An FM radio, free with your subscription to Out magazine in 2005.
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VWestlife
@vwestlife@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-062257 Followers
53 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 18, 2022
Location:
New Jersey, USA
Web Site:
YouTube:
MakerTube (PeerTube):
The comeback of CDs (and re-decline of vinyl) is starting to happen: https://consequence.net/2026/07/the-cd-revival-is-getting-hard-to-ignore/
Subaru took the Outback, a wagon that appealed to women, turned it into a boxy macho-style SUV despite the company's own focus groups telling them not to change it, and raised the price by $5000, and now is astonished that sales of it have nosedived: https://www.autoblog.com/news/subaru-ditched-the-wagon-and-outback-sales-dropped-over-40
MBI had the gall to disclaim the IBM logo as a registered trademark of IBM, but then just flip it around and use it as their own.
Replying to
Oh, great. Another channel I used to watch regularly has just jumped on the AI thumbnail bandwagon today ("Rare Classic Cars & Automotive History"). Maybe it's time to start a stamp collection instead.
Yes, that's the actual name of the perky pizzicato production music you've heard in TV shows, cartoons, commercials, etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QtxOr4iSBY
A classic Alfa Romeo converted to electric power deserves more than 4 views (when I watched this yesterday, it said "No views"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umP7wVRhtqY
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
First the Gen Z kids were into vinyl records, then typewriters, and now Model A Fords: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnUDn0WF3Xw
If only TV was like that again.
This fits with most of the people I see using AI-generated images or thumbnails being old enough to have used VHS tape and Mavica floppy disk cameras. Younger people who grew up when HD video and multi-megapixel photos were the norm are better at spotting the slop.
Did you know? The word damsel (as in "damsel in distress") has a rarely used male equivalent: donzel. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/donzel
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
Sad news. YouTuber Daniel Schwank (CoolBlueLights / ControlledExplosions) passed away recently at the age of 45. He made videos about various things including small engine equipment, old radios and appliances, his 1966 VW Beetle, and vlogging about life in rural upstate NY. https://www.compassionatefuneralcare.com/obituary/Daniel-Schwank
@TechConnectify@mas.to's term "user-hostile" is the perfect description for automakers doing dumb things like burying the odometer in a touchscreen menu -- and not a new phenomenon, like when Ford and various others moved the horn button to the end of the turn signal stalk in the 1970s. Sometimes "because we've always done it that way" is a perfectly reasonable explanation of why not to change a critical user function. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EhEWdBgZYo
www.worldradiohistory.com has been an invaluable resource in doing research for my videos. It has fully OCR'ed and searchable scans of books, magazines, catalogs, journals, and other publications relating to radio, TV, audio, video, electronics, and music.
Did he trip and fall on my collection of Y2K-era translucent blue electronics?
I remember being taught the basics of cars and engines in elementary school science class, maybe in 5th grade? The book we used must've been written in the 1970s, because its default car had a carbureted V8 engine and rear-wheel drive, and it presented rotary/Wankel engines as a new development. Our teacher was amused that some of the then-current econoboxes like the Geo Metro had a 3-cylinder engine.
If you want something else to watch tonight, and an early chance to jump on a bargain(?!) before the video goes public tomorrow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2TpDZw9AwQ
Contributors to the AT&T PC6300 newsletter back in 1988 were James Butts and David Gay. https://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.sys.att/1990-June/004022.html
Radio Shack's "Easy Home Video Editor" from the mid-1990s. A Videonics product in disguise? @themaritimegirl@tech.lgbt
One odd thing about the 1985 Fisher FVH830 VCR I used in my Macrovision video: it has a "tape select" switch with positions marked "~T60" and "T80~". The manual just says to set it to the length of tape you're using, and gives no further explanation. I guess the squigglies are supposed to mean "T60 or shorter" and "T80 or longer", but who was using tapes that short, anyway? I thought T120 tape was already the norm long before then. And why would it matter?
Heads up, they're called transistors, not cisistors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdgQaRICEig
Going from below freezing to 80°F in one week sure melts the snow quickly... and also brings out the shirtless runners and spandex-clad bicyclists. 🏃 🚴
Malaise-era GM thought it was a good idea to use the Opel name from Germany, to sell cars made in Japan by Isuzu, at Buick dealers in the USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npGqHqiTBXs
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@Elizafox@social.treehouse.systems No clue. According to what I can find, MBI of Irvine, Cal. was only around in 1982-1983. After then they either changed their name or went out of business. There was another MBI at the same time -- Microcomputer Business Industries, based in Golden, Colorado, whose logo mimicked IBM's without being an exact copy of it.
Ah yes, the forgotten ELP speed of VHS video cassette recording.
A video series to binge-watch: a Canadian couple buy and begin restoring an abandoned French château: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpyRF5CaoDE
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@codemonkeymike Older versions of Windows and Mac OS install on them anyway, too. (I'm typing this from a computer running Windows XP.)
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@TechTangents@dialup.space I'd call it "two-thirds height", especially if the remaining gap versus a full-height drive is one inch tall, like most 3.5 inch drives and those strange skinny 5.25 inch floppy drives that some OEMs like Compaq and NEC used in the '90s.
The temperature plummeted and it snowed a little bit today, so hopefully skiing season isn't over quite yet.
I'm pretty sure my Canon HF200 is "Orlando" -- it's from around when this was recorded (2010), did cost around $700 when new, and Canon's press photo of it matches the brief glimpse of the web site shown in the video; although it doesn't have an L-Series lens (that was only on Canon's high-end camcorders), and it does have dual 3.5 mm jacks, but they're a mic input and headphone/AV output instead of "dual inputs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt68nkF1l2Y
A camcorder named Orlando
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@straphanger Thumbs-down to the AI-generated image. School busses don't have the side-mounted stop sign at the rear!
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@xodium@mastodon.social I'm typing this from an XP system right now. Most malware/ransomware incidents are from people clicking on rogue links in spoofed e-mails. Every day my spam folder is full of them, and some are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBfuOKUhArU
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@annaecook I predict it will be as successful as when Radio Shack tried to become a cryptocurrency platform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack#Retail_Ecommerce_Ventures_(REV)
@krishnadraws Could simply be due to being in the middle of winter and having very dry air. Plus the SE/30 has a fan, which combined with the static charge of the CRT basically turns it into an air cleaner, attracting dust to the picture tube.
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@tlayoyo Early on, IBM was in the "slashed letter O" camp. I have a book from the 1960s which follows that convention.
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@zeldman@front-end.social I just type it the old-fashioned way -- and I don't use curly quotes, either.
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@bitsavers@oldbytes.space There were some audio recording devices for dictation which used flat discs that had a magnetic surface where the audio would be recorded and played back, and also a groove that the tape heads would follow. This is the same idea, just used for data rather than audio.
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@jwz@mastodon.social If it's any consolation, Outlook loves to autocomplete unintended recipients based on *misspellings* of their names even as I am typing the *correct* spelling of the intended recipient. This has caused me to send an e-mail to the wrong person on several occasions.
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@avavsystems@mastodon.world @obsoletemediauk@mastodon.world They were still trying to make VHD a thing outside of Japan in 1987???