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
A large reel to reel tape recorder.
A few early pentium laptops that no longer turn on.
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
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes… But still… Especially when running… I find these things completely ridiculous.
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.
Depends on ehat kind of ipod you have. The mini is probably the easiest to mod with flash. The taptic and bluetooth are a bit harder to do.
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.
We still have a landline (technically VoIP) phone. There’s also a list of important phone numbers written on the fridge. Good for emergencies.
There are few things more nerve wracking than frantically trying to find your cell phone and the number for poison control after your kid just swallowed something they shouldn’t have.
It’s fortunate where I live that poison control just uses the standard emergency services number.
I can’t imagine how hard it must be to recall the number during an emergency where time is a factor. Particularly if the number is like 0118 999 881 999 119 725… 3
I hope your kids are okay
I found my old TomTom GPS in a box last year. I struggled to find a reason it might be worth keeping. In the end it got recycled.
Not mine personally, but my town still has some hitching posts and mounting blocks
I got a Toshiba music centre like this…
Keep it in good shape.
