When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.
I have a large collection of VGA cables and proprietary phone charging cables.
If you have a Samsung PCB115UBE USB cable for an old SCH-A870 I will seriously give you money for it right now
Guy got a whole hoard of old geeks going through their cable stashes right now 😋
I hope so, my only alternative to get my old data off this phone is desoldering the NAND chip lol
i bet that motorola cable is gold. : D
Me too! A whole milk crate full! Everyone thinks its a waste of space until I bust out the exact obscure/ancient cable they need.
I have an old 6 volt lantern that uses a battery that is 6 inches wide, 4 inches tall, and 3 inches deep.
If I turn it on it gives you almost enough light to actually see where you are going and the battery lasts for about 2 hours.
With two 18650s I could replace that battery for a package 2/3 the size of a pack of cigarettes and run that light for a day or so.
If I replace the bulb in it with an LED equivalent I could probably stretch that out to nearly a week.
Ouch I remember thouse fat 4.5 volt battery who had like 2 long tongues, going into those old flashlights, glowing in the dark at best with a super small incandescent lamp.
These?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:4,5V-AA-battery.jpg
I’d forgotten that they existed. I used to use them for something, maybe powering a Lego or meccano motor.
Yes that’s the one!
They were expensive and didn’t work for long IIRC :-)
Its important to consider amperage discharge too. Can the two 18660s put out the same current as the big rectangle one?
Replacing the old halogen with led would be a big difference. Ot would need basically no amperage. At that point you can attach usb male to alligator clips, clip the ends of the lanterns battery pack connectors to supply 5v 2.4a of power directly with a power bank.
I use a 5 volt led bulb that plugs into regular usba slot. It works with small power banks and ast forever on larger 20ah batteries.
High discharge 18650s can provide 20-30 amps, doubt the lamp needs that much current if it’s powered off older battery tech
My record player has the ability to record cassette audio onto USB.
Mine too!
TI-89 graphing calculator
There’s an app for that now
Ti-83 plus silver edition, baybee! I learned to code (badly) on that bad boy.
- CLS
- PRINT “Same,”
- PRINT “BASIC was my first programming language.”
- GOTO 1
Look at this guy who doesn’t number his commands by tens! Such confidence!
Exactly! And a TON of labels with single character names. GOTO E
They’re still using the successor TI-84 in high school and it still costs around $100.
Same, but different calculator: I own an HP-48SX, but now I just use HP-48GX emulated in an Android app.
I still have to use the calculator when taking exams. If I pull out a phone it’s an automatic fail.
Sliding ruler for doing multiplications (1). Still have it for nostalgia or post-apocalyptic scenarios.
You just beat me to it! Still got my slide rule in my desk, right next to the digital calipers.
Can do more than just multiplication, too.
Oh yeah! I have my dad’s old slide rule, looks a lot like that one.
Same. Got them from my old retired draft engineer papa.
What a beauty
Rewritable CDs? Technically I can still use them, but I don’t really expect to use them and I wonder if they are still worth keeping.
I got rid of mine with my most recent move. Why bother bringing them with me.
I still have a couple hundred and a couple usb cd/DVD burners. Maybe someday I’ll use one again…
A large reel to reel tape recorder.
A few early pentium laptops that no longer turn on.
If you are interested in fixing those I might be able to help.
The most common reason is the internal CMOS battery exploding or needing replacement.
Of that era, it could well be capacitor plague.
literally the same combo here, but my reel to reel is a rebranded “viking” telefunken unit
Not mine personally, but my town still has some hitching posts and mounting blocks
Birmingham Alabama has a zeppelin mooring building.
Pretty cool! I’ve actually been to the site where the Hindenburg went up in flames. There’s a small museum there with pieces of the actual blimp in it, including a tiny piece of the Nazi flag that was painted on the tail portion. Felt pretty odd for me to see that in person.
Mooring to the top of tall buildings didn’t generally work well in practice
Maybe they kept it around in hope of making it a flying saucer dock, as in old Popular Mechanics cover art.
Chicago has one, but it’s never been used
Reminds me of another thing: you see these boot scrapers all across european cities (1) They’re usually victorian era, and were used to clean horse shit from your shoes before entering a house.
Owie the photo contains errors :-(
You’re right :(
There are those kind of things everywhere where I live, took me some time to find out what it was for:
In Amish country, you’ll see horses hitched up at Costco.
A coat with a phone pocket. If you have something shaped like a Nokia 3210, you can actually use that pocket. Modern phones are the exact wrong shape to fit in there.
A Minidisc player. First, music went to mp3 players and then it went completely online. Fortunately I sold that thing while it still had some value.
A battery powered GPS device. It’s just for navigating in the forest, and nothing else. It doesn’t even have a map, so it’s pretty useless while driving.
I have a hoodie with a little tunnel sewed in it to route your headphone wire down to the phone pocket.
Oh, and some backpacks have a hole for headphones. I guess you’re supposed to keep a CD player in there or something.
Those have a modern use too. I keep my power bank in the bag and use it to charge my phone on the go.
That would have been handy when playing pokemon go.
What does that GPS display? A direction?
Here’s one way you could have used it. You drive your car to a remote location. You grab your rifle and your dog, and go hunting. You mark the location of your car on the GPS and start walking. In the evening, you can use the GPS to find your way back to the car. You could also go hiking and use the GPS to find your way back.
The whole point is to mark locations and later find your way back those locations. In the era of geocaching you would have made a custom point of interest and input the coordinates manually before actually visiting the location.
This device actually shows you lots of information you rarely need these days: direction, speed, distance, coordinates, signal strength, just to name a few.
I used it that way when I did desert hikes. Do food and water caches, mark them as waypoints. I would mark them on my topo too of course. Sure was nice on night hikes to pull out a backlit GPS instead of a topo map.
I have an ISA soundcard around here somewhere.
You will only take my Gravis Ultrasound Max from my stiff cold dead hands.
Not before.
I moved heaven and earth to find and buy one back in the day. We will never part ways. I don’t have had a system to put it in for the last 22 years. I dont care. It’s resting in its box untill… I dont know, the rapture or something. It’s mine.
I had one!
my old ISA graphics card would like a word. :p
Scientific calculator.
I got a graphing one from TI. It was really expensive and was marginally useful during college. Then I had a cheap one that just did numbers.
And those were way better than sliding rulers.
I have an old dial telephone from the 1940s. A couple years ago I saw an Arduino project to make them dial digitally, but it’s not the top item on my bucket list.
I have a sony mini cassette video camera. Got a new battery for it and works like a dream. Really fun to record modern events in that format.
I also have a Sears VHS video camera. Working on getting a battery for that.
A functional electric Smith Corona typewriter
8mm slide projector
Too many CRTS
It’s a good time being a Junkman
Jaz drive (and the isa scsi card) and several tapes.
Woah, so you’re the other person who bought a Jaz drive! I knew we’d meet eventually.
My school had them everywhere back then. At one point, I owned 2 jaz drives, several Zip drives, and countless disks for each. I later worked the phones during Iomega’s click of death scandal. Yeah, I’m old.
I had Zip and Jaz drives as well. A couple years ago a guy at work was doing some weird project where he neede a bunch of zip disks, so I gave him my box of them and he transferred my data to a couple DVDs. Found a lot of photos, old forgotten code of mine, and D&D scenarios I had written and never played. Homebrew spells, magic items, etc… which I’m now using in my campaign. Great treasure trove!
Zip drives were all over campus for me in the early 2000’s too. I’ve got a Zip & a Zip 250 somewhere…
Thanks for reminding me that I can’t trust my own memory and that they were NOT called Jazz drives
I have a sheet of foam with 40 or 50 old 7400-series chips - mostly simple logic gates. I could probably make some fun retro led blinky things.
It’s crazy what the talented engineers in the 1970s were doing with those 7400 series logic. It’s a lost art these days, just throw a 10c microcontroller on your board and control everything with code.
Code is my preference, having spent a whole career as a software dev - I do a lot of messing around with Arduino and ESP. But I remember back in the 70s when a college prof let me play with a bunch of chips he had acquired but didn’t have a curriculum put together yet. He let me do a little demo for one of his classes, which was pretty cool. I explained how binary numbers worked, how to step through a counter by pressing a button a bunch of times, read out the count on leds, use the number as an address to a memory chip and other things. He mentioned that the next new thing was going to be a “microprocessor” - a whole computer on a single chip - imagine that! If my school had had an electronics program I would switched my major on the spot, based solely on how fun it was.
