Holy cow, I bought a new iPod Touch in February '22, just a few months before they were discontinued. What do people do for portable music these days? Is everyone just streaming everything through their phones? Doesn’t that just eat up data? Or are they storing all of their MP3s on their phones? I’m up to about 35 GB of MP3s now - if I want to put all that on my phone (along with all the pics that are already there), I’m gonna need more storage space. Thankfully not for another decade or so, when this new iPod finally gets tired.
If your phone has a SD card slot, you can plug in a SD card that can hold a lot of music without touching your internal memory (no problem for 35 GB).
Some people stream - but some people keep music on their phones. You can get iPhones with a lot of storage now plus there’s backup storage so you don’t have to keep photos and videos on your phone if you run out of space. A couple of years ago I moved everything form my husband’s iPod to his iPhone because I thought it was ridiculous for him to take both on vacation.
35 GB is not a lot these days - my phone has 128, and my apps in and of themselves only use a fraction of that.
I thought of another one: what about screensavers, wouldn’t anyone under 20 who sees old footage of a computer screen with flying toasters or fishes swimming around wonder what strange games these are without having a clue what a screensaver is and what is was good for?
Still ubiquitous, but how many know the reason for the pointy end of this.
BTW: The machine translation of the site where I found the pic, e.g. Stainless Steel Is Not Easy To Rust And Deform
Full text
- One Thing Is Multi-Purpose, Convenient, Worry-Free, Simple And Practical, Not Only Can Open Beer; It Can Also Open Medicine Bottle/Oral Liquid. One End Can Be Used To Open Beer Drinks, The Other Pointed End Can Be Used To Open Flat Lids That Are Difficult To Open2. 304 Stainless Steel Is Not Easy To Rust And Deform3. Thick Handle With Smooth Lines And Comfortable Grip4. The Appearance Is Beautiful And The Inner Beauty Is Online, And The Thickened Steel Feels Delicate
You would have if you used to get the old Edmund Scientific catalog (or better yet visited their store in New Jersey).
ETA: Ninja’d multiple times. That’s what I get for replying without reading the whole thread.
This is almost poetry, but I still don’t know what cans or bottles could be opened with the pointy end. I’ve always wondered about that.
The oil can spout definitely. He’ll, I’m not sure my brother (born 1979) would recognize it.
But a wheel weight? I’m pretty sure those are still in wide use.
One thing that I have had to explain and even point out to my kids are payphones. They’ve grown up with smartphones being ubiquitous, and only old geezers like their grandparents still have land lines as well as smartphones.
The idea of a fixed location phone that you have to feed quarters in order to call someone was completely foreign to them. So was, for that matter, the idea of long distance calling.
Newspaper machines were a novel thing for them as well ; they’re still around, but are usually derelict and don’t have any papers in them.
Old beer cans.
Pineapple Juice cans.
Pretty much any can that have a pourable liquid in it.
After looking around , this is all I could find - everything else seems to come in plastic jugs now.
So you just made a little hole in the top of the can you could drink/pour the liquid from? I remember tools for making holes in cans of condensed milk, but they looked like this:
Two holes - one to let air in.
If you look at the top of older soda cans (pic above) you’ll see that the tab to pull off is vaguely triangular, with the pointy end in the middle. Now, imagine if it didn’t have such a tab, for easy opening. And the can was made from steel/tin. You wouldn’t use a can opener that cuts away the whole top, the way you did with cans holding foods.
But imagine that you take that pointy end of the bottle opener and put it perpendicular to the can, wedge the little hook under the rim and bend upwards, so the pointy end goes down. Ta-da. A soda or beer can with a triangular whole.
I was going to link to the original Space Jam website, which until a few years ago was all 1996 in its splendid glory. Almost as if WB had forgotten it. Sadly, they found it again and it’s now archived as some sort of legacy under the new Space Jam site.
It’s still a good reminder of what the web looked like 25 years ago:
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
ETA: This is what media giant Warner Bros managed to produce to promote a movie back then. The mind, it boggles. The eyes, they hurt.
Ah yes, forgot about that trick.
Like this:
Me too, but I’m in Minnesota.
I go to the garage at work and ask if I can have some of the weights, and the mechanics are happy to let me take as many as I want. Lead weights can be heated in an old pot on a campstove in the driveway. Fish the clip out, and try to wipe the slag off the top of the molten lead, and you can pour the lead into molds for all sorts of things (weights for duck decoys, model trains, etc). Outside is safe. Just be careful to wash your hands and don’t get the lead too hot.
Some of the weights seem to be steel now, though, which is useless to me.
My best friend and I used to bike around to all the tire places we could find and collect tire weights, so that we could melt them down and make slingshot balls, using a mold from Cabela’s.
This was in the early 70s.
I’m in my early 40s and my only experience with them was when someone gave me and old radio/8-track player for free. I bought a random tape from Goodwill to play in it just for the novelty of playing an 8-track tape.
By the 1990s, maybe even in the 1980s, the 8-track tape was the go-to example of an obsolete media format on TV. In early Simpsons episodes Homer’s car was drawn as having an 8-track player. That was obviously meant to show the viewer that Homer’s car is old. Although I guess for the viewer to understand the reference they would need to have at least some idea what an 8-track is.
My daughter was looking at Buzzfeed, and she was taking a quiz requiring her to name some now-forgotten items, so she asked for my help. They had pictures of rotary phone dials, rolodexes, the button on the floor of a car to turn on the high beams, the oil can spout pictured above, flip open telephone address index, car cigarette lighters, 8 tracks, ashtrays in airplane seats, a cableTV channel box, etc.
Needless to say, she didn’t know any of them, but I knew them all.