Blackberry style keyboards are a pretty common component of some DIY and Kit builds these days.
The Beepy:
It uses this OSHW keyboard, the BB Q20:
$30 but unfortunately out of stock.
The Lilygo T-Deck is similar, but of the ESP32 variety, rather than an Raspberry Pi Zero:
This seems like it was primarily designed as a LoRa device, but they do have a model without the radio.
Some interesting things there, but all seem to be āprojectā oriented and I have zero electronic or coding skills. Iāve seen a few things that supposedly adapt an Android/iPhone touchscreen, too, but they mostly seem rather clunky/shonky.
Iāve become too integrated with my iPhone to move to a different device so many years after being corporately forced on to one and off my Blackberry.
My Blackberry/physical keyboard on a phone nostalgia was just that. ;-(
I was quite surprised to learn that Super 8 is still (or maybe once again) a Thing. As a kid circa 1982 I had a wind-up 8mm camera (not Super 8, but Double 8, which used 16mm film on a reel that youād expose, unload in the dark, flip over, reload, expose the other side, unload in the dark again, and then take to the lab where theyād process it, slice the film longitudinally right down the center, then buttsplice the two pieces together before sending it back to you on an 8mm reel) that my much-older brother had used in the 60s. When I used it, you could still buy Double 8 and Super 8 film at the drugstore for another year or two. When I started college in Fall 1988, I was a Telecommunications major, and I took a film production class that was based on Super 8. The next semester they sold off all the film equipment and switched to video production only. I lamented that I didnāt get a chance to buy any of the Super 8 gear.
I work in TV post production and have watched what I thought was the permanent demise of film before my eyes. My second job was on Encino Man back in 1991, and I spend six months working with the editors. They cut film on KEM flatbed machines, and we had at least five of them, for the picture editor, a 1st assistant, two 2nd assistants, two music editors, an apprentice editor, and liāl olā me. Today that movie would be cut by half the staff in half the time, except there would be the opportunity for much more iteration and many, many more rough cuts.
Anyway, except for popping up in occasional movies and TV shows as a nostalgia gag, I thought Super 8 was never coming back. When I was on Will & Grace we had an extremely talented and in-demand telecine colorist (for a while there he always transferred and colored Bob Richardsonās movies like The Aviator and Kill Bill), and one day our line producer asked if, as a favor, he could transfer and regrade some family Super 8 films, and the guy was happy to help out. But he had to find the Super 8 gate for his telecine rank. According to him, plenty of facilities in town still transferred film (this would have been 2002ish and W&G always shot on 35mm for its first 8 seasons) and there was no shortage of gates for the various 16mm, 35mm, 65mm, and IMAX filmsā¦ but apparently there was only one Super 8 gate remaining that all the labs would share, so he had to call around from Technicolor to CFI to DeLuxe to Modern Videofilm to see who had it last.
I thought that was sweetly quaint. And then just last year I hear that hipster hobbyists have been shooting on Super 8 for a while now, and the film stock is again being made, and a few labs support it.
Pretty neato. Guess Iāve been even more out of touch than usual.
A few years back, I ran across a YT Super 8 vid that the poster claimed as being something from the 1960ās or thereabouts. But something about the āteens hanging out on a Bāklyn tenement roofā vibe (ex: the look) made me very suspicious of the filmās claimed provenance. So, yet again, I wonder.
Another bit of old-school tech Iāve found amusingly useful today. I had long held onto a bookmark that explained how to use old telephones as intercoms, but it seemed somewhat more complicated than I figured I wanted to deal with. But then someone mentioned to me the Viking DLE-200B line simulator, which I guess is useful for testing or demonstrating phones, fax machines, modems, PABXs and whatever, without needing an actual working landline system in place.
I had grown tired of trying to summon my son for dinner or whatever when heās upstairs in his room gaming or watching videos with his headphones on. Sometimes he doesnāt hear his phone, sometimes I donāt feel like trudging upstairs again for the zillionth time, and I donāt relish whacking the dining room ceiling with a broomstick to get his attention. So I figured Iād just use a couple of old telephones, but I havenāt yet found a couple of vintage ones that I love yet. So I just got a red wallphone with a handy flashing red light on top and mounted it in his room next to his monitor, so he canāt fail to see it ring, even if he doesnāt hear the fairly loud bell.
And then the Viking box is just plugged in under his desk.
Another tasteful black phone is downstairs in the dining room, and I ran a wire from the Viking in his room, out the window, and down the porch, into the dining room. And when I need his attention, I just pick up the downstairs handset. No need to dial, after a 2-second dialtone, it rings his upstairs phone, he answers, I give him what-have-you, we hang up and go about our day. And he can call the dining room phone if he wants, but it hasnāt come up yet. The two new phones were about $38 each since I didnāt want to comb the thrift shops looking for a vintage phone with a light. The Viking unit is $122, but worth it to me because A) it tickles me no end to call him on an old landline like Iām Commissioner Gordon, and B) itās already saved me several unnecessary trips upstairs. Highly recommend for larger houses!
It was also funny to find out some of the suggested applications: prison phones (for visiting rooms), press box / coaching applications in sports stadiumsā¦ but the golf course one was particularly hilarious. Note the incredible range!
This was my phone growing up:
Itās currently hooked up to a Grandstream box which technically turns it into an IP phone, but I set that up as a Voice Assistant endpoint for Home Assistant. You can check out the instructions on how to do so from here. In summary, I can pick up the phone and issue voice commands to my home automation system. Itās not something I use often, but I appreciate how utterly silly it is.
Oh, food, huh? Something from the bar, maybe?
Groovy!
What exactly is that? is there a makerās name on it?
I get it now. Thanks.
Sorry for the unclear picture. Nice job @RickMycroft on the ID. It does in fact have a Northern Telecom mark on it, but no other identifying information at present. It used to have a printed label on it, but the adhesive long ago gave up.
From the page, it looks like they made a white one and a camouflage one. I may be biased, but it seems to me that the orange one is the most interesting looking.
Another somewhat minor detail is that this model of phone appeared in the movie Toys:
At around the eight minute mark, when Zevo is proposing turning over leadership of the company to his brother, you can see it on the desk in the lower right of the frame:
Decades before software like Premiere and iMovie made video editing cheap, easy, and accessible for everyone, the only option was chaining a conglomerate of vintage 80s technology ā multiple camcorders or VCRs and a TV ā to craft custom analog video. Then the Videonics system changed tech history forever.
REMEMBRANCE OF SCREENSAVERS PAST
Back in the pre-millennium days when I had a PowerMac Preforma something something and a huge CRT monitor (why yes I bought that system new with a credit card and eventually had to declare bankruptcy, why do you ask?), when I wasnāt running SETI @ Home I used this wonderful screensaver that I havenāt seen since like Snow Leopard. It hada sorta Lava Lamp vibe, you could set the colors to multi but I always had it set to one color, and it would just kind of bloopily undulate between shades of that one color.
Anybody know what Iām on about?
I wish someone somehow would bring it back. I never turned off my monitor back then, I just let it lazily bloop and blob 24-7.
I donāt remember it, but I like the sound of it.
I recently heard about these LED Christmas lights that are very good at simulating the warm, cozy look of incandescent, instead of the piercing, harsh glare most LED holiday lights make. Apparently this is achieved simply by using the same colored glass Christmas lights always used, over a warm-tone white LED, whereas most others use colored LEDs. Theyāre unfortunately pretty expensive, but considering they eliminate the problem of burned-out bulbs, it seems like theyāll eventually be worth it. You can also save a little by just buying the bulbs and putting them into a cord for incandescent bulbs you already happened to own.
Thereās another brand doing the same thing for those smaller indoor lights, Vintaglo, but try as I might I could only find them on Amazon (and sold out there, with no indication theyāll ever be back)- literally every other search result is some social media post advertising them, but nobody seems to actually sell them.
