Bedroom TV

[aemeijers]

I feel your pain. I have about 6 or 7 perfectly good 17" CRT monitors sitting in corners around here that I can't GIVE away. (Mostly Trinitron- damn things Will Not Die.) I'm too much of a cheap SOB to send working equipment to be demanufactured, and my long-dead EE grandfather would haunt me if I did. All leftovers from a brief period when it was possible to make a few bucks on the side buying used commercial PCs in bulk, cleaning them up, and reselling them at half the price of a new one. Moore's law bit me in the ass, and I am stuck with a couple hundred bucks (my cost) of working PIII PCs that are essentially worthless. One of these days I'll throw Ubuntu on the lot of them, and put them on Freecycle, just to get rid of them. (Perfectly competent e-mail terminals for people that can't get their kids off the 'real' PC for five minutes.)

[aemeijers]

Robert Green wrote: (Amusing rant snipped)

heh. Reminds me of my confusion when I came home and found my youngest two PCs on, and I knew I had left them off. There had been a power blip, because some of the clocks were blinking 1200. This happened 2-3 times (thunderstorm season in a semi-rural area), before the penny dropped and I looked in the BIOS on the PCs, and found a setting where one could choose to auto-boot after a power loss. Guess it is part of ATX standard for some reason- mebbe for non-attended operations. But the BIOS let me disable it, so no more ghosts.

[The Daring Dufas]

Have you ever tried to Linux the boxes and post them on Craigslist?

TDD

[aemeijers]

That is almost what I said- Ubuntu being a flavor of Linux, and Freecycle being rather like CL, just with lowered expectations. (IOW, getting it gone is more important than getting money.) I suppose I should try CL first, and maybe the swap board at work as well.

At this point, I'd GIVE them to a good home, or only charge what they are worth to me for parts. (Hey, an optical burner is worth something...) Gotta keep the one with a 5.25 floppy drive in it, though- still got a file drawer full of those, most of which are probably still readable.

I really need a SWMBO to nag my sorry ass into actually finishing any of the projects I start- it has gotten rather out of control. I'd need to at least clean up the front room enough to not scare strangers before I place the CL ads, so they don't run in terror when I open the door.

[The Daring Dufas]

I have a lot of older computer gear that I hang on to because, believe it or not, I have some customers who are still running DOS and certain software simply because it works. The newfangled super fast motherboards and CPU's are not compatible. People think I'm crazy for rescuing old computers from the trash heap.

TDD

[aemeijers]

The Daring Dufas wrote: (snip)

Oh, I believe it. I keep an old slow Dell laptop chained under my desk at work, that boots up in dos 6.22, and still has a 9-pin serial port. The software I use to program the decade-old walkie-talkies that our contractor staff uses, will not run under windows (even in a dos box), or on a USB to serial adapter for the PC to radio interface box. They used to try to keep replacing it on me, but I think it finally fell off the inventory records. As long as we use those vintage radios (Motorola HT1000), I need that relic of a PC, even if it only gets booted up 2-3 times a year. Those Motorolas are not dying anytime soon- these are from before M. off-shored all their production, and are built to mil-spec standards for outside use. Living inside an office building all day is easy duty for them. I'll be retired before those radios are. (The kid contractors keep asking for PTT cell phones to replace them, and I keep telling them Not On My Watch- we OWN the radios and the repeater on the roof, and I'm not gonna ask the taxpayers to start paying $40? a month per user, for something that doesn't work as well. We have about 100 of the radios, so it would be a hell of a cell phone bill.)

[Jim Elbrecht]

-snip-

Don't put too much hope into that. After the honeymoon is over you end up with 2 sets of projects that need finishing.

Jim

[norminn]

We came home once to find our dining room light on, and were sure we had turned it off. Since we had a problem neighbor at the time, I decided to call police just to make a record of it. One cop told me the cat probably turned it on :o) Crime stats are probably very artificially low where I live...good politics for police chiefs, mayors, realtors...

[George]

Or not. Two young relatives of mine and at least two more children of friends all reported the same thing when they worked there after college until they got real jobs. They pump them up at the beginning of the shift by telling them what particular items have spiffs and how much it was.

If you know better why did you challenge me?

[Robert Green]

turned it off.

You live in the state made famous by Dave Barry and the "Tomato that Dialed

911." Apparently a tomato, rotting on a window ledge, began oozing acidic tomato juice onto the phone below. Naturally, the goo shorted out the 911 speed dial key and the phone dialed 911 but no one answered the operator's questions so they assumed the worst, send the police to break into the house with their guns drawn to get the drop on the killer tomato.

- Bobby G.

[The Daring Dufas]

I have a Dell C600 laptop that has a serial port and I use it to program anything with a serial interface because some equipment will only work with a (true) serial port. Those HT1000 radios are newer than the radios I took care of for the contractor I worked for at the Kwajalein Missile Range back in the late 80's. Those units were just as tough and were also software programmable. Do you remember the old Motorola "brick" cellphones? Those things were built like tanks too and you could run over one of them with a truck and not break it.

TDD

[Nate Nagel]

I used to have some computers like that at my last job. Hopefully the people still there recognized their necessity for maintaining vintage systems and did not shitcan them.

nate

[krw]

All you need to do is move. It's a lot cheaper than a SWMBO and they'll make you do it anyway.

[aemeijers]

Nope. I still have crates from 2 moves ago that haven't been opened. Some of them are the parts from my former freelance used-PC endeavors. Not to mention the crates full of paperbacks that I will never read again, that nobody else on earth wants, that I still can't bear to recycle.

[Ron]

You left out letterbox on a 4:3, which makes the vertical height height even smaller, but can also increased on a 16:9 with the zoom feature.

And what is "most important" is debatable (not with you of course), because if a movie was shot in 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 you are missing a lot of the original content if the move is "formatted to fit this screen" like a lot of VHS movies were.

[Jim]

Might that be the P2570HD? If so we have the same unit. Also wound up getting mine at Newegg.

[krw]

I have a couple, but most will be opened as soon as I can get a shop put together. Others are permanent storage, but most got dumped in the last couple of moves (two 30yd roll-offs).

We give paperbacks to the local library for their annual sale (a write-off, too). Not sure what SWMBO does with the hard covers.