I recently digitized my family's (and extended family) VHS and new to me 5.5 VHS camcorder tapes. Now I have my grandfather's cassette tape collection of accordion recordings. Have yet to fiddle with losslessly digitizing those but I'm sure I'll figure out out. My mom also has my other grandfather's Super 8 camcorder she claims has their wedding video on it. Need to eventually get my hands on that and figure that out as well.

Scanning pictures however is the worst. You can use a 3rd party, but many of them dispose of your physicals after the fact and don't guarantee the scans came through without error.

I found out the hard way. I need an HDMI to VGA cable. You'll never guess what I gave away a few weeks ago.

Tapes are easy, get a cassette player of any kind with a headphone jack, jack that into your PC's 3.5mm hole, and use Tenacity (audacity bad now, tenacity good fork) to record side A and B into two tracks which you can later split up into individual songs if need be. The Super 8 camcorder however idk, that sounds more difficult than audio tapes lol!

But scanning photos? Just get a Brother laser printer/scanner combo and scan them hoes yourself!

In related news does anyone know of a good photo printer? I have to go the other way and make my digitals into physicals! I could go to a pharmacy still I think but it'd be cool if I could do it myself.

OKI Data Dot Matrix printers and the green and white paper For the Win!!! I kind of miss the noise they made.

I'm currently looking for a good laser printer myself, if I get my hands on one I'll pass the deets to you.

Interesting. I must have mandela-effected myself. It's been a few months since I last looked at the thing. It does have photos on it - they must have been transferred from iTunes.

I used a VGA cable just last week to attach a screen to an HP micro server.

Same. I waa too poor to buy a computer growing up so all my tech was scavenged out of dumps and off the side of the road until my late 20s. I still have an IDE to usb in my drawee and a stack of hard drives older than my child.

I'm retro computing, retro everything tech, and I DO need my collection!

Just had to order a keyboard DIN connector (pre PS-2) adapter for a old 80386. Because I obviously still don't hoard enough old stuff!

One of the few things I'm afraid I won't be able to use anymore are UMTS (3G) sticks and routers. Although, the router still works a perfectly fine mobile Wifi router, hmmmmm ....

Brother laser printers are the move for sure, but as for photo printers I'm at a loss.

Hell, Brother probably makes one now that I think about it, hmm...

It’s some pressed hams my friend.

We are on a road trip right now. we travel with a 12v peltier cooler. (don't need to lug around water/ice), the night before we leave, the internal fan whines and freezes.

Wife, what was that? I check, fan just died.

Wife, fuck now what, if we move it to the other cooler i won't all fit with ice.

Me: TO THE BASEMENT.....(DAD-CAPE) Shelves, boxes, PC parts, dig dig, Intel stock cooler on it's heatsink. flush cutters, snip strip, tape.

If I had more time, I'd have bought a direct replacement from noctua (already replaced the eternal fan years ago)

Having parts around is a bad investment until that one time you need it now.

Bam! I have that box too!

You get a zonk for using the most inefficient cooling technologies, but kudos for giving me faith that my extra stock coolers will come in handy eventually...

I've started to sort my random screws

You got rid of 80TB of storage? In this economy?

I had this exact feeling when my kid brought home an old laptop he found from his grandpa and it was one of those IBM T23s from the early 2000s but there was no power cable with it. Guess who had one still in his tangle of wires? lol Now we'll see if the laptop still actually works.

It's for a portable cooler though, you're not optimizing for heat removal per watt, you're optimizing for size and weight.

Perhaps I'm missing why an Igloo cooler won't work here.

If you get anything digitized, sanity check the results, my mother in law got some done that were really weird, like some other family's stuff and then it just cut out or something. I don't think they put any effort into making sure it was correct. Especially if it's somewhere disposing of the originals.

They said they didn't wanna carry ice. There's no reason why it wouldn't work, they just didn't want to bother with ice.

I still have the 5.25 inch floppy drive with ribbon cable.

Som e day a bank that never upgraded will need it desperately and then I'll cash in. Bwahahaha

My dad had a collection of old and weird stuff, and he'd frequently joke about it; when you need it, remember that there's a microphone wire for a 1932 Edison dictaphone in this drawer right here.

I haven't had time to respond to this, but, on a related note...

I bought my car new in 1999, and I still love driving it. Many years ago, say 2003 or so, I bought a resistor to enable to daytime running lights, then I realized I needed other components, and never got around to finishing the job.

A few weeks ago, a guy from the car club asked if I still had it, because he wanted to enable the daytime running lights and that was the last piece he needed, and no one seemed to have one. I looked and looked but couldn't find it anywhere. I think I threw it away a few months ago, figuring I wouldn't ever need it.

Sorry, bud. I had that thing sitting around for two plus decades, only to need it a few weeks after I tossed it.

I think he meant he kept 80 TB of storage.

Some years back I embarked on a project to scan my parents pictures. I think there were over 4,000 until I was done. I don't remember the ratio, but there were some negatives and some prints. Oh and trying to unduplicate (this picture is a print of this negative) was a bear, because the prints and pictures had sometimes gotten separated.

I set up the scanner in the living room and worked on it while we were watching TV. It took months, but I did it.

Then I did my in-laws' pictures, who didn't have nearly as many, fortunately. And they were better organized to start, so that felt like a walk in the park by comparison.

I noticed my parents took a ton of pictures of my older brothers, but very few of me... But there were a ton of pictures of the bridge construction next to their house... Hmmm!

Should've called me, we have several of those cables around. And that's after culling the herd of those cables we used to have!

Oh we should start a community for, "I need this cable..." where we can all help each other out!

Our cleaners are wizards at pulling the optical audio cable out of our sound bar or television. It's not too short or anything like that, but it's happened at least half the times they have been here. And it's behind the sound bar and television. I can't figure out why it's always that specific cable. Plenty of others nearby.

And that is why you never throw out anything, because if you do you are guaranteed to need it right after

future goals fr

Just checked in the parallel universe what you would’ve been up to instead, turns out the two of you bought a lottery ticket as a goof & won

(life was never simple or pure again) PHEW dodged it

Quoting @jlamoree@infosec.exchange (link)

All I’ve ever wanted is for the Revolution to knock on my door in need of a weird cable.

The movie prop companies are going to knock on your door.

I don't like that I am in this picture.

I'm so impressed by the organization.

I'm intrigued by the "USB WEIRD" label.

I have a USB->GBA SP cable that I have no idea where it came from. It probably came out of that box.

I'm glad I found this, I immediately thought of the same thing.

To be fair, with two daughters that are 1.5 years apart, we also have many more of our older daughter. We had more time to take pictures between naps and active time and less attention split once our second was born. Do I have remorse of having less pictures of our youngest? Of course, but it really was a challenge to get as many pictures with a 2 year old running around a baby that can't even crawl yet!

If I digitize anything, I only trust myself with that. I'm too OCD to trust a third party!

Thanks! I do have several cassette players, including the one my grandmother recently used to listen to these same tapes. I assumed the process is similar to what you laid out but have yet to get my system set up for said conversion.

And for the photos, I'm already planning that too. I have a stand alone scanner but know it's a very tedious process from past personal scanning projects, and I have a tote full of I scanned photos. Maybe I'll task my oldest with it later this year I'm her "down time" lol.

GBA SP charging cable? Or data cable? It it's a date cable is likely for transferring Pokémon and whatnot via a trainer program on a pc or something? Just a wild guess

I have an HP multi function that can print on multiple types of paper, including cardstock, photo and glossy magazine. I've made reprinted NES instruction booklets on it even. I know everyone says "HP Bad", but they are all making the toner move. I accidentally updated my dad's Epson color inkjet printer and it started complaining about his black ink cartridge. Lesson learned, just don't update firmware on ANY brand and block their update servers at your router if possible.

"did you say you needed a piece of scrap wood about this wide and about that long and about yea thick?!"

Happiest day of my "uncle's" (actually Dad's cousin in law) life.

Charging cable. It's definitely some 3rd party thing, but again, no clue where I got it

Oh for sure lol, never update it, I usually don't give printers access to the network anyway, I'll just use a cable! I'll check out that HP, thanks!

I kept my box of Nintendo 3DS LL since I bought it. After about five years I discovered that I could sell it for money. I listed it online asking for about $3.

Not too long a guy texted me and asked me if I still had it. I said sure, give me your address. I then asked my wife to ship it.

Wife said she had thrown it out a few days ago.

Guy said, "No worries, mate. It's alright if you don't have the outer box. It's actually the cardboard paper which holds up the box in shape I need."

Wife said the box was actually still in the drawer, but since I took the box out and also took out the cardboard paper for examination the other day, she threw out those cardboard paper but kept the box.

My landlady and good friend of the family came for a visit from abroad, she's very rich but stuck in her ways, and refuses to buy a smartphone.

She came over in a hurry and asked if by some wild chance I had a charger for a Nokia 3410 laying around somewhere.

I literally reached over into a box next to my desk and gave it to her. She was surprised and elated. "Dumb question, do you have another for my backup 3410?"

I reached into the box and gave her another.

That's the day I started suspecting I may have a problem.

True story, happened back in 2014.

Oh the cooler is horribly inefficient, but it's super light. And for the price of a battery powered compressor cooler, it'll be many, many years before it makes up for the price difference in electricity usage.

When it comes to obscure cabling I have diamond hands

🫲💎🫱

To us kids who grew up with the technological revolution, finding old tech gear is to us what seeing old cars and motorbikes is to boomers hahaha