Ooh, rotary phone switches. This YouTube channel (THIS MUSEUM IS NOT OBSOLETE) has a bunch of videos on them. I can only imagine how a massive exchange full of them must have sounded. They're so satisfyingly mechanical.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKnS0AB2CTN_eu8k8rgaOW0PWFH2Qv9Ui
The internet
Tiny lightbulbs fails to express how uncool led tvs are. They’re just diodes. Adulterated silicon. It’s cool in its own way. But yeah. Everything is just silicon
But LCD sound cool, too. Twisting crystals so they become opaque or transparent.
Lightbrite gone growed up.
Home stereo systems. As a kid I remained enthralled by the metal face and the heavily tactile buttons and switches and knobs. You felt a delicious variety of feedbacks for every action you took. I honestly think we really lost something special when tactility left technology. It was so satisfying to just use.
Find a video of the Marantz 2150 with the oscilloscope built in,or the Telefunken reel to deal with the glowing level meter. Really wished I'd kept both of those
That's dope. Would love to get one of those some day.
My friend's dad had one with a remote that when you changed the volume on the remote the volume knob would move. I thought it was so cool
My hifi does that, (a very cheap second hand Teac system) it makes me giddy every time it does it!
Lol that is definitely cool, no thinking required.
Luckily, the age of proper home stereo systems isn't over unless you want it to be. But be warned, it's an expensive rabbit hole to fall into...
Yeah, I grabbed an old Technics deck to fix up. So many other things were waaay too expensive.
I was thinking the other day how much cooler flap displays at stations and airports were compared to modern displays.
Such a nice interface between computer control and a purely mechanical display. Watching them update, flipping through all the variables to land on the right one, and then clearing was so cool.
I miss the noise they made too. Haven’t seen one for like 20 years now.
Slide open phones with a QWERTY keyboard. Those were the bomb.
I wish someone would being those back
There’s a company called Unihertz that sells a line of keyboard Android phones similar to the last batch of Blackberry models. I know it’s not slider phones but they are inexpensive.
There is also Planet Computers which makes sliding Qwerty phones but they are expensive.
Prices look decent at a glance as well.
I miss my BB keyboard something fierce.
I'm biased because I'm building up a small collection, but radios were cooler when they were made of Bakelite.
My modest collection:
Also, I realize that digital tuning is more accurate, but there's something I find very pleasant about turning a knob and the station suddenly comes in clearly. Just that little "aha" serotonin hit.
Nice!
Been hunting for an old tube state radio ever since I heard one last year - it blew my fucking mind how deep, rich, and punchy FM radio came through on that little thing. I couldn't believe how good it sounded.
To be honest, I've never plugged any of these in and I have no idea if they work. They probably don't because I was getting them at thrift stores for like $20.
But I do want to get a working one eventually. When I see the working ones on eBay they're much pricier.
I remember those radios. And I remember the small town radio stations that had shows filled with local happenings and people with local voices providing the information. Not canned shows from a central location.
Not sure where you are, but where I live, college and community radio stations are still old school, and very worth listening to. Most if not all now stream online too, so, they're around if you're looking for that hit of the olden times.
Razors. Back in the day you could buy a razor and expect to shave with it every day for the rest of your life. I still have my first razor, a Gillette Slim Adjustable and it still shaves as well as it did the first day I brought it home. The heft and balance are something those new plastic razors and multi bladed monsters can never match.
Thankfully, internet shopping allows me to buy blades from around the world and now I can enjoy my old razor again.
Everyone who shaves should own a safety razor. The blades only cost a few pennies each, and they shave so well. Blade preference might be individual, but it's so cheap it's easy to experiment.
I used to be pretty into machine learning and AI generation circa 2018-ish. It used to be fun and surreal. Sites like artbreeder were a great novelty, and also a pretty good learning tool. Now that it's "good" I feel that not only has a lot of the charm been lost, it's become much easier for malicious actors to use it.
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