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einTier posted:Good call. I forgot how popular Subarus are up there. Here's an XT for $1200. It's rough, but it's all there. Looking at those pictures reminded me of another obsolete car tech: Automatic seat belts.
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Aug 14, 2013 21:25
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Trebek posted:I think the problem with this concept is if it malfunctions you are completely hosed. At least with the current mechanical doors you can get in and out of your car even if your battery fails. Well, it's a soft top, so there's always that. If you're upsidedown you could be hosed though.
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Aug 16, 2013 00:16
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I was in the thrift store the other day and thought I saw a LaserDisc player, but it turned out to just be a 5-disc CD player.
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Sep 16, 2013 17:54
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Geoj posted:I can recall in the early - mid 90s radios that had a "TV station audio" function were a thing, granted relatively useless unless you were blind/liked pretending you were blind/didn't mind awkward pauses where you had to see what was going on to follow what was happening in the show. Yup, I had a cassette player/radio that had this functionality. The band selector had three choices: FM, AM, and TV, and likewise, the frequency bar had a few spots for TV stations. I was only ever able to get one station in pretty clear, which was also the case the few times I tried to get a TV station with the old TV and a pair of rabbit ears. We were slightly too far and on the other side of a mountain from the other 3 broadcast stations, the one we could get was in the other direction across the lake. Of course, like I said, I only tried that a few times for funsies, since my family had cable as long as I can remember (born in '82.)  I still remember when The Disney Channel was considered "premium." I don't think think it was as much a month as HBO, but it generally wasn't part of the standard package for a long time, except when the cable companies did those "free week/weekend" promos with the good channels. I also remember a time when, for some random reason, we started getting free Cinemax and Showtime (but not HBO) for about half a week. I know it wasn't a scheduled "free weekend" because during those times, they ALWAYS had ads telling you such, and they also typically played less softcore porn on the free weekends. When this happened, I was 14/15, so you bet your rear end I stayed up late and popped a blank VHS into that VCR every night we had that deal going. 
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Sep 17, 2013 14:59
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Pilsner posted:I find it fascinating how the software is all completely custom written, solely made for a very narrow generation of models for a single brand. It's also out-of-this-world stable when you compare it to a typical modern computer program that can crash left and right. That's a no-go in a car. Well, yeah. When you have a set number of hardware models the software is used on, it's much easier to create a stable platform. You can literally test every single hardware configuration to ensure it's stable on all models. Same reason that Apple OS's are, on average, much more stable than Windows (or Android in the phone world.) That's changed a bit in recent years for PC's, for phones iOS is still pretty rock solid because, again, very limited number of hardware models.
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Oct 10, 2013 15:05
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Vykuza posted:I won one of these in a competition I didn't remember entering: So did Nintendo just agree to do that as some sort of last-ditch middle finger to Sony after their planned "BFF" console from the mid 90's fell through? "Oh, you didn't want to partner with us and made a kick-rear end console? Well, we found someone else who will partner with us to take our already mediocre console and turn it into a mediocre DVD player! Take THAT!"
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Oct 12, 2013 05:15
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Zonekeeper posted:The only real problem I had with the controller was that the layout made playing games that weren't designed for it hard as hell. (Ever tried playing an SNES game that actually utilized the X/Y buttons on one?) Yeah, I remember when my roommates and I first got a Wii, we got several SNES games from the virtual console, and figured we'd be ok using one of the several GC controllers we had lying around...NOPE! You cannot play Super Mario World with a GC controller.
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Oct 13, 2013 02:44
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Krispy Kareem posted:Interior plastics from before the 90's are certainly obsolete. Nothing better than your dashboard cracking. Oh, let's put a carpet cover over it to make it look BETTER! Reminds me of car bras:  Which I know are still a "thing" but I don't see them now nearly as much as I did in the 90's. But it's the same philosophy. "Well, I don't want the front of my car to get dinged up and ruined from rocks, gravel, road dust, etc...so I'll put a giant, ugly, black tarp over it so it stays in perfect condition for all the times I never get to see it."
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Apr 2, 2014 20:24
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HonorableTB posted:My 2013 Corolla has bluetooth, USB, CDs, and a cool touch screen for radio/stereo selection. It's miles and miles above what I used to have. Too bad touchscreens for a car stereo/information center are a terrible idea. Yes, what we need is MORE things to encourage people to take their eyes off the road. At least with your "standard" car stereo, after your initial learning curve, you can operate it by touch alone. In theory, you can with a touchscreen, but in my experience (and every thing I've seen/read,) it's never as good as a real. tactile interface and will always encourage more "eyes off the road" scenarios.
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Apr 8, 2014 18:24
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Captain Trips posted:No, I mean, a rear USB is going to be inside the dash. How do you get to it, and why not just have two on the front? You run a cable from the back to somewhere in the front. It makes it look "cleaner" than having the cable go in the front, I guess. empty baggie posted:I've been through 8 car stereos in the past several years, from very basic up to $2000 double din touch screen navigation units with all the bells and whistles. About 6 months ago I found what I think is the best, non flashy, easy to control stereo with the essentials. The Blaupunkt Toronto 420BT. It has bluetooth built in, front and rear USB inputs, plenty of preamp outputs, two knobs, and lighting that isn't obnoxious and tacky. I have one very similar. It's weird, because it doesn't have built-in Bluetooth, but it came with a Bluetooth dongle to plug in. It has front and rear USB ports, so naturally I plugged it into the rear one. It's nice to simply connect my phone for music/podcasts and not have to dig out wires/have them get tangled in the gearshift and such, but it does have one weird problem: It has no CD player, just the Bluetooth, USB, and Aux, so because of that, it's missing most simple controls. It has Next and Previous buttons, but no play/pause or stop. Kind of annoying because I have to fumble with my phone to pause or stop, which as I already mentioned, isn't a good thing to do while driving.
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Apr 9, 2014 00:56
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(best pic I could find online)
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Sir_Substance posted:The concept isn't dead at least. The Australian tax office has for quite a few years now released each year a program which takes the entire Australian tax code and turns it into about 30 minutes of "click next and occasionally fill in boxes". The thing is amazing, if you give it your tax file number and your total income for the year, it will pre-fill 99% of the forms for you anyway, so all you really need to do is put in all the expenses you want to get refunded from your tax balance There's, like, two dozen tax software programs in the US that do this, too. TurboTax, TacAct, H&R Block has one...uhh...others? I imagine Quicken/Quickbooks probably has some kind of tax thing built in to one of its versions.
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Apr 10, 2014 16:25
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0dB posted:Also 'Smart Media' cards, came and went too fast and now cost way too much second hand... But Smart Media cards had the advantage of looking the coolest out of all those early 2000's memory card formats:  I remember the first digital camera my dad bought in...2001/2002 used one of those, but his computer didn't have any sort of memory card reader. So he had to use this: 
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May 4, 2014 15:43
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 I never had this beast, but I almost sort of wanted one. IIRC, it just took a standard "laptop" sized HD (2.5") so it was super-easy to upgrade your storage...so long as you had the money.
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May 5, 2014 20:41
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Speaking of Smartphones, behold, my first two smartphones: This wasn't the actual phone I had...I can't remember what model that was; but this is very similar. It ran Pocket PC 2002, like this one, but had no camera. The biggest problems were that it didn't run the "phone" version of Pocket PC 2002, so all the telephony and modem software was developed by Samsung and wasn't native to the Windows CE environment, so there were problems with getting "apps" (not called apps back then, but whatever,) to communicate with the cell connection. It also had a regular SD slot, not an SDIO slot. This wouldn't be that big of a problem if the thing had wifi, but it didn't...yes, that's right, a smartphone without wifi. That's how lovely "smartphones" were back in that era. I then thought I could use a wifi SDIO card...except it only had a regular SD card slot, not an SDIO one. So...yeah. I got it in 2004/2005 from eBay (it was already outdated by then, but it was cheap-ish.) It took like three phone calls to finally get it activated on my plan (since I had Verizon, not a GSM carrier where I could just pop out a SIM card.) There were problems with getting the data plan added on and so forth. I initially didn't even want a data plan, but once I found out it had no wifi built in, I had to get one. So I used it as my actual phone for all of two days before I switched back to my old, monochrome screen flip-phone from 2003, and canceled my data plan. I then just tried to use it like an organizer, or to play games on. But other than poo poo like solitaire, there weren't a lot of games. I tried to get a NES emulator to work on it, but it was janky. Ran slow, and it had a weird hardware issue where it only ever recognized ONE button press at a time. So even though it had enough hardware buttons (including a "directional pad" type of area,) I couldn't really play any games on it. So I kept that same old flip phone from 2003 until 2007 when I got this beast:  Samsung SCH-i730. That's right, I didn't learn my lesson from Windows Mobile/Pocket PC before. To my credit, though, this one at least had a Pocket PC version designed for phones (came with Pocket PC 2003 phone Edition, and was up-gradable to Windows Mobile 5.) Still was poo poo. I kept that for less than two years before I got rid of it, and finally got off of the family plan on Verizon I was on through my parents, and went to AT&T and got the iPhone 3G. Then went from that to various kinds of Android phones.
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May 6, 2014 14:29
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Man, did everyone have a Palm at some point? Before my first "smartphones", in college, 2002/2003, I had a Palm IIIc. That 'c' stood for color.   After I no longer needed it, I actually found a program that used the Palm IIIc as an RSS reader. The downside was it wasn't wireless (since that Palm didn't have wifi,) so it had to be in its dock the whole time, and the dock connected to the PC (with a serial cable, natch.) Edit: Ha, according to Wikipedia: quote:The Palm IIIc features the classic III-series connector, 8MB of RAM and a 20MHz DragonBall EZI CPU. DragonBall CPU?!? Did they ever go Super Saiyan? DrBouvenstein has a new favorite as of 14:55 on May 7, 2014 |
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May 7, 2014 14:52
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The_Raven posted:Much later I had a great PDA/smartphone, the Audiovox Thera. With a outboard GPS receiver on my dash, I had excellent results, and the 1X data gave me real-time traffic data to boot. Plus it was a pretty decent smartphone, surfed the web, played music and video... All this in 2002! Verizon screwed me after a couple years because it couldn't do Enhanced 911. Ok, I was wrong earlier. My first smartphone wasn't a Samsung, it was this POS. I mean...I'm sure it was great in 2002, but I got mine in 2004/2005, so it was out of date. And those drat little plastic trim pieces on the side were always falling off! 
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May 9, 2014 01:05
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KozmoNaut posted:My apartment is one of the very few in the greater Copenhagen area with an actual bathroom, rather than just a shower stall with a toilet in it, as is the norm. A separate shower stall is a luxury I will not live without. Wait, that's an actual thing?! He wasn't just making a joke about a tiny apartment? 
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May 13, 2014 13:45
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Jerry Cotton posted:Then again, why bother? It's not like anything in the room is sensitive to water and a man needs room to do his shower karates. That is something I wish caught on more in America. Why shouldn't my entire bathroom be made of walls, floor, and possibly ceiling that is made to get wet? But no, someone decided it was better to put drywall up, and then make sure to get the special drywall for wet environments, and make sure the exhaust fan is good enough to get the hot, steamy air out because even "wet environment" drywall will get mildew-y. Get some cheap linoleum floor that will let tons of water leak to the sub-floor (or, God-forbid...carpet. *shudder*) I know there are newer bathrooms that are basically all-tile, and tile floors aren't that rare, but it really should be the standard to be all-tile everywhere.
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May 13, 2014 17:18
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The End posted:You also have one of those lovely Linksys routers. I've killed two of those bloody things. You'd think being Cisco's consumer line, they'd be awesome, but nope. gently caress those routers. I have a similar model, as well. It's been relatively ok for me...except that it hates one of my laptops. Like...just flat-out despises it. I can use the laptop for internet, streaming, etc..., but it can NOT do any kind of internal file sharing/streaming. I tried to transfer a video file from my desktop to it and suddenly my entire network shits the bed. A 100 MB file estimated at taking a few days to continue transferring, and I can't even get Google's homepage to load. None of my other device have a problem, and that includes two other laptops, my desktop, my PS3, and my tablet and phone (though I guess truth me told I can't recall if I've ever transferred files to my tablet or phone over the wifi.)
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Jun 9, 2014 15:09
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Krispy Kareem posted:I had both a 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch drive and was considered a golden god by my friends. Oh Hells, yeah. My elementary school (late 80's to early 90's,) had a "computer lab" with like half a dozen Macs in it:  And then in Junior high and high school (mid 90's to 2000, same building,) we had two computer labs. The older one was full of those IBM's above...maybe 25-30 of them. I took a intro level computer programming class with them in Pascal. Those things were still in there when I graduated. The "better" computer lab originally had a few PCs with Win 95 on them, and actual internet access. Then my junior or senior year they got a couple dozen Packard Bell PCs with Win 98. It was fun being young and knowledgeable about computers in those days. Nothing was locked down, no content filters or firewalls. I was actually relatively good. I'd just do silly stuff like change a bunch of startup/shutdown sounds (usually to Simpsons WAVs,) do the ol' "screenshot the desktop + icons, set as background, delete all icons" prank, etc... My friend's little brother got into MASSIVE trouble for doing far, far worse things on the network. Juvenile hall and all that jazz.
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Jun 13, 2014 15:03
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BlackBerry, the company that gives on giving, has given us a unique look into obsolete tech of the future...today! And yes...that last one is real:  
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Jun 19, 2014 20:32
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Elliotw2 posted:Sony has thankfully been quietly shoving Memory stick off the stage for a while now, most of their stuff has a combi-port of SD and MSpro duo. That doesn't include the Vita, does it? I've been thinking about getting one (especially since my PS+ subscription is getting me several free Vita games I can't play,) but I hate that I'd have to buy a memory stick that's two to three times the cost of an SD/microSD card.
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Jun 30, 2014 14:56
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cheerfullydrab posted:I have no answer as to why my wireless adapter just turns itself off and needs to be reset all the time, and I think I never will. My HP laptop refuses to play nice internally on my wireless network. If all it's doing is accesing the internet, it's fine. But if I try to send a file from/to it, or stream something from/to it, the entire wireless network slows to a crawl...I mean, like, 1 kbps crawl. The laptop has an N wireless card, it's configured to use N, the router is N, EVERYTHING ON THE NETWORK CAN USE N, so why does it drop to slower than "a" speeds? And only when doing things internally on the network? No clue.
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Jul 2, 2014 14:03
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two forty posted:
They can't penetrate the body, no, but if they get in through other means, like, say...injestion...they can be dangerous. But I'm sure there's no need to worry about ingesting alpha particles from things you put your food on, right? That being said, my mom has a metric poo poo-ton of Fiesta-ware. I'm 90% sure it's all from after my parents were married (possibly gotten as wedding gifts?) so sometimes in the 70's before they halted production in those years. Is it only the red color that has uranium in it? For some reason, I thought I remember hearing that the yellow color was slightly radioactive as well from my high school chemistry class.
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Jul 25, 2014 13:53
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The other weekend I was in Goodwill and spied a couple of N64 controllers in decent shape. Not fantastic, but about as good as one can expect for 14-20 year old controllers. I bought them, and took them apart to clean them. Here's part of the reason the analog sticks on N64 went so bad: 
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Sep 18, 2014 13:37
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Yeah, that's a combo of dust, and worn down plastic from the stick itself. Even after cleaning it, the stick remains a little loose, because it's worn down so it no longer fits in very well.
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Sep 18, 2014 13:47
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Platystemon posted:You can get replacements for the entire module for $5, likely made out of a more durable plastic than the original or the 3D‐printed parts. Yeah, I'm thinking about getting replacement modules. The replacement ones are all essentially copies of the one from the Gamecube controller. They aren't used for much. I got them for my girlfriend and her roommate, not myself. They have an N64 and love playing Mario kart/Smash Bros/etc.., and only have two working controllers. ow they have 4, and I plan to clean out their older two as well...maybe I'll get new joysticks for all of them while I'm at it.
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Sep 18, 2014 15:53
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And here I was, thinking that the Wiimote condom was the first time Nintendo had to give away a "protective item" for one of their controllers.
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Oct 14, 2014 13:16
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KozmoNaut posted:FM will probably continue to exist for decades more, if only for traffic and emergency announcements. If AM is still around, despite there seeming to be an average of two-three stations in any given area (one of which will just be a local sports channel that probably has an FM sister station anyway,) I suspect FM will still be around for a while, too.
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Oct 20, 2014 15:57
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Dirk Squarejaw posted:I already have students who were completely baffled by the use of the floppy disc symbol for saving. They had no idea what it was. Has there been any effort to change that recently? I mean...in theory, it doesn't matter what the icon is, so long as it's universal and everyone knows it, but it is weird...it'd be like the symbol for "play" on a music app/stereo being a little image of a record player with a needle going down on it, or something, instead of an arrow/triangle.
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Nov 9, 2014 20:32
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cheerfullydrab posted:So many things could be delivered with pneumatic tubes! Whole fish, pairs of glasses, cell phone batteries, burritos, souvenir replicas of the Empire State Building, t shirts, toothpaste! Donnie think vacuum. 
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Nov 11, 2014 02:34
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Coffee And Pie posted:I was in high school during that weird fuzzy period between floppies (though our computers still had the ports) and flash drives, so we had to write everything to CDs. That was college for me. 2000-2004. My school had a "laptop program", so every incoming student had to either buy a laptop from the school or bring one that met the specs,. Most bought from the school, which were Thinkpads (I think my incoming class had T20s? it was back when IBM still owned the brand.) They had a floppy drive, but it was a unit that was "hot swap-able" with the CD drive. Technically. These things ran Windows 98, so "hot swapping" was a misnomer. You always had to make sure to go into the control panel and tell it to eject the drive, and then, and only then, could you remove the CD drive and put in the floppy. And even then it would still sometimes freeze up, or not recognize the drive. It was pretty much always best to save whatever you were doing and shutdown to swap it. By about my sophomore year, most people's floppy drives stopped working, but it was still too soon for flash drives to be a "thing" (I remember seeing ads for them in things like TigerDirect, and it would be like $40 for a 10MB drive, and no guarantee it would work on any computer you plugged it into, so you'd have to also have a floppy or CD drive wit the drivers, etc...) For the most part, we'd email our assignments to the professor or TA, but I was an engineering student, so sometimes I've had a large collection of (sometimes very large) files for a project that was too big to email. The laptops they provided us with only had CD drives, not CD-R drives, so the solution was either store them on your shared network drive and use one of the computers in the computer lab to burn it to a CD, or go out and buy your own external CD-R drive. I chose the latter, since I lived off-campus. But man, that thing was FLAKY. It came with the worlds shortest USB cable, like less than a foot, and warned to NEVER use a cable extender or USB hub. And since these were oh-so-modern laptops, they also had a whopping 1 USB port, and no PS/2 mouse port (though they did have a PS/2 keyboard port, for some reason.) They also only had a nipple/clit mouse, which I hate, which I guess makes me weird her in goon-land, as all I ever see are praises for clit-mice. Mine started "drifting" tot he right within the first few months I had it.
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Nov 25, 2014 15:45
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There's not as much medical equipment out there now still exporting to floppies, but there's some. Especially a lot of things like EKG machines, stress test computers, and what not. Back when I was a biomedical technician (just a couple years ago), it was a nightmare when I had to do things like update/reload firmware on those things, because the floppy was the only way to get it onto the machine. We had to keep a couple old legacy computers around with floppies and serial ports running XP just for reasons like that. Speaking of serial ports, plenty of medical equipment, even new stuff, still uses them for exporting logs, updating firmware and software, etc...Thankfully, most of them will work with a USB-to-serial adapter, at least.
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Nov 26, 2014 21:40
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Ha, that reminds me yet again of the laptops we got as part of my school's laptop program. They all had video out, and yup...it was S-Video. And in the early 2000's, plenty of TVs didn't have S-Video, so cue everyone buying a little S-Video to RCA dongle. (well, it had a VGA out, too, but a VGA-in on a TV was more rare than an S-Video.) V V V Didn't you have to have one of the early generation GCs? For some reason, i thought I read they eventually took out the RGB out because only a few games ever used the higher resolution. I do remember having it for my GC, though (still stuffed in a closet somewhere...and with the Wii (and Wii U?) being backwards compatible, can't even really sell it.) V V V DrBouvenstein has a new favorite as of 14:43 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 14:33
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El Estrago Bonito posted:When it comes to good CRT's its been the standard on video production monitors for a long time (Sony PVM's are popular for old game systems) It was also used on medical monitiors (like for endoscopy cameras) for a while before it had mainstream home-use adoption, too. I think a lot of them were essentially the same as for video production (Sony PVMs,) but just gone through a bit more rigorous testing/QA/etc... to be approved for medical use. Here's an endoscopy cart with everything else missing, but that sweet, sweet PVM monitor still on top:  Of course, to use them for games, you'll probably have toget some RCA-to-BNC connectors: 
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Dec 5, 2014 14:23
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:The list of things I wouldn't do to own that cart is very, very short. There's thing thing called "money" that can be used to buy things: http://www.ebay.com/bhp/endoscopy-cart
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Dec 5, 2014 16:33
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Is that actually a cable de-scrambler for getting channels you didn't pay for, like HBO and Cinemax?
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Dec 17, 2014 15:17
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driguy posted:It's a macrovision remover. There's a signal present in the overscan area of commercial VHS tapes that tells the recording VCR that the incoming signal is copy protected. Ahhhh, cool. We never had two working VCRs when I was growing up, so I never experienced this. Plenty of movies that were recorded off of broadcast TV, though! You either had the commercials present and had to try and fast forward through them, going too far, rewinding, etc... (I mean...DVRs are like this now, but they are at least a little faster) or you were watching the movie live as you were recording and had to try to hit pause during the commercials, and then un-pause at the right time. Then later you'd be watching a movie someone else recorded and they forgot to hit un-pause way late and you miss a cool scene. 
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Dec 17, 2014 15:52
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Keiya posted:Honestly USB is a mess, but the reasons it's a mess are mostly also its strengths, like the fact that anything can use it (devices can spoof other devices) (Bolding mine.) That part has led to a MASSIVE security flaw. Since all something has to do to be "seen" as a mouse and/or keyboard is to simply tell the OS it's a mouse and/or keyboard, a malicious USB device can be plugged in, and almost instantly take control of the cursor and keyboard input, and start doing poo poo like modifying the host file so common sites like Google and Facebook go to spoofing sites, disable software firewalls, etc...
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Dec 21, 2014 05:48
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BattleMaster posted:The point to take away from this is not that USB or Firewire is bad but that there isn't much you can do if someone has physical access to your machine. True, but with something like a thumb drive, someone can just leave it lying around in front of Apple HQ in the hopes someone will see it and go, "Ooh! Free thumb drive!" Edit: Actually, Apple HQ might be the only place it makes sense to leave a malicious Firewire device, since who else is still using Firewire these days?
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Jan 2, 2015 23:58
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