Last Saturday I wrote in detail about the three-soundboard setup I used for a school play. It’s a rather technical topic (although I don’t get overly technical with it), but I made a little video that will either a.) clarify how the setup worked or b.) deepen readers’ confusion.
Let’s find out which!
Apparently, yours portly has MP3 players strewn about—well, at least two. I’m wondering if I might stumble into a third. At one point, I had an MP3 player with a whopping 64 MB of storage space. I have no idea where that one is now, but I remember listening to it on repeat my freshman year of college to drown out the sound of reruns of The Golden Girls that my roommate would listen to to fall asleep at night (he also recited the dialogue in his sleep). I could squeeze maybe eighteen songs on there, depending on the bit-rate of the MP3s, and I would periodically trade songs out for new ones.
But I digress. Here are some recent pieces on the two MP3 players I do have in my possession (and which I am selling—here and here):
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
Last week I wrote about an old MP3 player I’d used for years (and which you can buy). In digging around in my Drawer of Forgotten Technology, I found another MP3 player, this one a Centon MP3 Player that doubles as a USB stick/storage device (you can buy it, too)!
I apparently never really used this one all that much, but I did find ten recordings from a Christmas Concert that my old group, Brass to the Future, played on 20 December 2009 at the Sumter Opera House. Since I can’t figure out how to remove those files (apparently, I can’t just delete them from the file folder in Windows), whoever purchases it will get those recordings (which, despite my apparent inability to delete them, I have managed to copy onto two external hard drives).
I’m back with more ancient alien technology. This one is a bit interesting in our world of endless streaming—an old MP3 player (I’m selling it on eBay, by the way):
This device is a SanDisk Sansa c250, which boasted a whopping two gigabytes of flash storage. To put that into perspective, my very first MP3 player—which I received for my eighteenth birthday in 2003—had a mere 64 megabytes of storage. In high school, a friend of mine had an MP3 player that sported an actual hard drive, and he kept it in his truck to play tunes; it was too big to carry around regularly!
This Sansa c250 likely came out when the iPod was getting going, and was a non-Apple competitor. The music industry in the early 2000s was still trying to figure out how to monetize the digitization of music, and I know for a fact a number of the tunes on this device were rips from CDs or recordings I’d made using crude digital methods. I know for a fact I owned the CD the song in the picture comes from, and I believe I still do.
But it was a golden and/or dark age of intellectual theft and copyright infringement, depending on one’s perspective, and these devices were quite popular for listening to music on-the-go without the need for a bulky Disc Man.
The run of films based in the grimy past of analog technology keeps rolling. This week’s movie is a great example of another horror thriller that explores dated technology in fresh ways. Most flicks that attempt to look back at the 1980s tend to do so through rose-tinted glasses, and focus on the neon and the crazy fashion. Dead Mail (2024) looks back at the 1980s as I vaguely remember them—a drab post office in a small town.
I’m continuing to find all sorts of dubious treasures in my Drawer of Forgotten Technology. This Wednesday, I’m featuring these two beauties:
I’m trying to sell these two phones on eBay, so if you’re hankering for ancient flip phone technology, now’s your chance!
I used these phones for years. I was way behind the curve on adopting smartphone technology. When the black flip phone broke one morning, I finally made the switch… to a Windows Phone! 😣 I loved that phone, but by that point, the Windows Phone OS had zero app support, and I directly attribute it with a serious off-season in my dating life (which, in retrospect, was a good thing, because now I’m marrying the love of my life).
But I digress. People tend to romanticize flip phones now because they allowed one to be relatively disconnected, and were only really good for calls and some limited texting (you had to hit a number one, two, or three times depending on what letter you wanted to use; somehow, I got really fast at writing text messages that were exactly the right number of characters for one message). You could still keep in touch with people, but these phones weren’t constantly bombarding you with notifications, apps, games, distractions, etc., etc. That said, the massive functionality of the modern smartphone is hard to pass up, even if they’re destroying society.
But I digress once again! Here are some photos of these beautiful little LG smartphones:
I have been a blast unearthing some old technology, so this weekend’s Lazy Sunday is dedicated to the glory of ancient tech:
More ancient alien technology to come!
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
Yours portly recently dug into his Drawer of Forgotten Technology and found some unusual bits of ancient alien (well, human) technology. I’m currently trying to sell them on eBay (here and here). In writing their listings, I made short little videos and uploaded them to YouTube; I want to share those videos today.
I wrote extensively about this technology on Wednesday in my post “Ancient Alien Technology“; now, here are the promised videos.
Yours portly recently dug into his Drawer of Forgotten Technology and found some unusual bits of ancient alien (well, human) technology. I’m currently trying to sell them on eBay (here and here). In writing their listings, I made short little videos and uploaded them to YouTube, and may start uploading bits of old and/or weird technology on Fridays.
When I was a nerdy child in the late 1990s, I desperately wanted a laptop computer. At that time, I dreamt of being able to play Civilization II on family road trips, in the way that I would play my Gameboy. To me, that seemed like the peak of human advancement: conquering the world in the back of an Astro van.
The late 1990s and early 2000s were a fascinating time of oddball technology. Remember, these years were before Facebook and, even more consequentially, YouTube (I learned about YouTube from an article in Newsweek, of all places; at the time, it was touted as a place to watch old public domain television shows and movies). It was also the time before the iPhone came along and totally transformed the world. As such, every computer company was trying to create “the next big thing,” or at least were attempting to explore where technology was heading next.
These two devices represent two possible paths along the tree of technological evolution that were either dead-ends or, perhaps more generously, stepping stones to technology to come. The first is the iOmega ZIP drive, which promised a disk comparable in size to the classic 1.44 MB, 3.5″ floppy disk, but with a whopping 100 (and, later, 250) MB of storage; the second is the HP Jornada 680, one is a series of “palmtop” computers that attempted to bridge the gap between full-fledged laptop and palm assistants (PDAs, or “Personal Digital Assistants,” like the once-ubiquitous Blackberry).
Yours portly has finally had some time to watch some movies again, and it really went from famine to feast. I’ve watched several solid flicks lately, including this week’s selection, the French-Canadian psychological thriller Red Rooms (2023).
The Portly Politico 