Sea could receive the commercial station from the REM island, and those in the south perhaps RTL from Luxembourg? IDK). So for the first decade there was no dating stuff on teletext at all in this country.
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May 26, 2022 08:49
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Pham Nuwen posted:Around 1995, my father had a subscription to the DTN service (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTN_%28company%29). There was a little terminal that sat in our living room, consisting of a color monitor on top of a small box with a few rubber buttons on the front: arrow keys, select, back, that's basically it. A friend of mine's family had one of these. I liked to look at the live weather radar images on it, as this was pre-internet days (early 90s) and such things where not generally easily accessible. I didn't realize it also broadcasted from FM and TV subcarriers. My friend's was satellite based.
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May 26, 2022 14:09
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stevewm posted:A friend of mine's family had one of these. I liked to look at the live weather radar images on it, as this was pre-internet days (early 90s) and such things where not generally easily accessible. I didn't realize it also broadcasted from FM and TV subcarriers. My friend's was satellite based. Ours was satellite too. I think maybe my parents had just purchased the farm at that point so my dad decided it was critical to keep a close eye on the price of corn and such. I don't know that we kept it more than 6 months.
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May 26, 2022 16:36
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Shibawanko posted:i used to read teletext every morning, it was what i used to keep up with the news, see some stocks and stuff I was in a bar last Sunday and someone asked the bartender for the television remote so they could check something out on Teksti-TV. Also people in jail use it to receive messages from outside.
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May 27, 2022 08:43
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmAnCzquo64
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May 27, 2022 11:59
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Had a very sweet elderly couple surrender this last week at work. Apple IIc Plus, just need the floppy
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May 27, 2022 17:22
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I just bought two new in box camping lanterns, brand new from the German Democratic Republic. Even came with the original warranty slip. I absolutely love the brightly colored plastics. They were made in 1989 by RFT, and the price was 17,50 Mark. Lanterns and flashlights with incandescent bulbs are thankfully very obsolete. These lanterns run on 4 D size batteries, but on those it would last just 5 to 10 hours depending on the quality of socialist batteries. I'm gonna put some LEDs in the base of an old light bulb so i can use these things with much higher light output.  Each one has two light bulbs 4,8v 500mA, but you can only turn on one at a time. The middle bulb is used as a spotlight, the off centre one (turned on in the picture) is used for the floodlight function.
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May 27, 2022 17:43
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DJOprahSpinfrey posted:Had a very sweet elderly couple surrender this last week at work. Apple IIc Plus, just need the floppy We maybe you should check your cupboards for a disk instead of searching online.
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May 27, 2022 19:55
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LimaBiker posted:I just bought two new in box camping lanterns, brand new from the German Democratic Republic. Even came with the original warranty slip. I absolutely love the brightly colored plastics. Holy poo poo I remember those  Only complete with the original DDR paper wrapped D-cells tho
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May 27, 2022 20:12
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Didn't come with batteries, because they're unused. If it did come with them, i'd have kept one of them. I'm going back to the thrift shop tomorrow, i told a friend about these and he wants the other 2 or 3 that are there. There also was one of those flat flashlights that was suspiciously heavy. There's probably a 4,5v battery still in that one. Are these the ones you mean? 
LimaBiker has a new favorite as of 21:48 on May 27, 2022 |
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May 27, 2022 21:45
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Yeah that's it. Here, some pictures from one of my books.  
TotalLossBrain has a new favorite as of 22:50 on May 27, 2022 |
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May 27, 2022 22:43
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The GDR was a goldmine of obsolete technologies. In the 1980s the Ruhla watch factory was probably the largest in the world, equipped with a lot of legitimately state of the art manufacturing equipment. At a time when quartz watches were cheaply available in the west, Ruhla was using this cutting edge capacity to produce pin pallet watches not much different from what their predecessor companies were making in the 19th century.
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May 27, 2022 23:10
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The GDR also tried very hard to catch up to the West in semiconductor technology, actually managing to produce 1MB memory chips by 1988. Unfortunately they were not commercially viable; a running joke was that Honecker had claimed the GDR were producing the biggest chips in the world, but referring to their physical size. Dresden is still a major center for semiconductor manufacturing in Germany, so neither obsolete nor failed though.
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May 28, 2022 17:43
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You can still see the east/west berlin divide from space
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May 28, 2022 18:00
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Speaking of Berlin, they still have a lot of gas street lighting. Not nearly as many as they used to have, but they're still there. http://www.gaslicht-kultur.de/Home_EN.html Pretty neat. Also not failed, but definitely obsolete.
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May 28, 2022 18:49
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LimaBiker posted:Speaking of Berlin, they still have a lot of gas street lighting. Not nearly as many as they used to have, but they're still there. There are gaslights in the Westminster area in London too. Take a guided walk if you get the opportunity, it’s excellent. e: Fixed link. Zopotantor has a new favorite as of 22:19 on May 28, 2022 |
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May 28, 2022 22:12
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Years ago when the great digital TV switch was still pretty new, there was an attempt at a Smart Antenna that didn't seem to go anywhere. A few antennas and converter boxes (and likely TVs) popped up in the marketplace for a few years, but gradually there were none. Even today it's hard to find any images or reviews of them or the tech, it seems. The best I've really found have been random eBay listings showing off old converter boxes with the port on them. But from what I can tell is that they had some sort of ethernet/phone-styled plug for connecting to the box/TV rather than using a coaxial cable. Another image seems to show some sort of box as part of the antenna connection, too, so I'm left to assume it would have allowed traditional coaxial hook ups via that and/or been akin to the amplifiers built into other similar antennas. I think RCA was maybe the driving force behind that which pairs nicely with a strange Original XBox-compatible proprietary cable I think they also tried to make into a thing about 5 years before that.
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May 29, 2022 07:23
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Scarodactyl posted:Sort of iffy since this is still a current product, but I finally got my hands on one of these babies:
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May 29, 2022 07:42
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This color photography nonsense will never catch on. https://twitter.com/StuartHumphryes/status/1531232860165881857?s=20&t=G6jscy4otOLynt1em2SrjQ 
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May 30, 2022 14:53
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Dick Trauma posted:This color photography nonsense will never catch on. that was the last time it was affordable to live in the bay area.
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May 30, 2022 15:54
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 I bought a nine inch TV/VCR and immediately put in The Boondock Saints. It's even a Blockbuster copy.
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May 31, 2022 00:16
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I got a new phone book over the weekend. It's not even 100 pages anymore, a lot of businesses that you would think would be listed aren't, and any business that pays money for a featured ad is undoubtedly a ripoff because they know exactly who their audience is: ancient people who don't know any better since they still, you know, look things up in the phonebook. It's also yellow pages (business) only. Apparently residential phone listings are totally dead here at this point.
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May 31, 2022 00:49
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The_Franz posted:I got a new phone book over the weekend. My folks just got a new phonebook. It has white pages, but they're not in it. I actually kinda miss phone books.
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May 31, 2022 00:53
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:
I just found a 9" sansui combo on the curb in its travel bag. Had the 120v and 12v power cords and the manual but no antenna or remote.  Took a second for the capacitors to charge up but once they did it works perfectly. My vhs selection was falling down
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May 31, 2022 00:55
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Extremely jealous. Of both the TV and the VHS copy of Falling Down.
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May 31, 2022 01:06
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:Extremely jealous. Of both the TV and the VHS copy of Falling Down. It was in a box of skateboard/punk rock tapes I got out of a storage locker years ago. Turns out a few of them are worth a few bucks.  There was also a hand labeled VHS that turned out to be local idiot highschoolers trying to make their own version of Jackass from drinking ipecac, to hassling homeless people to dumpster diving etc... And a horrible VHS porn title called Chicalot part 2 lol.
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May 31, 2022 01:35
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my turn in the barrel posted:And a horrible VHS porn title called Chicalot part 2 lol. I have a single VHS porno called gently caress Me Tender from a harsh noise label that mostly makes video content.
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May 31, 2022 01:48
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Super jealous of those punk rock tapes man. Nice find.
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May 31, 2022 02:06
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3 of them are apparently live late 90s shows recorded at the Metro in Chicago. Tried googling them and can't find any reference to them online. 2 are some band called Apocalypse Hoboken and the 3rd one is Less than Jake. 
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May 31, 2022 02:12
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my turn in the barrel posted:the 3rd one is Less than Jake. 
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May 31, 2022 02:20
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Less Than Jake put on an awesome show live.
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