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.
Me too! A whole milk crate full! Everyone thinks its a waste of space until I bust out the exact obscure/ancient cable they need.
If you have a Samsung PCB115UBE USB cable for an old SCH-A870 I will seriously give you money for it right now
i bet that motorola cable is gold. : D
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.
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.
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
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.
My record player has the ability to record cassette audio onto USB.
Mine too!
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 got a Toshiba music centre like this…
Keep it in good shape.
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.
TI-89 graphing calculator
There’s an app for that now
Ti-83 plus silver edition, baybee! I learned to code (badly) on that bad boy.
- CLS
- PRINT “Same,”
- PRINT “BASIC was my first programming language.”
- GOTO 1
Look at this guy who doesn’t number his commands by tens! Such confidence!
Exactly! And a TON of labels with single character names. GOTO E
They’re still using the successor TI-84 in high school and it still costs around $100.
I still have to use the calculator when taking exams. If I pull out a phone it’s an automatic fail.
Same, but different calculator: I own an HP-48SX, but now I just use HP-48GX emulated in an Android app.
Sliding ruler for doing multiplications (1). Still have it for nostalgia or post-apocalyptic scenarios.
You just beat me to it! Still got my slide rule in my desk, right next to the digital calipers.
Can do more than just multiplication, too.
Oh yeah! I have my dad’s old slide rule, looks a lot like that one.
Same. Got them from my old retired draft engineer papa.
What a beauty
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 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
I still have a couple hundred and a couple usb cd/DVD burners. Maybe someday I’ll use one again…
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.
Removed by mod
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.
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!
Zip drives were all over campus for me in the early 2000’s too. I’ve got a Zip & a Zip 250 somewhere…
A large reel to reel tape recorder.
A few early pentium laptops that no longer turn on.
If you are interested in fixing those I might be able to help.
The most common reason is the internal CMOS battery exploding or needing replacement.
Of that era, it could well be capacitor plague.
literally the same combo here, but my reel to reel is a rebranded “viking” telefunken unit
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.
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.
In Amish country, you’ll see horses hitched up at Costco.
My hometown did, too! Even Chicago still has a couple.
