Rock tumbler.
They weren’t very forthcoming about the fact that it takes a month to turn a rock into a polished rock. And that it’s a month of “Wrrgghh! Wrrrgghh! Wrrrgghh! Wrrrghh!” so you’d better hope you have a detached garage with a power outlet in it because that’s the only place you’ll be allowed to use it.
I still have one of those…brought it up out of the basement a few months back. Had to disassemble it and clean all the contacts. and it’s FRIKKIN LOUD. I don’t remember it being that loud as a teenager. My 7 year old kids were less than impressed.
I think they did both. I remember some ads would say “Original Songs by the Original Artists” and others would quietly say something like “music performed by the Soundalikes.”
Remember those vibrating football games? Where you’d put all the little football players onto a field and then switch the power on the that the field would vibrate the players through the play?
OK, that was freakin’ awesome.
But with mine, if you wanted to pass or kick, you’d have to turn the game off in the middle of the play and replace the QB or kicker with a special figure. It was about 4 times as tall as the other figures, and had a spring-loaded arm and leg. The power in the spring was such that the average pass was typically 1,500 yards. That’s basically across the living room, through the kitchen, and down a heating vent.
As the game only came with two balls, play options were limited.
Remember the DAK catalog? They had all sorts of cool gadgets that were almost as good as they looked on paper. For example, they had bread machines before they became (briefly) mainstream. One of the cool things they had was a handheld photocopier. I lusted after this thing. I was doing research at the time and was tired of pumping nickels (yes it was a while ago) into the copy machines. So I had this vision of swiping the copier over the list of references in a journal publication, or even copying entire pages.
Well, the copier actually worked, in a somewhat touchy, blurry, heat-treated paper sort of way. But about the time I got it, papers started becoming available on-line. And somehow I never quite got around to using the copier for its intended purpose. So it knocked around one of my drawers for a couple of years until I gave it away.
Nowadays when I want to copy something in a quick and dirty fashion, I just point a digital camera at it.
They snipped intros, and sometimes complete verses for packing purposes.
I assume you mean a VCR-type DVD recorder. Some of this sounds weird:
a) I don’t know why you would need the TV on to record from the DVR to DVD, other than to to get it started.
b) I thought even the crappiest DVRs will record one program while another is in playback mode–and many, if not most, will record two with one in playback.
c) Every DVR I’ve owned assigned a default meaningless title id, but had a menu option to override it.
Now, having said that, consumer DVD recorders are crap, regardless of the manufacturer. That’s why I’ve had so many (on my fifth one). My first four lasted: 30 days, 30 days, 6 months [repaired under warranty it, and it lasted another year], and a year. My last one is still working two years later, but I also don’t record as much stuff as I used to to DVD, now that I have a DVR.
I got a watch you could play Frogger on when I was 12 or so. Not that it wasn’t the most super-awesomest gadget ever - it was. I even set an alarm that played the Frogger theme song every day.
But then that my brother dropped it down a hole in the wall, from which I could not retrieve it.
And at 6pm every day for the next few months, I heard the Frogger theme song, mocking me from behind the drywall. But toward the end, when the battery wore down, it sounded downright plaintive. <sigh>
Man, send that thing MY way. My mother got one, and loves it, but she kept it in the oven when not in use, and my nephew decided to cook something in the oven. He didn’t check to see if it was empty. He baked my digital scale (since replaced) and my mother’s GFG. I sorta fixed it, but it’s never been the same since.
Yeah, some of them were billed as “by the Original Artists”. A freakin’ cover band called The Original Artists. :smack:
Why, in the name of all that is holy, were you keeping your digital scale in the oven?!
I didn’t think I had anything to contribute to this thread until you mentioned that. There were ads in the back for what I think was called an ‘air car’ from a company called WidgitWorks (or something similar). The ad made it sound like you could have your very own flying car that sailed through the air; my head was filled with visions of making a truly awesome landing in the middle of the schoolyard and never having to take the bus again. Imagine -imagine- my disappointment when I received the plans for something that ran on a vacuum cleaner motor and allowed you to glide across the gymnasium floor if the cord was long enough. Calvin and Hobbes fans who remember the story arc about the propeller beanie can perhaps understand the magnitude of my emotions.
i had one of those!!!
K-Tel actually used the original recordings. On another site I belong to, would you believe people actually collect these, this was affirmed. Again the issue was the chopping off and they actually sped some of the music up to get more songs on one side. They also used a narrower groove to get more songs on an album.
Somewhat oddly the K-Tel 8-tracks were sought after 'cause K-Tel would go out of their way to make sure the tracks never crossed over the switch on an 8-Track. So you never go the “ker-chunk” noise in the middle of the song when in the middle of a song it moved from track 3 to track 4.
Ronco also did compilation albums in the 60s and 70s, though I don’t know if they used sound alike artists or re-records.
Anyone who’s a fan of BJ Thomas knows about re-records. It’s a nightmare trying to find his originals, as so many of his “best of” albums are mixes of old songs and his re-records.
St. Clair Entertainment is famous for putting out re-records by the original artists
I’m pretty disappointed with my Motorola Droid phone. Android’s all right, but most of the apps are crap and even the included Google ones have annoying bugs. I ranted about it in another thread.
Something that disappointed me?
The Perstel DR-101 DAB radio. I bought it at Radio Shack when DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting, that is, digital radio) was making its hesitant and ultimately unsuccessful foray into the Canadian market around five years ago.
The DR-101 was a small square box with a long antenna and a display and a couple of buttons. it could receive DAB broadcasts on the L band (somewhere around 1450 MHz) and also FM broadcasts. I was all set to use it on my bus ride to work.
But, alas, because the DAB signal was almost line-of-sight, and the DAB stations were broadcasting from the CN Tower, still on a semi-experimental basis, and I was going to Mississauga… reception was often interrupted. It sounded good when it worked though: good enough to reming me how crappy drive-time radio actually is.
Furthermore, the little receiver ate batteries with astonishing speed. One set of batteries lasted an hour. My commute was usually longer than that. And the receiver had no internal storage, so I couldn’t load MP3s onto it for those times I was in subway tunnels.
The DR-101 now sits in a drawer, unused. I don’t even know whether the DAB transmitters are still transmitting.
Now, this disappointment cannot be laid wholly at the feet of the DR-101. Equal blame goes to the broadcasting industry and the electronics retailers.
The CRTC and the CBC and various broadcasting-industry magazines had been making noises since the late nineties about how DAB was going to be the wave of the future. Both AM and FM stations were allocated DAB slots, and the CRTC had worked out an elaborate plan to shift all stations to DAB. They said that it was possible to make a single-frequency network with multiple transmitters, so that you could go from city to city and never change frequencies to keep receiving stations with national reach, like CBC Radio Two. Each DAB transmitter could send five stations simultaneously, and you also got a text readout of song name, artist, etc.
But somehow, aside from ‘experimental’ transmitters in the largest cities, DAB never seemd to take off. DAB receivers were never easy to find in Canada. Arcam sold a few at high-end audio shops in Toronto, and Radio Shack had a brief flirtation with them. But the mainstream retailers like Future Shop or Sears never sold them.
I am wondering whether DAB’s time has passed. The spread of MP3 players with cellular and WiFi access (or phones with MP3 playback, depending on how you want to look at it) has meant that people have shifted to the Web and downloads and streaming, even on the go.
My iPhone and my computer, and their internet connections, do far more for me in audio than the DR-101 ever did. In the past tenn years, I’ve found and bought far more good music via iTunes, YouTube, Last.fm, and the like, than I have via radio. And I just downloaded an app that lets me listen to radio stations streamed acroiss the net. Radio has its uses, especially for disseminating news during public emergencies; but all we really need is an addon for the iPhone that receives FM.
Yes! I was obsessed with this thing and begged my mother for it for three Christmases in a row. She finally relented, and I had the exact same experience you describe, down to being made to set the thing up in the garage because the WHRRRRGH WHRRRRRGH was so annoying. It developed a tiny little leak after a day or two - probably fixable by just readjusting the gasket - and that was all the more excuse my mom needed to send it back to Sears. I was a little disappointed but really not that much.
I also bought one of these from the DAK catalog, with similar results. Moreover, I bought it when it was first offered, not when they cut the price by 2/3rds a few months later. The thing worked but was somewhat bulky – you had to carefully run it slowly over what you were copying, and it just wasn’t very practical. More successful was a Visual Commuter, an IBM compatible computer with 512 k of RAM, an LCD screen, and two 5 1-4 inch floppy drives, that I also bought from them. I fired it up a few minutes ago, and it still runs.
First Generation iPod Mini when it came out in Canada. What a piece of useless sh*t. I’ve never bought an Apple product since then.
When the oven isn’t in use, it makes a nice storage space. Unless your nephew doesn’t check. 
I went through three portable MP3 players before I landed on the iPod.
Strangely, I was very happy with all of them.
The first I bought in 1999. Diamond Rio PMP300. Loved it, though it had only 32 MB of storage space.
Think about that, kids. An MP3 player that couldn’t hold any longish album encoded at 128 kb/s. I still loved it because it fit in my pocket unlike a discman.
The second - an upgrade. A Rio 500. Now with 64 mb of storage and a much sleeker package. Glorious.
The third - another upgrade. The Rio 500 could hold one album plus a few more tracks; I wanted more. I ended up buying a Creative Nomad Jukebox. I don’t remember the specific model.
It was about the same size as a discman, but thicker. But wonder upon wonders, it held, IIRC, something like 4 or 6 GB? Meaning I could have my entire music library with me at all times. I worked this thing to hell - I had it while still in College; my daily pedestrian commute was probably a few miles total. I had it playing the entire time.
Worked great. After maybe three years of heavy use it still worked like a charm. I ended up selling mine on eBay with the paint on the buttons worn completely off and the buyer was still thrilled to get it (“Works great! Good description!”)
Gah, I miss my old MP3 players now. They’d be great college nostalgia pieces to have.
Of course, I’ve had iPods since then and all have been very well built and a delight to use.