Links Of The Week

The Atari Landfill Excavation
8 Things You No Longer See At Gas Stations
Inside Abandoned Malls
Family Gospel Albums of The '70s
See Inside Kurt Cobain's Abandoned L.A. Apartment
Awesome Vintage '80s Lunchboxes
45 Vintage Sexist Ads That Wouldn't Go Down Well Today
The Story Of The Great Togo
Untouched Paris Apartment Discovered After 70 Years

RIP Windows XP

Still Got An XP Machine? Turn It On Now.

History's Dumpster Is Now On Facebook!

Like and share!

https://www.facebook.com/HistorysDumpster

The Exciting Sounds Project & Retrophile Daily

Hey, I have some KILLER new blog links for ya you're sure to love if you enjoy the stuff you read here on History's Dumpster (and you're here, aren't you?)

The Exciting Sounds Project

Retrophile Daily

The Tiki Cha Cha Club

If you LOVE classic lounge/mood  music of the 1950s and early '60s....

Then join The Tiki Cha Cha Club! Each week, your host, DJ Chintzy Schmaltz brings you the finest in classic exotica, lounge and other orchestral delights. And all from vinyl!

The Tiki Cha Cha Club airs Monday nights/Early Tuesday mornings at Midnight (12:00am) Pacific, 3:00am Eastern on KBOO 90.7 FM Portland, OR. You can listen directly here.

Look for updated episodes to listen or download every Tuesday evening on The Tiki Cha Cha Club's Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/groups/tikichachaclubclub/

And an interview with your host: http://kboo.fm/content/betterknowakbooprogramtikichachaclubandloungeworld

"Internet Radio"

And a little white "earbud" too!

 Don't expect to connect this to your wi-fi and hear your favourite podcast.

This radio was made in the late 1960s. And it's a standard AM transistor radio. That's all. Radios like this were the iPods of their day and your 20 song playlist came courtesy of your favourite local Top 40 radio station (almost all of them on AM radio in those days.)

And at the time, what we would later call the internet was then called "ARPANET" And strictly for military and government use only. Computers in the 1960s were extremely huge (often taking up an entire large room and hopelessly limited and underpowered - by 1981 standards!) and were rarely seen outside a laboratory. The very few civilian computers never connected to anything.

The Honeywell 316 was the world's first consumer marketed computer (1969). It was essentially a $10,600 recipe box and pencil. Exactly the thing you want to give someone who allegedly can't cook very well. It had no online connectivity.

 That's not to say people weren't dreaming. Note the "flat screen monitors".

While it's almost spooky to consider someone could use a word that would be so ubiquitous 30 years before it's general use, I think "Internet" just sounded like a fancy hi-tech name for a cheap UK electronics brand at the time this radio was made. (I'd have a hard time with the "time traveler" theory.)

More on the discovery of this radio with a very futuristic name here:

http://www.markhillpublishing.com/the-internet-transistor-radio/

Chinese Import Video Camera Glasses: A Review

A week ago on a lark, I ordered a pair of Chinese made video sunglasses. They only cost $16.49 - including shipping on eBay.

So I ordered and it did arrive. Quickly...A couple days ago. I got a package from Shanghai. (These photos were taken on my Android tablet. Bear with me.)

 

Comes with carrying case, USB cord and lens cleaning cloth.

"I make these look good..."

The instruction booklet

This also uses a 2 to 32GB Micro SD card (not included.) I pulled a 2 GB card out of one of my old cell phones and reformatted it for use on this.

I was more or less expecting the worst. But they were surprisingly good for the price.

The video quality isn't 1080pi HD (but what were you expecting for $16.49?) But a hell of lot better than what you'd expect for that price. I've seen worse video from $200 cell phones.

The downside:

The video files they record are HUGE in pure AVI format (a little over 1 GB for a 15 minute video shoot) The video here took about 180 MB. So to upload onto the web, you'll need video compression software. I used FFConvert for Linux and converted it to a 27 MB MP4 file. But there are a number of these available depending on your operating system.

The lens is just above the bridge of your nose on these glasses. So you will need to keep your head slightly tilted down (don't shoegaze.) I deliberately aimed my head lower to keep as many faces as possible out of this video (which was shot at a library. I picked it to demonstrate average indoor lighting conditions.)   

The built in mic is extremely sensitive in video recording mode (it encodes in uncompressed PCM.) And if you're talking in a normal volume, you'll overmodulate (cause distortion.) So keep your voice very low when recording.

For straight audio MP3 recording (no video), they're very bad. They encode at 8kHz at 128kbps and sound extremely muffled.

I don't know the overall battery life because first, the instructions say the red LED light will stop flashing when fully charged. But after 24 hours of initial charging, it never stopped flashing. Plus as it takes 1 GB for 15 minutes of video and my micro SD card was only 2 GB, I'll have to buy a full 32 GB card to really find out.

The photos are also pretty bad. And the problem is you have to make a time.txt file in the root file of this for the automatic time stamp on the photos (the time reads in 24 hour UTC and not in standard AM/PM. I tried this in every configuration, but I could never get it to read correctly.) It always read as the default 2008/12/31 00:00:00 (give or take a few seconds)

While the photo and audio capabilities are downers, that's not the BEST feature of these glasses, which is the video recording capability. These glasses have quite a few uses. I wouldn't recommend them for recording concerts, namely because of the sensitive mic audio issues as well as the mysterious battery life. But for quick on the spot video recording of public events incognito, they're PERFECT.

Rating *** (3/5 stars)

You can buy them here:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/111137776719?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649

(This review was made uncompensated and totally independent, based only on my own experience. - Larry)

R.U. A Cyberpunk? (1993)

Hard to believe an average smartphone in 2013 can do all this and more.....

http://io9.com/are-you-a-cyberpunk-this-early-1990s-poster-explains-i-1231691511

One Weird Trick

Have you ever spotted these web ads and asked yourself "Who do these people think they're fooling?"

"One Weird Trick"....or some variant in ads for everything from mortgage reduction to testosterone building. Nothing screams SCAM louder.

They began appearing around 2008. And became ubiquitous by 2010.

In copy writing, one major no-no is overused superlatives. The reason is simple - They get old. And cliche.

And apparently, I'm not the only one who notices it. 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-09/just-1-weird-trick-to-get-you-to-read-this-article.html

Remember The Days Of 56k Modems?

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   http://lazylaces.com/56Kmodem/
   
  Ahhh...the 56k modem. Remember how we all thought that was the best and fastest way to get on the internet?
  
  When I first went online with my big bad Windows 98 (HA!) computer with 64 MB of RAM and only a 2 GB hard drive, I tried using those worthless "free" dial-up internet providers that were everywhere in the Roaring '90s when it seemed like you could pay ALL the bills AND provide free internet with banner ads. Unfortunately, they had a habit of cutting you off after an hour...then 30 minutes....then 15 minutes. Finally, I yelled uncle and signed up for actual internet service. (GOOD LUCK trying to call me then!)
  
  I think 56k still has it's place for non-computer junkie people who only use the internet to surf for something specific or use e-mail and nothing else. Or for the REALLY poor. It should always be there and really cheap if worse comes to worse.
  
  I learned how to tweak a 56k modem to run at it's peak. But it was still prone to cut-offs......
  
  I on the other hand am a power and speed FREAK, expecting nothing less than the FASTEST possible connection. I was a dedicated "netizen" and I wasn't changing for anyone.
  
  I used 56k until from 1998 to early 2001 when I moved up to broadband. I paid about $100 bucks a month for it then - a LOT less now (about $30 now), but when I first set it up and connected, I though I was in heaven.
  
  The only problem today is websites are a lot more complex and don't work too well with dial-up. An average home page in 1999 had only 50-200kb of data. Today, it's 1-3 MB or more. So load up times take a lot longer on 56k now. It took 15 minutes to download a 3 MB file in 2000 with dial-up. Today, it takes less than a nanosecond with broadband.
  
  Those were the daze......