string can phone

Retrobrick sells vintage and rare mobile phones.

That is to say, out-of-date cell-phones. Which in this day and age usually means the day-before-yesterday. But a lot of them are analogue beasts, and many of them could be used to club a loudly talking moron to civility.

Via Le Boinge

A retro-techno remix of Radiohead’s “Nude” - using a ZX Spectrum, dot-matrik printer, scanner, and hard-drives. Give it a minute to load.

A page with more details and “behind-the-scenes” photos can be found at .

It was never designed for playback — it’s a phonautogram, and it predates Edison’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by 20 years.

Which is a misleading statistic, because the big deal about MHLL was the playback. It’s like having videotape before the television….

A history of speech synthesis.

BoingBoing leads us to this delightful apparatus, a psychically-powered gramophone.

While some may wish to remain skeptical, others desire to fly forward, eyes open, into the brave new future!

Western Union has announced the end of Telegram services:

Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.

Some more history on Western Union can be obtained from the company itself or from that nigh-omniscient oracle, the WikiPedia.

Stewart has generated a pleasant “music video” for the band Grandaddy on a 48K Apple ][

Our kind friends at La Musee de la Boing have directed our all-seeing ear toward Casette Jam ‘05, a rather large (and unwieldy, for those of you with, ahem, slower connections to the Intar-webs) page of images.

Of audio cassette tapes.

And little else.

Well, the glowering eye of Honesty compells us to admit to spotting one, perhaps two, items cassette-shaped and more designed for demagnetizing your electronic auto apparatus or otherwise.

Distinctly we remember in the golden days of youth being driven to a far-off land where ice water was free and giant, scorching fiberglass jackalope sculptures burned our tender flesh when we were forced to pose for pictures upon them. To this day, we are still not entirely certain where the heck Wall Drug is, but one memory (besides the jackalopes of pain) persists: automatons. A quarter would bring the massive robotic dioramas to life, and they would beat out a high-tempo antiquated tune upon actual instruments that miraculously played without players.

Not surprisingly, there is–as there is for all things–a group devoted to these devices: the Musical Box Society International. These 19th-century minstrels travel to festivals around the country, spreading the joy of mechanized music. And now they have produced a documentary about their craft, Marvels of Mechanial Music. We only wish that rather that DVD, the society had chosen to produce it in zoetrope format, for which you had to pay a nickel to view it.

STOP THE HAND-CRANKED PRESSES: Peter Jackson possesses automusica.

SCP apologizes for its quietude. In truth, we have been too busy refreshing our 1337 T3L3GR4PH1C 5K1LLZ (rather rusty, we shame-facedly and shame-fingeredly admit) to post lately. In short, we have been enraptured with Mr. Hugovk’s new gem:

[A] dodgy prototype for Series 60 phones. Tap in some Morse code, and then send it as an SMS.

SCP wishes to thank the New Renaissance people at SpringSpring for our awareness.