I love seeing art like this. Using things that are forgotten, obscure, unused, insignificant, or otherwise inconsequential is an ethos unto its own. Obsolete technologies are becoming exponentially rare; I unfortunately passed up an auction for an Osbourne 1 just this week and I'm regretting it more every second since.
I desperatey search thrift stores for anything I can find that isn't the generic consumer garbage that plagues the US; smart tvs, ISP-issued modem/routers, terrible dvd players, "media centers", other smart garbage. Really, any kind of digital circuit that isnt a dumb interface to media is sacrilige in my search. This has become all but a moot point because things like CRTs and other obscure electronics are all picked off at the donation point and then sold online because they've been indentified as valuable or "retro", or outright thrown away because theyre considered too old for anyone to ever give a shit about.
There is a disturbing situation regarding old technology right now where only a very, very specific subset of technologies are considered valuable to a very small, specific subset of consumers; this means that things like CRTs are shipped off to warehouses to be catalogued and sold on online auctions, and their accompanying hardware is being thrown into dumpsters because theres no immediately correlated market for this hardware. For the first time in about 10 years I saw two VCRs at a thrift store (a Quasar VHQ-40M and some lesser generic garbage). This was the first time I had seen a VCR for sale IRL since going to a pawn shop that has since been demolished; the man running the store said I could keep it for free because the person who pawned it was a crackhead and he didn't even know if it worked, but if it did, he wanted me to come back and pay him $10 for it. Lo and behold it worked perfectly, so I went back and did.
I've noticed just this week that both of the thrift store companies I frequent have stopped stocking VHS tapes; I don't know if this is because they have decided they're to be thrown out, sold online, or refused as donations. The last VHS tapes I've bought were Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Austin Powers in Goldmember.
Thrift stores throw out things THEY don't think are valuable. Skip that bottleneck, go straight to the estate sales.
Every Thursday around lunch, I open up Estatesales.net and browse the sales for the upcoming weekend. There's typically a dozen or two. I open each one in a new tab, and scroll down through what's typically 100-300 photos per sale. Very quick skim, stopping if I see anything interesting.
I then paste links to specific photos into item-specific category threads in a local makerspace chat: Sewing machines/other fabric stuff, Typewriters/addingmachines/cashregisters/calculators, CRT TVs/VCRs/related, Computers/videogames/peripherals, Tools, Cameras/film/telescopes/projectors/optics, Radio/stereo/DJ/vinyl records, Landline phones. So basically I've done the horizontal browse and sorted it into vertical categories, and anyone who follows those threads for stuff they're interested in, can go to the sale and nab the stuff.
But crucially, estate sales have _everything_, and if the sale folks have reorganized the house, badger them into telling you where the accessories went. If they already threw out valuable cables or something, give 'em hell for it and refuse the purchase, and they'll be more mindful next time.
If you're looking for something specific, show up on the first day. But personally, I just want to keep it from being landfilled, so I show up near the end of the last day. Offer fifty bucks for all the VHS tapes in the house, they'll take it. I got about 3500 floppy disks this way -- other shoppers ended up helping bucket-brigade them to my car as the clerk was closing up shop.
I get it, but, for every estate sale, there are people that have lost a parent, a grandparent, a friend, a neighbour.
There will be people, the executors of the will, that need to clear the house, however, much which is just $$$ to you will be heirloom grade stuff to them, with memories of happier times attached. Yet still, they need to realise the assets from the estate, maybe there are grandchildren with inheritances in that mountain of cruft left over after a long life.
Sure, there are things that just need to go, that the executors of the will would consider paying to get cleared.
As for getting things like the cables and power bricks that go with electrical items, chances are that the deceased was not doing a good job of keeping everything in order, they might even have a bit of hoarding going on. It is no easy job to repatriate cables with electrical items, that might have gone to the tip already, as e-waste.
There is also a tendency for men to put value on what most women will just see as e-waste. Similarly, with clothes, men see the whole lot as jumble sale trash, whereas women are more likely to see value in these items. I say this not to court sexist allegations, it is just that, if a woman clears the house, there is a slimmer likelihood of getting that lead for that obsolete electronic kit that somehow is considered valuable.
Sometimes the estate is too much work for the relatives, so the solicitor might get the keys to the house and instructions to get it all cleared. These are a minority of cases, usually, the relatives do pick through everything and put stuff in charity shops, charity shops that deal with big items of furniture, up to half a dozen 'skips' (British English term) and so on. I would say there isn't going to be a estate sale in these situations, really you are relying on the minority of sales where the solicitor gets the key, if you are going the estate sales route.
Meanwhile some of us just want to simplify, accessories and cables have probably been scattered, etc. it’s not worth it to me to find a home for a lot of this stuff or just live with the clutter until probably someone else needs to deal with it.
I can't believe nobody had nitpicked the obvious mistake yet: there never was an iBook Duo. The 68k Apple notebooks and the early PPC ones were called PowerBooks, so the correct naming is "PowerBook Duo 230".
I thought this was going to be about phonemes that used to be part of English but aren't anymore (e.g. all of the vestigal "gh"es in our spellings that used to represent the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative but are now either silent or pronounced as another phoneme).
I was hoping for fax machine, 56K modem, 300 baud modem, US public pay phone ringing and coin deposit, princess phone ring and dial, rotary phone dialing, 9-pin printer, and 24-pin color printer.
When I was a kid, I could hear the sound the of the flyback transformer on the CRT TV from anywhere in the house. None of the adults could. 15.7 kHz. Now obsolete both due to the lack of CRTs, and degradation of my hearing from heavy metal concerts and jet engine exposure.
It took me a few clicks to figure out what played those sounds. The background images of the play buttons aren't helpful in visually clarifying their function. Otherwise: Good idea, keep it up!
50 comments
I desperatey search thrift stores for anything I can find that isn't the generic consumer garbage that plagues the US; smart tvs, ISP-issued modem/routers, terrible dvd players, "media centers", other smart garbage. Really, any kind of digital circuit that isnt a dumb interface to media is sacrilige in my search. This has become all but a moot point because things like CRTs and other obscure electronics are all picked off at the donation point and then sold online because they've been indentified as valuable or "retro", or outright thrown away because theyre considered too old for anyone to ever give a shit about.
There is a disturbing situation regarding old technology right now where only a very, very specific subset of technologies are considered valuable to a very small, specific subset of consumers; this means that things like CRTs are shipped off to warehouses to be catalogued and sold on online auctions, and their accompanying hardware is being thrown into dumpsters because theres no immediately correlated market for this hardware. For the first time in about 10 years I saw two VCRs at a thrift store (a Quasar VHQ-40M and some lesser generic garbage). This was the first time I had seen a VCR for sale IRL since going to a pawn shop that has since been demolished; the man running the store said I could keep it for free because the person who pawned it was a crackhead and he didn't even know if it worked, but if it did, he wanted me to come back and pay him $10 for it. Lo and behold it worked perfectly, so I went back and did.
I've noticed just this week that both of the thrift store companies I frequent have stopped stocking VHS tapes; I don't know if this is because they have decided they're to be thrown out, sold online, or refused as donations. The last VHS tapes I've bought were Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Austin Powers in Goldmember.
Every Thursday around lunch, I open up Estatesales.net and browse the sales for the upcoming weekend. There's typically a dozen or two. I open each one in a new tab, and scroll down through what's typically 100-300 photos per sale. Very quick skim, stopping if I see anything interesting.
I then paste links to specific photos into item-specific category threads in a local makerspace chat: Sewing machines/other fabric stuff, Typewriters/addingmachines/cashregisters/calculators, CRT TVs/VCRs/related, Computers/videogames/peripherals, Tools, Cameras/film/telescopes/projectors/optics, Radio/stereo/DJ/vinyl records, Landline phones. So basically I've done the horizontal browse and sorted it into vertical categories, and anyone who follows those threads for stuff they're interested in, can go to the sale and nab the stuff.
But crucially, estate sales have _everything_, and if the sale folks have reorganized the house, badger them into telling you where the accessories went. If they already threw out valuable cables or something, give 'em hell for it and refuse the purchase, and they'll be more mindful next time.
If you're looking for something specific, show up on the first day. But personally, I just want to keep it from being landfilled, so I show up near the end of the last day. Offer fifty bucks for all the VHS tapes in the house, they'll take it. I got about 3500 floppy disks this way -- other shoppers ended up helping bucket-brigade them to my car as the clerk was closing up shop.
There will be people, the executors of the will, that need to clear the house, however, much which is just $$$ to you will be heirloom grade stuff to them, with memories of happier times attached. Yet still, they need to realise the assets from the estate, maybe there are grandchildren with inheritances in that mountain of cruft left over after a long life.
Sure, there are things that just need to go, that the executors of the will would consider paying to get cleared.
As for getting things like the cables and power bricks that go with electrical items, chances are that the deceased was not doing a good job of keeping everything in order, they might even have a bit of hoarding going on. It is no easy job to repatriate cables with electrical items, that might have gone to the tip already, as e-waste.
There is also a tendency for men to put value on what most women will just see as e-waste. Similarly, with clothes, men see the whole lot as jumble sale trash, whereas women are more likely to see value in these items. I say this not to court sexist allegations, it is just that, if a woman clears the house, there is a slimmer likelihood of getting that lead for that obsolete electronic kit that somehow is considered valuable.
Sometimes the estate is too much work for the relatives, so the solicitor might get the keys to the house and instructions to get it all cleared. These are a minority of cases, usually, the relatives do pick through everything and put stuff in charity shops, charity shops that deal with big items of furniture, up to half a dozen 'skips' (British English term) and so on. I would say there isn't going to be a estate sale in these situations, really you are relying on the minority of sales where the solicitor gets the key, if you are going the estate sales route.
(The interface on the website is a bit confusing to use, IMHO)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Library/comments/unek0c/old_library...
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JroA0Ap7zGU
> a brand new form of listening
bro go away from me with that crap. nothing has been invented, here.