When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.
Not mine personally, but my town still has some hitching posts and mounting blocks
Birmingham Alabama has a zeppelin mooring building.
Chicago has one, but it’s never been used
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.
My hometown did, too! Even Chicago still has a couple.
In Amish country, you’ll see horses hitched up at Costco.
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:
Echo detector. Piece of shit only picks up the weakest artifacts.
Removed by mod
This man stalks.
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.
When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.
Once I have seen an offer on eBay for a similar device, but for DVD’s.
Yes, really. It was that time, and it was almost serious ;)
My older brother still jokes about the time that when he and his wife first got a DVD player they watched a movie on it and once it was done he asked her to get up and rewind the movie and she ended up spending 2 minutes while he was doing everything in his power not to laugh at her trying to figure out how to rewind the DVD.
DVDs had been out for quite a while at this point they were just late to the game.
Like putting side 2 on for the CD…
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 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
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 still have a couple hundred and a couple usb cd/DVD burners. Maybe someday I’ll use one again…
I got rid of mine with my most recent move. Why bother bringing them with me.
Depending on their age and how you stored them they might not even work anymore
Audio modem. I think I have one in the bottom of my spare cables box.
2 Garmin GPS, one handheld and one for the car. I’ve been using my phone for directions now for years, but I suppose I’ll hang on to both units for a bit longer.
Radio w/ cassette player, still use the radio tho
My record player has the ability to record cassette audio onto USB.
Mine too!
Tape device so you can plug your phone into car stereos that don’t have Bluetooth. Some cars just have cd deck/player and no aux input, no Bluetooth. Really new cars will have Bluetooth for phone control. Really old ones with cassette players you could use the tape gadget. Not so much in between.
Old flash drives, that were only like 1gb when that was supposedly sufficient back then.
Headphones with audio jack because most new phones have usb-c ports only now. Although I bought an adapter for only 10 bucks.
A/V cord consoles and devices.
I had a VHS rewinder too. Also that reminds me I had a mechanical “crank” playing card shuffler which would probably be an antique now. Lol.
We’ve got at least 7 or 8 old remotes for items we don’t even have anymore.
I have a rotary dial. It was made as a spare part for an analog telephone.
A tone dialer. Like this
https://images.app.goo.gl/fbdmckv44BY7fdWw9
Not for phone phreaking, just for speed-dialling.
I would make international calls frequently. I would buy calling cards. The process was: dial the 800 number on the card. Enter the id number on the card to use some of its credit. Dial the number to call. Their service would then connect me at a low rate to another country(probably making a voip call).
So I’d set up the 3 speed dial buttons with those. For each new card I’d only have to change the card’s unique number.
I was a phone phreak, and I still have my last old-school brown Radio Shack tone dialer which I’d been planning to make into a red box. Ultimately I was too lazy to swap the crystal in it, and it sat in my junk drawer for years while red boxing died. Now it’s a curiosity that sits on my shelf of hacker books. Maybe I’ll still do the crystal swap someday for the sheer hell of it.
There an app for that now.
At least, there is on the Flipper Zero.
Building one of those was always on my list when I got a copy of the Anarchist’s cookbook, never got around to it though.
