030 - This Week: COMPUTERS!

This week I am going to be focusing on clearing out my "Technomancer Graveyard" of dead computers, harvesting their organs and cobbling together systems for various friends and family members from their lifeless corpses.

(This is a task made SO MUCH EASIER by having an actual, working computer, thank you very much!)

One of the first things I'm going to do is install my old PCI Video Capture Card into THIS, the *WORKING* computer, so i can digitize a bunch of VHS tapes that I have recently adopted. I can hardly wait to see how this VCC from 2006 holds up in the modern day of digital file transfer! Over ten years old in the world of computers = "An elegant weapon for a more civilized age".

Then I shall move on to The Laptops, because EVERYBODY loves a laptop and has room for one. After that, it's to The Towers, where one tower in particular has been giving me entirely too much grief - it's a huge, beefy system with a teeny-tiny power source (like 450 i think?), and I'm surprised that it lasted as long as it did in the service of it's owner. Hopefully I can find something better and get it back to it's rightful home.

And that's my week this week!

031 - VHS

Rescued these VHS tapes from a one-way trip to the Recycling Bin last night - some guy finally gave up on his 64 tapes full of (mostly) Grand Prix, Indy 500 and CART Races from 1989 to 1994. Last night, he just got tired of asking his friends, weekend after weekend, "Hey, you fellers wanna come over and watch 512 hours of Races on VHS from the early 90's?" and never getting a reply :(

Yes it's mostly racing stuff, but there's also a few tapes of what appears to be random stuff. Other than racing, he aparently also enjoyed Star Trek The Next Generation, Cops, and the occasional "Edited For Television" movie. THOSE are the tapes I'm really looking forward to :)

A home-recorded video tape is a wonderful little pop-culture mix tape you made and sent to your future self without even knowing it :) Unlike The Internet which you can get distracted from and click away from and rely on the YouTube Auto Play to give you more videos like it from now until forever, a VHS tape is finite. At the very most, it's 8 hours of your life, but more likely it's like an hour or two at the most. Watching a tape that somebody else recorded feels slightly voyeuristic, like reading a Diary that you found at a used bookstore.

I don't think you can get that from a DVD or a digital download...