Ask Lemmy
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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.
We've got at least 7 or 8 old remotes for items we don't even have anymore.
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.
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.
Jaz drive (and the isa scsi card) and several tapes.
Woah, so you're the other person who bought a Jaz drive! I knew we'd meet eventually.
I have my dad's old Pentax camera and accessories, as well as a Super 8mm film camera, unused film cannisters, and a projector with a screen. It's all still functional, and I could still film stuff with the 8mm. I could use the Pentax but I would need to go out of my way to get film for it. Shit probably costs way more now than it did when I first got into photography.
I also still have one of those CD/DVD repair things. Put a scratched CD in, run it, and it smooths out the scratches and, most of the time, makes an unplayable disc perfectly fine again.
My wife has her old Canon with a few nice lenses. It probably wouldn't be super hard to convert it to digital, I've seen projects like that on Hackaday.
Analog photography is also on a bit of a resurgence. As long as it takes 35mm film there shouldn't be any issues getting film or having it developed somewhere (apart from the high prices).
It's become a bit of a hobby for me lately. Analog photography requires more commitment when taking pictures and the images also have this lovely analog aesthetic. In a weird way it's also fun to have to wait until you see your images. Once you're finally through a roll and have it developed, you're taken back to all the memories you've photographed in the past weeks/months.
I have a stereoscopic viewer. Like a desk version of Google Cardboard. You tape down two photos taken from different angles and view them in 3d. It has an adjustment knob like binoculars for your pupil distance, and some legs to hold it parallel to the desk. It’s made for aerial photographs. Maybe I could turn it into a VR viewer.
My modular synthesizer.
I love it and I've poured far to much money into it for something that doesn't come close to the power of making music in a DAW. But I do love it, and it can do some cool stuff that I've not been able to reproduce in a DAW - like random triggers and probability. It's also nice to get away from my computer.
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.
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.