un boxing video

[fred]

Is there anything as vapid or inane as un-boxing videos, especially those made by holding the camera in one hand whilst struggling with the box with the other.

[News]

In message , fred writes

I'm almost glad you asked that, although cannot offer an answer, or explanation. I have seen 'em too, and am just left wondering WHY? Why people make the recording in the first place, and why they imagine anyone has the slightest interest in watching. Are people's lives really that empty? Yeah, I know, and I'm talking about it ...

[Johnny B Good]

I've created a photo slideshow of my 'unboxing' an Acer laptop I'd bought from a grocery store (Tescos) for my own reference but only because of the difficulties I'd had in reboxing a Medion laptop I'd bought the week before from Woolworths (just over a decade ago now) and didn't want to face a similar 'Puzzle Solving' exercise if the need to return for a full 'No Quibble refund' arose yet again.

I chose a 'Grocery Superstore' to source my second attempt to buy a reasonably specced for the money laptop over Woolies (who didn't understand their own "No Quibble 28 day" refund policy) and the likes of "PC World" (who do but will deliberately quibble just the same) because they don't employ sales staff who specialise in the art of selling PC hardware to gain a sales commission.

Unless I give up trying to get Linux to function fully[1] and revert back to win2kSP4 which I'd installed less than one week after purchase to replace the s**te known as winXP MCE that Acer had inflicted upon it, it will have effectively outlived its usefulness after almost a decade of

24/7 operation.

The battery, despite also being 'on - charge' for 99% of that 24/7 period, still retains a good 70% of its original capacity so it's hats off to Acer's battery management technology which nicely avoided the "Float charge it to death" trap most other brands seemed to have kept falling into (at least up to that point in history).

Anyhow, if I ever wanted to re-box it up "As new" (I kept all of the packaging), I can always run my 'Slideshow' in reverse and take a leaf out of the Haynes Manual books' frequent references to 'reassembly'. :-)

[1] I've tried many of the older 'Lightweight' 32 bit distros and not one of them can handle the 'Acer Weirdness' applied to what is essentially and Intel chipped MoBo which results in no power management features and an inability to complete the shutdown process without the assistance of a four second press on the power button.

Other than those annoyances, most distros did install and work just fine. Considering the Linux developers have had almost a full decade to get their heads around "The Acer problem" they all appear to have given up and lost interest in 'completing the challenge' so it looks like I'm stuck with using MSFT's finest OS ever (win2k - *not* being sarcastic here - it's just getting a bit 'long in the tooth' is all).

I suppose I could try turning the *nix host / windows guest VM idea on its head[2] and try running a lightweight Linux distro in a VM in order to run Kaffeine as my preferred Freeview TV recording software over my previous choice of "DTVR" which I used to run under win2k in preference to the execrable "Home Theatre" styled crapware offerings and their incredibly sluggish Ten Foot user interfaces and their one channel per MUX recording limitations (absent in Kaffeine under Linux).

[2] One would normally run windows VMs on a Linux host rather than the other way around but since VirtualBox supports pretty well all permutations of host versus guests combinations, doing things 'the wrong way around' might, in this case, provide an effective work around to getting Kaffeine running without the 10 watt idle consumption penalty of a Linux host OS installation.

[The Natural Philosopher]

yes.

[Adrian Caspersz]

You forgot the holding the cameraphone vertical bit.

Some are a bit

1. "Hey look at me, I have bought bling. Wouldn't you like to be doing this?"
2. "Hey look at me, am I stupid or what?"
3. Useful.

I like the real unboxings.

"Don't plug it in. Tear it apart!!!!!" [tm]

[Jonno]

fred scribbled

They're not all boring

I've never heard of 'Playtape'.

[News]

In message , Jonno writes

Neither had I. Interesting.

[Brian Gaff]

????? What do you mean? Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

especially

Some one buys a new gadget and posts a medium close up of the box whistle they open it and take the gadget and supplies accessories out.

Some are shot handheld on a phone in portrait mode meaning the other hand is on it's own to try and open the box...

[fred]

I do some times take a quick photo on the phone of the contents of a tool b ox. Some drive me insane trying to re-pack them. Worst was a Festool portab le edgebander a Contura K65. I could never work out how to replace the han dle. First time I succeeded I took a photo.

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

Wish I'd done a video of unboxing my (now deceased) Skill Saw. Every single time I took it out of it's handy plastic case I made a mental note of how it should go back, yet every time I went to put it back It appeared to be way too big to shut the lid and took 20 minutes of experimentation to get it back in.

[soup]

Sometimes (well twice actually ) I actually watch an unboxing video just to see if such-and-such an item/cable is included or will I have to source it separately.

[Theo]

Sometimes it's useful to be able to see a side of the product that they don't show you in the promo photos. For instance I just watched a video that showed me the back panel of a PC - it's much quicker to realise 'ah so there's two full-size DisplayPort sockets, 4x USB 3 and 2x USB 2 and a gap for a serial connector' than you'd find out by reading the spec.

(it wasn't an unboxing video, but it could have been)

Theo

[Bob Eager]

When Intel made motherboards, you could go to their website and rotate a view of the board through 360 degrees. Very useful.

[Theo]

The vendor's website has I/O EXPANSION Video port ? rear

which is actually 2x DisplayPort and 1x VGA but they were too lazy to tell us.

Theo