string can phone

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 .

A history of speech synthesis.

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.

An aquaintence of ours recently retired from the electronics repair business has approximately 2,500 vacuum tubes stored in his garage. We suspect that he will no doubt be investing heavily in Goldster Audio, which has recently debuted its Concertina tube-based amplifier and speaker set. Ah, the warm cathode glow and ozone aroma of toasted glass! The perfect accompanyment to your colorless, oderless iPod.

When presented with a wholly new medium to experiment with–in this case, the wonderful miniscule phonograph player known as an iPod–what better than to thrust the most ancient form of the medium upon it? The fine folks at WFMU have long made available dusty cylinder and disk recordings over the air with The Antique Phonograph Music Program and Thomas Edison’s Attic. Now that the WFMU cadre have expanded into the realm of so-called “ipodding”, you can pull these very rare recordings down to your very own microphonograph–er, iPod–and enjoy them at your whim.

The RCA Nostalgic Stereo is available for purchase from that discount retailer, Nieman-Marcus.

Our brief, daily perusal of Gizmodo alerted us to this new model from RCA. We are not entirely sure what we think of it, but we note the Ornamental metal horn and hand crank with sadness at their delegation to ornamentation. We note with some joy that we can play our 78s upon this device, even though we are unaware of any 78-RPM records available in stereo.

Endgadget has invaded our airspace with this post on a Hitachi TRK-8200HR boombox modified with a Tablet PC. This, we must say, is impressive.

Now, where did we put our Run-D.M.C. tapes?

It has come to our attention that at one time there was a serious interest in telegraphony–the transmission of telegraph signals via the typewriter keyboard. Yes, no longer were trained telegraphers necessary to tap out one’s message in a series of cryptic Morse Code dashes and blips. Rather, the time-conscious businessman could now employee his office girl at this task.

Mr Richard Polt has aquired a fine specimin of a Yetman Transmitting Typewriter which he has written extensively about.

Another entry into the telegraphony field was the Burlingame Telegraphing Typewriter. Sadly, the page itself is apparently transmitted to one’s viewscreen by telegraphic means, so your patience is kindy requested.

One may witness a variety of other unconventional transmitting devices at the Early Office Museum.

For those who absolutely cannot get enough of these bulky yet charming devices, one may visit
the History of Teletypewriter Development for a brief biography.

No Name No Slogan labs tests the latest (ugh) must-have device against "one of the all time great audio formats." Imagine our surprise when we found out they were not referring to wire-recordings! Still, their heart is in the correct place.

If you must use the latest (ugh) technology, and you must use a fashionable carrying-case, SCP approves of this method.

Okay, so it’s a little frayed around the edges—what isn’t? If you’ve got any other complains, SCP advises you to put a sock in it.