ITT weird tech you have seen

It's sort of neat that they look a children's O2, which in itself was the junior of the Octane.
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Speaking of phones, I don't know how popular these were in the rest of the world.
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They might look like a gentleman's pleasure aide but they were good.
Specifically with the US market, the Ericofon had a hard time because the way the phone system (the Bell system, which was monopolized by AT&T) was set up, they'd cut your service if you used a third-party device.
 
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I am a sucker for old and obscure tech. I really wanna buy a electric typewriter sometime just because.

I own a Anita 811 calculator I once got on a thrift shop. Such a cute little thing, bright red numbers and unorthodox operating because of a lack of a division button meaning you had to actually do division backwards. But you also had a memory switch on it to carry results. It even came with the original manual and a leather case to carry it.
 
Specifically with the US market, the Ericofon had a hard time because the way the phone system (the Bell system, which was monopolized by AT&T) was set up, they'd cut your service if you used a third-party device.
I think that was pretty common, our market was the same and the cobra phone came from here.
 
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Some prototype PDA with video conference functionality.
 
So I have something that I thought about recently because I was talking a buddy about crypto mining:

About 2005 to 2007 I was using a program. I think it was called RC75??? (Not sure really) it had a comic version of a cow head as logo and it was basically connected to a certain university server. This program then would download packages and open them, trying to find a key.
All while doing this your pc was quite busy because of the calculations (my pc wasn’t that powerful to say the least).
If it didn’t find a key it would download more packages if you wanted it to.
A group from the US found the key and got 10.000$.

Maybe there were other programs like these going for hidden keys but this was the only time I encountered something similar to mining, in which robuste your pc hardware to find something specific valuable.

Maybe someone here knows that program too.
Might have been one of the attempts to distributed crack RSA or similar like this one: https://brenthugh.com/dicinfo.html

Or the Mersenne prime search

They need to make reel to reel style tapes using LTO technology- restricting it to a full height drive is so limiting beheheh

Parallel port Zip drives were the shit before but able CDs but Jaz drives were even cooler. Both would die all the time however.
 
There are some Aliexpress chinese storage devices sold as a "5 terabyte SSD" which end up just being microSD cards soldered together
Atomic Shimp has done some videos on those drives. They're usuall only 1 or 2GB and because the write speed is so low it would take weeks to copy anything to the drive even if it was real.
 
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The chinks pretty much just fudge the internal machine code of the SDs into pretending it is 2tb or some shit while not having it. And then it takes forever to write and read from, and anything above the actual real capacity just gets corrupted to shit.
 
And sometimes they don't even bother fucking with the flash controller firmware, they just pop a 2GB in there and say the flash drive is 2TB-colored. Sucks to not read the fine print, I guess.
 
The Datahand. An odd keyboard where you type by wiggling your fingers in various directions. It looks pretty cool, but i bet it's a bitch to learn, assuming you can find one in the first place.

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If it had been closer to the QWERTY layout I think it would have been really easy to learn for people already with a proper typing style and ability to not look when they type.
 
I remember seeing that in a high end toy store. I wasn't old enough to care about music that much, but was mesmerised by the formfactor- so much smaller than audio casettes, it looke like something out of sci-fi movie.

My dad had one of those old school organisers
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I remember it being very sleek, made of very high quality materials (it's plastic felt nicer than the ones used in my current day laptop or smartphone), and in early 90's it was futuristic af
I wish this formfactor made a comback
These were great. With some modern updates to the UI and some new features like a barebones word processor and an integrated notebook system like obsidian or onenote, or a voice recorder, I could see the Casio style organizers making a big comeback with the dumbphone crowd. It would probably cost a pittance to make them, too, even a higher end one could retail for under 50 bucks.
 
Well, not the drive itself, but there were some data converter boards on the market that could use an already existing normal VHS as a data backup system - like Russian-made ArVid or Danmere Backer (LGR made a good video on it).

LTO tapes can keep data for about 30 years without it degrading, but it's really more useful for mass storage (as in when you have tens of terabytes' worth of archives).
I'm somewhat of a data hoarder, so it's good for me, but I don't think a normalfag would need that much storage. Furthermore, if you buy a used drive, it's likely going to be a SAS drive, so you'll need a SAS controller as well (luckily you can get a used one for cheap too).
I've heard some promising things about bd-r for cheap archiving, that in ideal conditions they can last about 15 years, any truth to it? Even if it's only ten, you could just make duplicate of everything for increased security
 
If it had been closer to the QWERTY layout I think it would have been really easy to learn for people already with a proper typing style and ability to not look when they type.
Good lord am i late here, but anyway

I think the biggest obstacle is in the way the buttons are set up. Regular typing is after all just stabbing keys, but the datahand requires you to wiggle your fingers in all directions, occasionally while raising your thumb. I doubt many people would put in the time to learn it if they had a choice, even if it is efficient and fast


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On another note, i am fascinated by linotypes. It's just an awesome oldschool thing

 
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I've somewhat recently discovered AliExpress (Mostly because they apparently accept paypal now) and I've found all kinds of weird shit being sold over there, including but not limited to:
  • Customizable gpu holders
  • Dual screen laptops with a second screen on the wrist pad
  • Alternate brand Risc V SBCs (Computers with an open cpu architecture)
  • Mobile GPU's customized to work on standard pci slots
  • Mobile CPU's soldered directly into motherboards so they work as desktop PC's
  • GPU models that never arrived here or were made as limited editions for china only (E.g. the Arc 750 tiger edition)
  • Kodak and Lenovo Think series ssds
  • Pocket windows 11 Pro PCs
  • Cheap air cpu coolers with lcd temperature display
  • Intel engineering samples
  • Moorethreads GPU's (Albeit these come with a huge markup)
The thing that I don't understand why hasn't caught up up with a certain demographic however are nvidia teslas (Also sold somewhat regularly on ebay). They're quite probably the cheapest way to get a 24GB gpu for making and testing AI models right now with the drawback that you must build a cooling solution for them in order to fit in a standard desktop. Here is how they look and how they usually ends up looking like:

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