I love seeing art like this. Using things that are forgotten, obscure, unused, insignificant, or otherwise inconsequential is an ethos unto its own. Obsolete technologies are becoming exponentially rare; I unfortunately passed up an auction for an Osbourne 1 just this week and I'm regretting it more every second since.
I desperatey search thrift stores for anything I can find that isn't the generic consumer garbage that plagues the US; smart tvs, ISP-issued modem/routers, terrible dvd players, "media centers", other smart garbage. Really, any kind of digital circuit that isnt a dumb interface to media is sacrilige in my search. This has become all but a moot point because things like CRTs and other obscure electronics are all picked off at the donation point and then sold online because they've been indentified as valuable or "retro", or outright thrown away because theyre considered too old for anyone to ever give a shit about.
There is a disturbing situation regarding old technology right now where only a very, very specific subset of technologies are considered valuable to a very small, specific subset of consumers; this means that things like CRTs are shipped off to warehouses to be catalogued and sold on online auctions, and their accompanying hardware is being thrown into dumpsters because theres no immediately correlated market for this hardware. For the first time in about 10 years I saw two VCRs at a thrift store (a Quasar VHQ-40M and some lesser generic garbage). This was the first time I had seen a VCR for sale IRL since going to a pawn shop that has since been demolished; the man running the store said I could keep it for free because the person who pawned it was a crackhead and he didn't even know if it worked, but if it did, he wanted me to come back and pay him $10 for it. Lo and behold it worked perfectly, so I went back and did.
I've noticed just this week that both of the thrift store companies I frequent have stopped stocking VHS tapes; I don't know if this is because they have decided they're to be thrown out, sold online, or refused as donations. The last VHS tapes I've bought were Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Austin Powers in Goldmember.
In my case I'm planing to get one of these portable game consoles mimicking a Game Boy with 4 buttons which have some embeeded Linux OS with a GP2X GUI (the handheldGUI from the old GP2X consoles, now being universal) and OFC video players like Mplayer can be adapted/ported there (and ScummVM and a lot more). Then I will just grab a cheap pair of $5 headphones and call it a day. Video player, retroconsole and maybe a pocket computer with a USB host cable and a mini keyboard, a geeks heaven.
As current smartphones as ditching own the auio cable this is great: I can listen to music/watch some niche scifi series at lowish res (PSP like) from an SD and I can also have nice matches with some old retro JRPGs and plataformers for almost nothing. Tons of homebrew ROMs are perfectly legal to share, too. I own a 100% legal collection which can be shared over Bittorrent and give a lot of fun for both kids and adults, from XRick to Cave Story ports for Genesis/MD to Supertux Advance, this one being a 100% libre game. As a plus, the phone battery will last for longer.
Oh, and with a mini keyboard I might be able to code in EForth whil seating down on a bus as they often have some foldable tray to place laptops and the like. I can just use a book to rest the console and with a keyboard I'm done :)
Oh, and podcasts, too.
It wasn't the original purpose, but this is libre software. If an $20/$30 can do the same as an $100 netbook, better for everyone.
As current devices will get a much higher price because of RAM and storage shortages, repurposing devices as computers (and with the right software) can create drastic changes.
"Each sound in the project is recomposed and reimagined by artists"
Completely agree! I would have much preferred original sounds, or - if anything - sounds taken from original recordings but restored to compensate for the bad recording equipment at the time of recording.
Yes, I came to say the same thing, not just typewriter - it's a great idea but I wish they had the original recordings by themselves and not overlayed with ambient music.
I can't believe nobody had nitpicked the obvious mistake yet: there never was an iBook Duo. The 68k Apple notebooks and the early PPC ones were called PowerBooks, so the correct naming is "PowerBook Duo 230".
Each time I get super anal about a piece nerd knowledge, I make some mistake myself - all the Apple PPC laptops were in fact called PowerBook. The MacBook name started with the Intel based devices.
I was hoping for fax machine, 56K modem, 300 baud modem, US public pay phone ringing and coin deposit, princess phone ring and dial, rotary phone dialing, 9-pin printer, and 24-pin color printer.
When I was a kid, I could hear the sound the of the flyback transformer on the CRT TV from anywhere in the house. None of the adults could. 15.7 kHz. Now obsolete both due to the lack of CRTs, and degradation of my hearing from heavy metal concerts and jet engine exposure.
I thought this was going to be about phonemes that used to be part of English but aren't anymore (e.g. all of the vestigal "gh"es in our spellings that used to represent the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative but are now either silent or pronounced as another phoneme).
It took me a few clicks to figure out what played those sounds. The background images of the play buttons aren't helpful in visually clarifying their function. Otherwise: Good idea, keep it up!
30 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 68.1 ms ] thread(The interface on the website is a bit confusing to use, IMHO)
I desperatey search thrift stores for anything I can find that isn't the generic consumer garbage that plagues the US; smart tvs, ISP-issued modem/routers, terrible dvd players, "media centers", other smart garbage. Really, any kind of digital circuit that isnt a dumb interface to media is sacrilige in my search. This has become all but a moot point because things like CRTs and other obscure electronics are all picked off at the donation point and then sold online because they've been indentified as valuable or "retro", or outright thrown away because theyre considered too old for anyone to ever give a shit about.
There is a disturbing situation regarding old technology right now where only a very, very specific subset of technologies are considered valuable to a very small, specific subset of consumers; this means that things like CRTs are shipped off to warehouses to be catalogued and sold on online auctions, and their accompanying hardware is being thrown into dumpsters because theres no immediately correlated market for this hardware. For the first time in about 10 years I saw two VCRs at a thrift store (a Quasar VHQ-40M and some lesser generic garbage). This was the first time I had seen a VCR for sale IRL since going to a pawn shop that has since been demolished; the man running the store said I could keep it for free because the person who pawned it was a crackhead and he didn't even know if it worked, but if it did, he wanted me to come back and pay him $10 for it. Lo and behold it worked perfectly, so I went back and did.
I've noticed just this week that both of the thrift store companies I frequent have stopped stocking VHS tapes; I don't know if this is because they have decided they're to be thrown out, sold online, or refused as donations. The last VHS tapes I've bought were Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Austin Powers in Goldmember.
As current smartphones as ditching own the auio cable this is great: I can listen to music/watch some niche scifi series at lowish res (PSP like) from an SD and I can also have nice matches with some old retro JRPGs and plataformers for almost nothing. Tons of homebrew ROMs are perfectly legal to share, too. I own a 100% legal collection which can be shared over Bittorrent and give a lot of fun for both kids and adults, from XRick to Cave Story ports for Genesis/MD to Supertux Advance, this one being a 100% libre game. As a plus, the phone battery will last for longer.
Oh, and with a mini keyboard I might be able to code in EForth whil seating down on a bus as they often have some foldable tray to place laptops and the like. I can just use a book to rest the console and with a keyboard I'm done :)
Oh, and podcasts, too. It wasn't the original purpose, but this is libre software. If an $20/$30 can do the same as an $100 netbook, better for everyone.
As current devices will get a much higher price because of RAM and storage shortages, repurposing devices as computers (and with the right software) can create drastic changes.
Completely agree! I would have much preferred original sounds, or - if anything - sounds taken from original recordings but restored to compensate for the bad recording equipment at the time of recording.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JroA0Ap7zGU
bro go away from me with that crap. nothing has been invented, here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Library/comments/unek0c/old_library...