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.
If you have a Samsung PCB115UBE USB cable for an old SCH-A870 I will seriously give you money for it right now
Guy got a whole hoard of old geeks going through their cable stashes right now 😋
I hope so, my only alternative to get my old data off this phone is desoldering the NAND chip lol
Build your own USB cable?
Proprietary Samshit BS, the charging wall wart appears to have a different pin out from the USB data transfer cable
Not sure why I’m being downvoted. If your only other option is desolder the NAND chips, you can build a cable for probably $10 in parts. Ask me how I know. That shit is easy. Get you a breakout board and find the connector or a close enough one that you can solder or crimp and get to it.
Way easier and less work than messing with the board level components, FFS people.
There are also people who will build you one as a service if it is beyond you.
Downvotes for adding to the discussion giving a real alternative to a stated problem is asinine.
Edit: also, if you’re willing to desolder the fucking NAND chips, just solder directly on the connector header on the PCB. Fucking duh!
Dunno on the downvotes lol, but it’s something like a 24 pin connector that I have been able to dig up 0 documentation for. This would be a full blown RE’ing project, so desoldering the NAND would be easier than that because I already have a (one step above low end admittedly) hot air station and lots and lots of dead RAM sticks to remp up practice on
Desoldering is the hardest part, then I can just slap it into one of those NAND/BGA adapters and dump it, no REing required
But
There are also people who will build you one as a service
If that exists, could edge out my desoldering solution, do you have any recommendations of said people?
i bet that motorola cable is gold. : D
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.
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
A large reel to reel tape recorder.
A few early pentium laptops that no longer turn on.
Not mine personally, but my town still has some hitching posts and mounting blocks
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.
Owie the photo contains errors :-(
You’re right :(
There are those kind of things everywhere where I live, took me some time to find out what it was for:
My hometown did, too! Even Chicago still has a couple.
In Amish country, you’ll see horses hitched up at Costco.
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.
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.
I have an ISA soundcard around here somewhere.
You will only take my Gravis Ultrasound Max from my stiff cold dead hands.
Not before.
I moved heaven and earth to find and buy one back in the day. We will never part ways. I don’t have had a system to put it in for the last 22 years. I dont care. It’s resting in its box untill… I dont know, the rapture or something. It’s mine.
I had one!
my old ISA graphics card would like a word. :p
I have a sony mini cassette video camera. Got a new battery for it and works like a dream. Really fun to record modern events in that format.
I also have a Sears VHS video camera. Working on getting a battery for that.
A functional electric Smith Corona typewriter
8mm slide projector
Too many CRTS
It’s a good time being a Junkman
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.
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.
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.
Please share at !musicproduction@sh.itjust.works
I wish I had the budget for modular. I’m stuck with Cardinal in the meantime.
The initial investment can be steep, but if you stick with buying second hand modules and look for deals, it’s easier. Plus the spending only really goes down over time, at a certain point you realize you have all the modules you need, and you find yourself only buying a module or 2 a year.
Also modular stuff holds its value really well. If you buy second hand, you can basically sell a piece of gear for what you paid for it, so if you get something you don’t love, you don’t lose much.
Having said that, cardinal and vcv rack is great, vcv rack is where I started and I used that for a few years before taking the plunge
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.
I was a phone phreak, and I still have my last old-school brown Radio Shack tone dialer which I’d been planning to make into a red box. Ultimately I was too lazy to swap the crystal in it, and it sat in my junk drawer for years while red boxing died. Now it’s a curiosity that sits on my shelf of hacker books. Maybe I’ll still do the crystal swap someday for the sheer hell of it.
There an app for that now.
At least, there is on the Flipper Zero.
I found my old TomTom GPS in a box last year. I struggled to find a reason it might be worth keeping. In the end it got recycled.
I got a Toshiba music centre like this…
Keep it in good shape.
