When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.
I own plenty of Libreboot computers without Intel Management Engine (2006-2009 era). For the average user in today’s world, I don’t see many people using them unless definitive proof came out that the government uses the IME to spy on them. These 2006-2009 era desktops/laptops can have the entire IME firmware removed, along with a 100% free BIOS. I collect as many as I can.
I am going different on this one.
An awl on a utility knife.
Nowadays, 99% of camping, hiking, and “survival” equipment is light weight composites that can be better fixed with glue, tape, small needle and thread, or a patch with one of the above. There are very few alternative uses for it that aren’t better with a different standard tool.
Audio modem. I think I have one in the bottom of my spare cables box.
I got a Toshiba music centre like this…
Keep it in good shape.
I’ve got a film negative scanner. I’ve also got a big pile of old negatives. I keep telling myself that someday I’m going to scan all those old negatives. We’ll see.
I have an old PCI TV tuner card. It predates the digital TV switchover so I have a card that can’t be plugged into modern motherboards for which no signals are broadcast. Plus I’m sure there are no 64-bit drivers ever made for the damn thing. At this point it’s ewaste.
I still have a modded WD TV Live Plus media box in the back of a drawer somewhere.
I have a handheld analog radio scanner. Once upon a time it was fun to listen to local police frequencies, air traffic control, cell phones and cordless phones and so on.
Everything is digital now, except for the air traffic control so once in a blue moon I might listen to that.
Film canisters. People saved the plastic canisters photo film came in because they were so well made, waterproof, airtight, and ubiquitous. They were used in all kinds of DIY designs. I’ve heard some companies still make them, without the film, for people who need them for crafts. I still have some in the junk drawer.
I used to keep weed in them
If you have a local photo shop that still develops film they will gladly give them to you for free. I have about 20 sitting around and rhey do come in handy. The shops just throw them away anyway.
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An iPod. It’s still the same iPod I got for my birthday 20 years ago. It probably still works… If I’d be able to find a cable for it.
I have used a dedicated MP3 player during the workout just few years back - I found carrying my entire almost 200g phone during the workout extremely inconvenient. In the end, I ended that for the benefit of bluetooth headphones which were not supported by the dedicated player.
My phone still has an SD card slot. So I can put my 64 GB SD card inside and have more music offline than my 4 GB iPod could ever have.
The iPod is a nice little piece of almost antique tech. But I’d still be using my phone over it.
No one can argue that 64gb of storage holds more music than 4gb of storage but 4gb still holds hundreds of songs.
Depends on the compression. Yes, you could fit 500 songs on a 4 GB iPod, as the adverts constantly loved to remind everyone about. But it was the early 2000s, so the quality wasn’t good, and then we’re still talking about a pretty high compression even back then.
You can quite easily convert ipods to flash storage. I have a 256GB ipod mini with bluetooth and a taptic engine instead of the clicker.
Interesting. Most interesting. I take it it would need some soldering? I don’t have the tools, but could you send me a video of some instructions on how to do that? Could be a fun future project.
Yes… But still… Especially when running… I find these things completely ridiculous.
For running, I got a smartwatch that can store some music locally, so I don’t need to be connected to listen. Still not perfect, kind of a hassle to use, and doesn’t always work perfectly. Almost miss those tiny iPod nanos. I feel like portable dedicated music players have gone backwards in features and usability with the rise in popularity of perpetually connected Internet devices and streaming services.
Ha, but with that smart watch we have almost came a full circle :) Except of course, it’s multipurpose and I presume much more expensive device now. What’s the model?
The Samsung gear watches all support Spotify offline playback. All the wearOS watches support as much local media playback as the hardware allows (I think), but managing that local library is pretty tedious and awful. Especially if like me you either listen through streaming services or streaming from a library of FLAC media on a NAS at home. With the Spotify app on my watch, I just select a playlist to be downloaded while I’m connected to WiFi and that’s it. It is not flawless though, sometimes the Spotify database or authentication gets fouled up and you’re unable to fix it until you return to WiFi. But I haven’t had many issues with it since Samsung switched away from their own bespoke watch OS to wearOS.
We’ve got at least 7 or 8 old remotes for items we don’t even have anymore.
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.
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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.
Jaz drive (and the isa scsi card) and several tapes.
Thanks for reminding me that I can’t trust my own memory and that they were NOT called Jazz drives
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.
Zip drives were all over campus for me in the early 2000’s too. I’ve got a Zip & a Zip 250 somewhere…
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!
