How to Fix Your CD Player
kuro5hin.org:
How to Fix Your CD Player
Every year countless CD players get junked because of one simple and easily-fixed problem: they fail to “find” CDs placed in them or they skip. Both of these faults are commonly caused by a misaligned read head.
In this article I provide details of a simple method which I have successfully applied to a number of ailing CD players. I hope that some of you will find it useful and that it will reduce the number of these devices that end up in the trash. [….]
er, be sure to read the comments. they don’t particularly agree with the “facts” in the article….
via FollowMeHere.
50 Years of Color
NPR : Color TV’s 50th Anniversary
March 25, 2004 — Fifty years ago today, the first color TV sets made for consumers started rolling off the assembly line. Because they were initially too expensive and there was little color programming available, it took more than a decade for color television to become a household fixture.
NPR’s Lynn Neary reports on the early days of color TV, and the way today’s new technology — from HDTV to TiVo — is similarly transforming home entertainment.
Includes related NPR stories and links to a 1958 NBC color broadcast, and early (animated) TV color logos (Peacocks, for those of you too young to have thought about it, have very colorful tails. get it?).
A Museum of Electric Appliances
A virtual museum of small early electrical appliances from the United Kingdom.
the Turk
“The Turk” was a automaton chess-player introduced by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769. It was also a hoax. Kottke points us to a Wired story by Tom Standage, author of a book on the “machine.” The condensation is a great overview of the particular affair, and trends in clockwork and mechanicals of the time:
Kempelen was familiar with Vaucanson’s work and shared his interest in building machines that could imitate human faculties. (In addition to creating the Turk, Kempelen spent many years researching the mechanism of speech, and in the 1770s he produced the first speech synthesizers capable of articulating entire sentences.) He must have been aware that most observers found Vaucanson’s constructions incomprehensibly complicated. With the introduction of the steam engine and the power loom across Europe, there seemed to be no limit to the potential of mechanical technology. The Turk cleverly exploited this perception.
The Turk inspired a movie more than a century later, and other automatons.
A Child’s Garden of Record Labels
Once upon a time, there was a little boy, just like half of you!, who had a lot of records. He found them and found them and then he put them in order, one by one until he had a garden. A garden of records!
Quirky collection of, er, record labels. Primarily 45s and 78s.
via J-Walk
tech loser
Retro digital camera
Typewriter/Computer conversions
the typewriter-keyboard conversion
A Smith-Corona portable now plugs in to the PC.
ElectriClerk
the “Brazil” macintosh casemod
Underwood #5 –> computer
the least succesful of the three puts an entire mini-ITX into Underwood #5. It fits, but the visual result is less than satisfying.
NY Subway System at 100
The Rumble That’s Lasted for 100 Years
NY Times March 19, 2004 By RANDY KENNEDY
Even in the world of yellow journalism, the headline was
the kind usually reserved for a horrible crime or a scandal
at City Hall, not a career decision by a maddeningly
sedulous civil engineer.
Bannered in big letters across the front page of The New
York Journal on Dec. 1, 1904, the headline screamed:
“Engineer Parsons Quits! Crazed by Suicide.”
Then again,
the man in question, William Barclay Parsons, was no
ordinary engineer. And the mission he had completed only a
few weeks earlier, the building of the New York City
subway, was no ordinary feat of engineering. In fact, in
the early years of the 20th century, it made him arguably
the most important public figure in the city, sought after,
feted nightly, consulted like a Delphic oracle and quoted
in newspapers more often than the mayor. And when he
resigned from the Rapid Transit Commission, it was
front-page news in many of the city’s papers, even though
he had always promised he would step down after the first
leg of the subway was completed (not, as William Randolph
Hearst’s Journal speculated sensationally, because of his
anguish over a suicide in the mass-transit leviathan he had
just created). The story of Parsons and his outsize
determination is the thread that winds through an
exhibition looking back at 100 years of the subway, opening
on Tuesday at the New York Public Library’s Science,
Industry and Business Library. It is one of the first of
what will probably be dozens of historical presentations
marking the subway’s centennial over the next few months.
(The subway opened from City Hall to Harlem on Oct. 27,
1904.)
Read more…
Vinyl Data
One strategy that major record companies have been employing lately to deter downloading is adding bonus computer content to new CD releases. I recently discovered that this technique is not unique to CD’s, but had in fact been practiced in the vinyl era as well. That’s right: there were a handful of records released in the late 70’s and early 80’s that contained computer programs as part of the audio. This is totally insane, and totally great.
In the case of these programs on vinyl, the user would have to play back the proper portion of the record, record the resultant chatter to tape, and load the tape into the spectrum. Some users have mentioned playing certain games so much that they could recognise the loading sounds.
via Scrubbles.net