I cook in my fireplace every chance I get.
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I forgot about the VHS machine, prolly cos it’s in the basement.
I’ll try and take pics of the Montgomery Ward turntable/am-fm radio/8-track stereo, plus the Radio Shack cassette player that connects to it when I’m out in the garage next. And all the other “junk”, LOL!
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IMO it’s pretty lame that road bikes had to wait until 1992 to get proper shifters on the bars. It didn’t have to be that way, but the road bike scene used to be damn stodgy before the MTB mob shook things up.
I can see an alternate history where that happened fifteen years earlier because say, a watch manufacturer went into the bike parts business.
The fundamental concept of the bike was unfinished until then. The first gear-shifting systems didn’t have any remote operation; you had to reach down to the drivetrain. Then some bright spark hit on the idea of cable operation, in the fifties IIRC. And that was it, apparently - hey, what more do you want, the gear levers are in reach kinda thing. That’ll be fine, pal.
Pff. The design job is unfinished if you can’t change gears while you’re standing on the bike. The MTB guys, redesigning the machine for their specialised purpose, could see that right away - I’ve never seen a MTB with downtube shifters; pretty sure there never was such a thing.
Bicycle tech was retarded for ages. Downtube shifters in particular represent the tendency to say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, without ever considering if it’s really broke and you’re just used to a missing stair.
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I rarely use an electric mixer, and I’m in the market for a hand-crank coffee grinder.
I would feel perfectly justified working at home if everything was human-powered; or can that be done, I wonder, such as using a bicycle for a generator? I wonder if the Mother Earth News has a DIY project for that in their archives…oh wait, the issue it was in might be in the garage!
Not kidding, I’ve found some of my old MEN (hahahaha) issues there; I also have the almanac they issued to first-year-of-publication subscribers, of which my dad was one.
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road is still pretty stodgy what with the UCI. I think the old Raleighs with the SA 3 speed hubs had a thumb shifter on the handle bar. Makes me wonder if the UCI held them back at all for race regulations or if not what made racers stall out so long on progressing towards bar shifting.
On a separate note, I forgot to mention I have an 8 track player in my bathroom that I listen to when I’m in the shower.
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IKR? Fuck those guys. They put the kybosh on beam bikes.
Arseholes.
But they had nothing to do with holding back dual control.
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Totally counts.
My “new computer” is a 2008 Mac Xserve.
It’s not supposed to be able to run anything after 10.7 or so, but mine is running 10.11.4 once I fiddled a bit and installed a new graphics card. Plenty fast for me.
My MacBook core2duo died a year of two ago- and I can’t bring myself to try to resurrect the poor thing. It’s earned some rest. Though the previous G4 still occasionally does some work with a USB tv tuner…
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Horses for courses. You wouldn’t ride off-road without an upright posture and immediately accessible brakes and shifting, just like you wouldn’t go on a 1000 mile road bike trip without a longer-lasting posture & foolproof, easily fixed technology. I mean, I have done both those things but the problems were pretty obvious.
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I can recommend Peugeot if you find one. I hear the Harios need some fine tuning before they work right, but I’ve never used one myself.
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I remember seeing one as a decoration in my paternal grandparents’ house. And it did look like it had been used at some point in the late 1890s/early 1900s.
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See, Mom and Dad were Great-Depression-era babies (1923 and 1926. respectively); I even have a photo album of my maternal grandfather’s; here’s one page:
Here’s the front cover of the scrapbook; it’s wooden and held together with leather laces. This thing is incredible. I guess I should scan the rest of the photos, eh?
There’s soooo much more, stuff from WWII from my dad, stuff from days growing up, for both of them, in their respective poverty (Mom in the Thumb of MI, Dad on the near-east side (just east of downtown) Detroit. And Mom inherited stuff from her older siblings who predeceased her, and my dad’s mom took photos and had her own darkroom in the basement of the building she lived in or in her bathroom, not sure.
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Of course, I instantly heard in my head the opening theme to “Mr. Ed”…thanks!
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I just sit back in my comfy chair and smile and wave at those UCI guys. As they sweep past me, admittedly.
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Mine’s from the late '40s-mid '50s and goes fine enough to work in a mokka pot though you’ll get a workout getting it there. I’ve used the big cast iron antique type, results are… inconsistent. Okay if you’re making cowboy coffee or steeping in an urn but not so great for more modern techniques.
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I still have two VCRs, they both still work, and I still use them.
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I found one like this at a garage sale, for about $2.00 
:
I use it regularly, and it just works better than a cordless drill for certain jobs (not all, obviously).
I got this adapter for it, so now I can use any 1/4" hex driver bit. The combination of a Yankee screwdriver and Robertson bits is a match made in tool heaven.
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Was that some sort of media duplication rig? That’s a lot of disc burners.
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That’s part of my setup for ripping my wife’s considerable DVD collection. Bought a batch of DVD drives off eBay for a couple of dollars, and got a pile of SATA to USB interfaces. The whole thing cost less than $50 and lets me que and rip 5 dvds at a time.
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very cool.
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