The phones with the internal hidden camera, I was sure it would be the future
https://www.91mobiles.com/list-of-phones/pop-up-camera-phones
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
The phones with the internal hidden camera, I was sure it would be the future
https://www.91mobiles.com/list-of-phones/pop-up-camera-phones
I want this so I can be sure my phone isn't sneaking a peek at my pooping face
Toasters. Specifically the Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster, with the tag line "Automatic Beyond Belief!". There is a fan site (https://automaticbeyondbelief.org/, excellent url). Like, what other appliance line has a fan site? Surely no modern day toaster!
But of course I first heard about it from Technology Connections video.
I think a lot of old school products worked better than modern equivalents. Take toasters - when I was a kid our toaster consistently made toast with the same degree of doneness. I've had modern ones that said "microprocessor controlled" on them that couldn't make consecutive pieces the same. Also flashlights. Simple metal flashlights just worked. My new sophisticated one cycles through multiple levels of brightness and then strobing (so I can what, have my own rave?) but sudden motions make it spontaneously turn off. I mean how hard is an ON/OFF switch?
And what's the deal with airline food? I'm thinkin' hey!
My grandmother used to have one. I never realized how it worked before that video, but I was always fascinated by the fact that the bread would lower itself
The original tv remote didn't use batteries. It used sound. Giant clunky devices with large tactile buttons. Never runs out of batteries and still works if your kid tries to block the screen to keep you from turning it off
Those remotes used little spring-loaded mechanical chimes that emitted ultrasonic notes. As a kid I discovered my parents' big console stereo would change channels if I clinked a handful of coins.
Even the replacement and most modern remotes (with an LED at the tip that you have to point at the device) use pretty cool tech.
Usually to send data you want a data channel and a clock channel. When the clock changes say from high to low you read the next bit in the data channel. With one LED to send info you need to combine them.
For transmission that's easy. You make the low to high change at a fixed frequency. For the high to low change if it's a zero you make the high to low change 1/3 the way through the cycle. For a 1 you make the change 2/3 the way through the cycle.
On the receiver you you sync up a signal at the same frequency rising with the start of the transmission at a 1/2 on 1/2 off. You look at the data when the reference falls 1/2 the way through the cycle.
If a zero was sent the line had fallen at the 1/3 and it is a zero. If a one was sent the line doesn't drop until 2/3 and it's a one.
The trick is how do you get a signal at the same frequency and in synch. You compare the transmission frequency revived to the frequency of a voltage controlled oscillator. If it's slower you up the voltage and increase the frequency if it's faster you lower the voltage and lower the frequency.
You similarly use a phase detector to determine if they are in phase slightly boosting the frequency until they are in sync.
This system is called a phased lock loop (pll). All this so you don't have to getup to change the channel. The same sort of system is used for reading data from the magnetic disk on a hard drive.
How did it generate that sound without batteries? Was it literally the audio from the clicking of the buttons? Genuine questions.
The button pressed a spring-loaded thing that struck a piece of metal, almost like a wind chime, emitting an ultrasonic note. I discovered by accident that I could make my parents' stereo change channels by clinking coins together.
Tuning forks!!! The Zenith clicker The buttons would work strikers that would hit tuned rods. A different one doing a different function.
Zenith Space Command remote.
Buttons and springs would make it click loudly at a predicable frequency.
It's why remotes are often referred to as "clickers".
sounds loud and annoying
Ice. As time has gone by, it has become less cool.
The force is strong with this one.
I will beat you to death with a wet piece of tissue.
No, you wont. Ill shield wall that joke all day long
Before transistors there were vacuum tubes which did the same thing but using very different principles (and were also way bigger, even than traditional transistors and billions of times more than the transistors in the most modern ICs)
Before electric milling or even steam milling, flour used to be milled using watermills and windmills which, IMHO, are way cooler.
a 127mm vacuum tube, quite large, is equivalent to 127,000,000 nm which is only 63.5 million times bigger than a cutting edge transistor so that estimate seems a little exaggerated.
That's just the length, if you are comparing volumes it's an under estimate.
I was too tired to go beyond "1nm = 10^-9^ hence 1 billion" and actually do the maths ;)
The internet
This may not apply, (as I know I'm simply saying a commercial product got worse as it had revisions) but Jawbone's first earbud/headset used a small rubber conductor to evaluate skull vibration for noise canceling ( and likely there was some ANC using incoming mic audio from external sources). They continued to include a rubber bumper but I think the device leaned more on incoming audio from mics rather than from the rubber bumper. The oldest device presented the best noise canceling even after 3 product changes. I used every version until they stopped making headsets. I miss my Jawbone. I still have my OG.
Oh man...I have an entire ten page paper on the go about this topic and it just keeps growing. One day I'll publish it in a blog or something, but for now it's just me vomiting up my thoughts about mass market manufacturing and the loss of zeitgeist.
The examples that I always use are a) Camera Lenses, b) Typewriters, and c) watches.
Mechanical things age individually, developing a sort of Kami, or personality of their own. Camera lenses wear out differently, develop lens bokehs that are unique. Their apertures breath differently as they age No two old mechanical camera lenses are quite the same. Similarly to typewriters; usage creates individual characteristics, so much so that law enforcement can pinpoint a particular typewriter used in a ransom note.
It's something that we've lost in a mass produced world. And to me, that's a loss of unimaginable proportions.
Consider a pocket watch from the civil war, passed down from generation to generation because it was special both in craftsmanship and in connotation. Who the hell is passing their Apple Watch down from generation to generation? No one....because it's just plastic and metal junk in two years. Or buying a table from Ikea versus buying one made bespoke by your neighbour down the street who wood works in his garage. Which of those is worthy of being an heirloom?
If our things are in part what informs the future of our role in the zeitgeist, what do we have except for mounds of plastic scrap.
!remindme One Day
Cars used to be cool. Every car company had some kind of sporty car, a couple cheap cars, a big luxury sedan and, a while ago, a station wagon.
Now every car is an SUV or CUV. Sedans are getting phased out. Cool sports cars don't make money so they don't make them. People don't buy station wagons so they don't make them. And they're pushing big, angry trucks on everyone.
I'd take it even further: Cars used to be cool - in the 50s to late 60s. Modern cars look so bloody bland in comparison. I'm sure there were duds as well, but the models that show up in period pieces look way cooler than anything we have today.
Pop up headlights! Way cooler that way. I've heard a couple reasons given for why they stopped being a thing, but one of them is that they were considered too unsafe for pedestrians-
Which is a fucking crazy though when you consider what we now blindly accept in automotive design with respect to pedestrian safety 😅
Disregarding the safety comments (which should not be disregarded) purely for the purposes of this conversation, in older cars the vacuum tubes that operated the lights would frequently fail, meaning that the lights wouldn't deploy even when desired.
That was revised in slightly newer cars, where the vacuum lines from the engine were required to hold the headlights closed. So when the mechanism inevitably failed, you had permanently deployed headlights until/if it was repaired.
Yes. I'd rather smash my femur at a pop up headlight while lounching over the engine hood than being dragged underneath an SUV street tank and being squashed.
The technology behind telecommunication.
Today everything happens inside your router, fast and silent. My father was a telecommunications engineer. When I was a amall boy (late 1980s) he once took me to his workplace (it was in the evening and he was supposed to troubleshoot). What today fits onto a few silicone chips inside a router took much more space back them.
I was in a room that was filled with several wardsobe-sized cabinets. Inside there were hundreds of electro-mechanical relays that were in motion, spinning and clicking, each time someone in the city dialed a number (back then rotary phones were quite common). It was quite loud. There also was a phone receptor inside one of the cabinets where one could tap into an established connection, listening into the conversation two strage people had (it was for checking if a connectiion works).
I still remeber the distinct "electrical" smell of that room (probably hazardous vapors from long forbidden cable insulation and other electrical components).
So when you dialed a number at one place with your rotary phone, you were able to move some electro-mechanical parts at another place that could be located somewhere else around the globe (hence long distance calls).
At my job we recently had an old device that was used to produce the sound a phone makes when the line is busy, open, etc. . It's about arm length and 20 cm thick, you can distinguish the cogs producing the phase from the signal.
My grandmother was a switchboard operator at one point in her life. She saw a scene in Mad Men and said they left didnt get the sound right but it might as well have been where she worked