Gadget News

As a city boy, I don't get to make recreational boating much of a part of my life. One of my best friends in college came from a rural area that was relatively close by, so we'd drive up to his family's house and bomb around in his boat. It was the first time I'd ever been in a boat with a steering wheel. The only other boating I'd ever really done was canoeing while camping, so the high-tech addition of a 25 year old Johnson outboard motor was a totally new experience for me. It also introduced me to a whole culture of lakeside people who use their motorboats to run errands as often as I might use a car. There was even a bar that you could only access by water, and we spent many a summer evening meeting boat people, downing beers and smelling the rotting bracken.

This old commercial for Johnson motors reminds me of the fun we had in that old boat. It makes me wish that perhaps one of these days life will lead me down a path where I'll be able to get my hands on a little boat of my own, and of course at the same time grab my own Johnson.

related:

An inflatable flying boat
"Tug Boat" board game
German version of classic game "Battleship"

This weekend I did some work for MTV, so I was hanging out with the hip and happenin' set. One interesting delineation of age was to see who was and who wasn't wearing a wristwatch. Unless they were blinged out, few of those folks encumbered their wrists with timekeeping devices. Instead they'd dip into their pocket to fish out their mobile phone, tap a few digits to turn off the keyguard, then finally see what time it is.Seems to take a bit longer that way than if they just had a darned watch. However I did find interesting that this was a sort of return to the same set of gestures you might use if you carried an old fob pocket watch.

I'm probably not classy enough to wear a pocket watch, nor do I have an especially snazzy wristwatch. So what about those times when you want to dress a little more formally and still know what time happy hour starts? I've got something here to kill two birds with one shirt cuff.

 

Men's fashion changes at a glacial pace. The sort of news that makes waves is whether french cuffs are coming back or not every forty years. Cuff links come and go a little more often. I tend to like them as they let you personalize what might be just a very ordinary shirt. Usually they're just decorative (at best perhaps serving as a reminder of your own initials since they're so frequently monogrammed) but occasionally someone gets clever offering some practical advantage. One of this pair of cuff links is quite ordinary, while the other is outfitted with a working watch. These were made by Swank (the menswear manufacturer, not the "gentleman's magazine" publisher...), and are admittedly quite swanky. My guess is that they took a mechanism for a smaller woman's watch to find something that would fit a nickel-sized cuff link.

Scoff if you will, but let's face it... you're never going to catch the eye of the ladies flashing them the clock in your cell phone.

Help out Retro Thing when you buy some watch cuff links on Ebay

Brian writes, "I recently had an opportunity to film a "tweet up" with NASA astronaut and U.S. Army Colonel Timothy "T.J." Creamer. During his talk, Colonel Creamer took a moment to answer the question, "What is the one science fictional item you wish you could really have in space with you."

In his answer, he revealed that he's a huge, old school science fiction fan, and used the opportunity to briefly discuss sf, Star Trek, and the way in which sf has influenced space exploration, science, and engineers. Oh, and he also answers the question."

Video: Astronaut Discusses Science Fiction

Ed Fries, a former Microsoft gaming vice president, has written and released a version of Halo that runs on the Atari 2600. The game is a free download and works with all your favorite emulators. Its release coincides with the 11th annual Classic Gaming Expo.

Fries posted some details on the AtariAge forums, explaining how this game came about. He writes:

I hadn't written 6502 assembler in almost 30 years but it turns out it's pretty easy to pick up again since there are so few instructions. I wasn't sure what to write so I created a little Master Chief from Halo and made him run around the screen. Then I created an Elite for him to shoot at. At this point it wasn't my intention to make a full game. I was just screwing around.

As I became more familiar with the machine I thought it might be possible to make something that was actually fun to play. I also ran into some fans of classic games at the Game Developers Conference in March and they encouraged me to keep going and try to make a finished game. At first I had the player battling through a linear series of rooms. You had to kill all the enemies before it would unlock the walls and let you move to the next room. As you can imagine, this got dull pretty quickly. I was doing it this way because it was relatively easy on the Atari 2600 but what if, instead, I could make a 64 room map the player had to explore, kind of like the old atari game Adventure? To implement this would require that I make an "asymmetric playfield" so that some rooms might have a wall on one side but not on the other. It turns out that's pretty tricky to do on the 2600, at least while you are trying to drawn everything else you want to draw, but I managed to get it working.

To add variety I divided the map into 4 "zones": outdoor, covenant base, ice world, and final boss area. Each had a unique look and some unique enemies. I also played with the atari's ability to stretch and duplicate sprites to create some further surprises for the player. Then I added some pickups the player could find to help them on the way.

Those pickups make the game, in my opinion. You can't start shooting until you find a gun, something that vexed me at first. There are different enemies and sometimes killing them reveals shields. The game reminded me a little of Berzerk, except for lack of electrified walls (Halo 2600 originally had them, Fries says. He got rid of them to make the game easier.) Still, it's a very challenging game.

Halo 2600 was one of several new homebrew games to be released at the Classic Gaming Expo. (Others included a boxing game for the 2600 and a war game for the Atari 7800.) Its provenance — a former Microsoft guy writes an Atari VCS version of a popular Xbox game — makes it an especially interesting bit of 8-bit fun.

related:

Atari 2600 Homebrew Games

Racing The Beam: Inside The Atari 2600

The Impossible Project continues to expand its menu of offerings. It just announced its first color film, a "first flush" for SX-70 and 600-series cameras. Not to be missed is that it also is now selling Silver Shade films for three different styles of Polaroid cameras — the two aforementioned models, plus Spectra variants — at a shipped-to-your-door cost in the neighborhood of $25 per 8-shot pack.

Impossible has come a long way in a relatively short amount of time, but it's important to know that its films are still experimental (triply so for its "first flush" versions, which are literally the first batches). While it is making continuous improvements, its own website contains frank discussions about all sorts of ominous-sounding maladies that can affect your photos, from the loose lamination problem, a now-resolved issue that the company traced to film made over a specific time frame, to killer crystals, a humidity-related problem that permanently mars photos.

As it stands right now. Impossible's film must be shot, developed and stored under pretty specific temperature, humidity and light conditions. Shooting in a warm room? Put your new photo in a cool place. Shooting in winter? Stick it in your pocket. Always let the photo develop face-down. (The color PX70 film has even more stringent light-protection requirements.) Each Silver Shade film order is accompanied by a silica gel packet to help keep humidity down in your chosen storage vessel. Impossible's website even warns you of potential problems when you put a film pack in your cart.

To some people, these are understandably show-stopping hurdles, especially considering the per-photo cost. But a more generous view is that they merely represent constraints for the photographer to navigate — not unlike ambient light levels or lens limitations. If you want to shoot outside those environmental parameters, you must be prepared.

One thing's clear: This is not point-and-shoot photography, at least not the kind practiced by Hugh Laurie in this old Polaroid ad.

I had mixed success on my first pack of Silver Shade. But I can say this: The good ones were immensely satisfying.

It is more than eight decades old, but Fritz Lang's 1927 science fiction epic, Metropolis, still has its surprises. A new cut of the dystopian masterpiece lets U.S. theater audiences see — for the first time — the film (nearly) the way Lang intended. Called The Complete Metropolis, the movie includes about 25 minutes of footage thought lost forever.

Metropolis is credited with influencing many great science fiction films, from Blade Runner to Star Wars to The Matrix (plus a Madonna video). It tells the story of massive city where the sons of the ruling class live a life of leisure in the clouds while the working class toils away far below ground, running the machines that keep the city going. Freder, whose father runs the city, is enraptured by the sight of a beautiful woman and embarks on an adventure in the underworld, where he learns just how brutal life can be at the machines. Meanwhile, a mad scientist creates a robot in the woman's image that he uses to galvanize a worker uprising and simultaneously re-enact the biblical story of The Tower of Babel.

It's heady stuff. And it scared the living daylights out of Paramount, the U.S. distributor. Metropolis was very different from Hollywood's simple, star-driven films, and Paramount demanded changes.

The full film played in Germany in early 1927, but it was soon pulled from theaters and recut. Paramount shortened the film, removing much of its symbolism and some of its drama, and hired an American playwright to rewrite the title cards.

That's pretty much where things stood for decades. From 1927 until the early 1980s, all versions of Metropolis were basically derived from the Paramount version or later German theatrical releases.

In 1984, songwriter Giorgio Moroder made a "pop" version by re-cutting the film, adding color tints and scoring it with songs by the likes of Freddy Mercury, Bonnie Tyler and Pat Benatar. A few years later, another version was put together with the help of the original intertitles (German censors of the 1920s were required to keep them) and newly discovered still photos of lost scenes.

In 2001, film preservationist Martin Koeber helped put together what was thought to be the definitive cut. A handful of recovered shots and intertitles with detailed information on still-missing scenes were added. The film was cleaned up digitally and the original score was re-recorded.

Then in 2008, a complete copy of the original cut was found in Argentina. How had it gotten there? An Argentine film distributor purchased the rights to Metropolis soon after its premiere and brought a copy home with him. In the 1930s, it wound up in a film critic's personal archive, which eventually was donated to the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. An Argentine film archivist, Fernando Peña, had long heard about the complete film's existence, but struggled for years to get someone to help him track it down. He finally did in 2008.

The Argentine copy was on 16 mm negative film — in the 1970s it had been transferred from a more volatile 35 mm nitrate print — and was in rough shape, with scratches and dust and all sorts of artifacts. A couple of scenes were so damaged, they couldn't be salvaged.

The lost footage ranges from short reaction shots to whole subplots that had been eliminated by Paramount. The parts of two minor characters, an agent named the Thin Man and worker Georgy 11811, are greatly expanded and the motivations of a third, Josaphat, are much clearer. The plot makes more sense, as the rivalry between Metropolis bigwig Joh Fredersen and mad scientist Rotwang is explained better. The drama is amped up in scenes showing the workers' children escaping floodwaters. Even a bit of violence — a nightclub shooting — is back.

The newfound footage is easily differentiated from the rest of the film. Its aspect ratio is slightly different and its quality is much poorer. The handful of scenes that couldn't be restored are explained in new intertitles.

Metropolis is an amazing artifact of the jazz age. It presents a wonderfully analog view of the future. It's a world of churning pistons, ticker tape, knobs, buttons, levers, gauges, incandescent light bulbs and neon tubes.

Sadly, there is one thing about The Complete Metropolis that is not analog: The version being shown in my hometown was projected digitally, not from film. (The theater posted a sign saying the distributor did not make a theatrical print available.) I prefer seeing movies on film, and it took me a long time to get used to the pixely nature of the presentation.

That said, I found it a very satisfying 2.5 hours. Showings around the U.S. are scheduled through the end of October.

related:

Full Copy of Sci-Fi Classic Metropolis Discovered in Argentina

You have to be a bit of a character to take on the lead role in Doctor Who. When Jon Pertwee took over, it was the series' first venture into colour. These new earthbound adventure brought massive popularity to the show and its star, turning in an impressively popular four year run. Known before the role as a comedian, Pertwee played the role straight proving himself to be a great choice for the Doctor. In his real life he was a gadget fan, as well as a sportsman and car enthusiast - all perfect traits for a time traveler. It was while at an appearance at an auto dealership that he met car customizer Peter Farries, which is where the story of Pertwee's 1973 Whomobile began.

The vehicle was never called the "Whomobile" in the show, though Pertwee does refer to it as such in his memoirs. It was actually designed under another name, "The Alien". Pertwee and Farries sketched out the fantasy car. Other car customizers said it would take several moldings to create such an unusual shape in fiberglass, but Farries did it in only two. The completed car was 14 feet long, 7 feet across, with fins that reached 5 feet into the air. There are no doors, you have to hop in over the wing, and once inside the driver and uncomfortable passenger are faced with the blinky lights of a prop computer, and a real television with dual rear antennae. Here's a great clip from children's show Blue Peter (it's great how the pair do sort of try to keep up the illusion of the car's abilities being "real") that offers what is probably the most detailed look at the car ever.

Once completed (at Pertwee's cost) the star was able to persuade the producers of Doctor Who to include the vehicle in the series. The car first appeared not yet complete in the 10th season's "Invasion of the Dinosaurs". The front windscreen you see in the episode as well as in the Blue Peter segment (hosted by Peter Purves, a 1960's Who companion) was from a boat, added to make the vehicle roadworthy. Its second and final appearance was in Pertwee's swansong, "Planet of the Spiders", where thought chromakey trickery the vehicle was shown to fly.

To this day some fans still think the Whomobile was a hovercraft. In fact the three wheeler struggled to be legally classified, until it was finally referred to as "an invalid tricycle"... that could go a hundred miles an hour!. Pertwee used the car for personal appearances even after his tenure as the Doctor was over. Eventually he gave it to a fan bereaved over the tragic death of his mother, with Pertwee simply "borrowing" it back on occasion. Just a few years ago (and this makes me crazy...) the car went up for auction with little fanfare. It was misclassified as a boat (foreshadowed by that boat windscreen used in version 1 of the car?) and went for around £1200. Had I known about the sale, I'd have made my way to the UK to bring back the official Retro Thing company car.

link:

Help out Retro Thing by picking up Pertwee's autobiography on Amazon

related:

The downright awful Doctor Who action figures by Dapol
Doctor Who and the Daleks on the big screen
Did Doctor Who musician invent techno?

The original RCA COSMAC ELF computer appeared on the front cover of Popular Electronics in August, 1976. It was a single board machine based on the RCA 1802 CPU that cost under $100 to build from a bare board. Another $20 would get you a B&W video display. It was an outstanding value that lingered in the classified section of computer magazines like BYTE well into the early 1980s.

Lee Hart's tiny 1802 Membership Card is an incredibly simple computer built around the classic RCA 1802 chip. The dual board design is small enough to cram into an Altoids tin and includes a front panel with 9 blinky LEDs and 11 subminiature toggle switches. A 25-pin parallel port is also built in.

The system is as simple as it looks. The 1802 CPU is driven by an adjustable RC clock oscillator, and a 28-pin IC socket accepts a 2 to 32 Kilobyte RAM or EPROM chip. There's an 8-bit output port, along with an 8-bit input port and an expansion header. The system operates from a 3V-6V power supply and draws less than 1 mA.

Lee Hart's "Membership Card" Kit [via Make]

Miasto Ruin (City in Ruins) is a heart-wrenching five minute film that simulates an aircraft flight over the ruined Polish capital of Warsaw in 1945. The project is the result of a two year collaboration between a team of Polish historians and dozens of special effects artists.

The extent of the destruction is almost too much to comprehend -- home to 1.3 million people prior to the war, the city was a barely-habitable wasteland five years later.

In the summer of 1944, a Polish uprising held out against the Nazi occupiers for 63 days. When the city fell, Hitler ordered the city obliterated in retaliation. Every building of significance was razed, along with all the bridges. An estimated 16,000 Polish resistance fighters died and as many as 250,000 civilians perished in the brutal aftermath of the uprising.

City in Ruins will be shown at the Warsaw Rising Museum, which opened on the 60th anniversary of the uprising in 2004 to tell the story of Warsaw's bittersweet resistance to new generations too young to remember anything but peace.

The Jolida FX10 is a surprisingly inexpensive integrated tube amplifier that carries a list price of only $450.

The 8" wide x 7" deep x 7" tall unit contains four EL-84 tubes, along with a pair of 12AX7s. The tubes are encased in an attractive heat-resistant safety glass top which keeps out dust and inquisitive fingers. My only complaint is that each tube is inexplicably lit from underneath with a bright blue LED, ensuring that it'll shine like a tacky supermarket Christmas tree when in operation.

The FX10 puts out a maximum of 10W x 2 into 8 Ohms and a credit card sized remote provides an on/off switch, volume, input select and mute functionality. Unlike modern solid state surround sound amps that offer dozens of inputs, this little stereo unit serves up a simple pair of RCA inputs along with a 1/8-inch iPod audio in.

To top everything off, the manufacturer offers a somewhat weird 9 month limited parts and labor warranty.

The FX10 is discounted to $415 at Galen Carol Audio

Frank writes, "I came across this auction for an old train that's been converted into an amazing dental office. I think it might actually make me want to go to the dentist."

I concur. This three car train is located on a large commercial lot in Spokane. It has operated as a fully equipped children's dental office for the past 30 years. The front car is set up as a reception area, with 6 dental workstations in the second. The caboose is configured as the doctor's private office with an old railroad wood stove.

The train is available for lease at $2500 per month, or purchase outright on eBay for $375,000. I wonder how I can squeeze in the time between posts to attend dental school?

Dental office and land! Complete three car train [eBay]

Fabrice from Musée Nintendo writes, "A very good French book, History of Nintendo, has finally been translated into English for your reading pleasure by the great French team Pix'n Love. It's really a wonderful read!"

Volume 1 of the History of Nintendo spans the years 1889 to 1980, from playing cards to Game & Watch handhelds. The 240 page full-color book includes over 500 card games, toys, home video games and arcade units. The limited edition title will be released in late August 2010, at a price of $25 + $4 for worldwide shipping. Volume 2, dedicated entirely to the Game & Watch, will be released in the winter.

You can pre-order your copy direct from Pix'n love Publishing.

I've got a number of old TV's around (probably too many!) that I've shared with you in the past. The oldest ones either don't work, or I'm too fearful to plug them in so I'll never know. However my newest acquisition not only works, but is the most intact of all of my retro TV sets. Why? Because it had been built into a wall for the last 50 years.

Getting a television to blend into home decor has always been tough, especially as viewers desired larger displays. My mother isn't a technological prognosticator, or even a fan of electronic anything, but for decades she has wished for a thin television. Her friends scoffed, but now jokingly admit that she "invented" flat panel TVs. I love the new breed of slim televisions (my 32" CRT was a cow) that offer a large picture without necessarily dominating a room. In the past if you wanted your TV to blend in, you had to take elaborate measures.

I was at an estate sale not long ago inside one of the finest retro houses I've ever seen. This family clearly took care of their home, and the decor and furnishings looked almost untouched since the 50's. Their basement was in the top 5 best 1950's rec rooms I've ever seen, one of the best features being the television built into the wall. I'd only ever seen that pulled off in fancy home improvement magazines, but the handyman patriarch of the family figured he could build his own.

The TV made its home in the wall for decades, which not only gave the room a sophisticated look, but also preserved the television set itself from decades of sunlight & scratches. The family was hesitant to sell me the TV as they thought I was proposing to tear the wall down! Fortunately the trim was only press fitted into place, so it was an easy job to take the still-functioning Philco 22C4011X home with me. Now to just hook up a DTV tuner, and this old TV will live on for decades more.

links:
Video sharing some old TV's left behind in the DTV transition
Break The TV Habit By Watching A TV/Waterfall/Clock
Westinghouse Portable TV Mystery

If you're lucky, you'll never need N sized batteries. If a device doesn't have its own built-in rechargeable battery these days, then it likely uses AA, AAA, and somewhat less frequently C, D, and 9 Volt. Today even button cells are easier to locate and cheaper than ever. Fair enough. The problem lies with devices whose hunger for power is of a more demanding taste.

My father's early 70s Commodore LED calculator used N size batteries. They're about the same thickness as AAA, at half the height. They were difficult to find even back then, usually necessitating a trip to the camera shop, the answer to all oddball power requirements. Once located, the batteries weren't cheap - and the calculator required four of them. hence I never got to use the calculator for fear that boyish carelessness would have lead to expensive, dead batteries. So thanks to N size batteries, I had to actually learn to do multiplication tables in my head - an arduous affair I can assure you. Once in high school, I saved up enough money to fund a solar powered calculator, the newest thing in the 80's. No more sneaking behind my father's back to check my homework.

So I thought I was done with N size batteries... I'd even forgotten that they existed, but two recent events triggered this battery-powered memory. I was going to buy a wireless doorbell, and thought to check the battery requirements of the transmitter. N size. Bastard. I walked away in disgust. Then a few days later, I came across a vintage calculator and as if by reflex popped out the ancient batteries... horrifying N size batteries. The consensus is that they're still ideal for low current applications like door chimes (damn), and laser pointers. Perhaps, but that means one more battery size to stock at home, and at $1.50-$3 each for less than special performance, I know we can do better.

I realized that this ancient experience with oddball batteries is what makes me bristle today when buying a new device with its own proprietary rechargeable battery that becomes expensive and difficult to source in just a few years. Is it wrong to buy something and to want it to work for the rest of my life? I realize that these devices have obsolescence built in, but hey... this is Retro Thing. I want my stuff to work forever. After all, I have to think ahead to what I'll be writing about in 2060.

related:
Amazingly tiny 80's Walkman made useless thanks to odd battery
Radio controlled Ferrari from Sears that ate all the batteries it could get
Prehistoric battery powered calculator watches