Retro Thing

Orbit 360F multi-exposure camera

Here's an example of Chinese design gone rogue. First off: ignore the hideous bargain-basement looks. The Orbit 360F is actually an artsy multi-exposure camera. It offers motor-driven film advance (and rewind), but everything else about this thing is decidedly weird. The vintage-style viewfinder is a waist-level optical design, perfect for snapping casual shots without arousing undue attention.

There's a built-in flash and also a hotshoe, just in case you need a more powerful shade of white to work your mojo. The exposure control is a minimalistic 3-way "weather symbol" control that would be completely at home on a cable TV news channel. To top everything off, the f4.5/50 mm lens is aspherical (the curved surface doesn't conform to the shape of a sphere - often cheaper to produce). The cam also includes a hand strap (useful, thanks to the camera's slightly odd shape). Oh, and there's a tripod mount.

The result of all this weirdness is a unique little beast that will cheerfully help you snap some of the most peculiar pictures in the known universe. The price? $50 - exclusively from Lomography dot com.

Drop by the Orbit 360F microsite

Free download: Vintage radio horror shows

Back in the days when radio was Queen of the Airwaves, listening to radio plays was an exciting way to spend an evening. Here's a timely link to a downloadable collection of 100 classic radio horror shows  - -updated to mp3 format, of course. The hiss, crackle and pop in the background wouldn't have been present in the original live broadcasts, but thankfully shows were typically recorded on shellac records for duplication and distribution to other stations... and so we could enjoy them 50 or 60 years later.

Old Time Horror Radio: Ghosts, monsters, mad scientists and more!

An unlikely book from a rock star

Before Brian May of Queen was a multi-millionaire rock guitarist, he was a shaggy haired graduate student successfully pursuing a doctoral degree in astronomy at Imperial College in London. He abandoned a career in academia to grind out the guitar lines for Bohemian Rhapsody and other bombastic Queen mega-hits.

May has returned to his first love as the co-author of "Bang! The Complete History of the Universe," which takes a look at the goings-on in the Universe from its formation more than 13 million billion years ago through its predicted demise a couple of million billion years from next Thursday.

May doesn't really see anything odd about his dual interests: "I think there's a sort of purity about both of them," he recently told The Guardian. "Because you can immerse yourself in thoughts of the universe, or in music, and you're really abstracted. You're a million miles away from all your worries and personal problems and the dust and smoke of where you are."

Visit the official Bang! web site [via space.com]

Intense recasing revisited

Mike Ford just gave us a shout to let us know that he's put together a fantastic Flickr set with great pix of his wicked looking (and sounding) gadgets. Mike is a sculptor and musician who creates truly inspirational electronic objects. They succeed in being old and new at the same time, and they've given me a burst of retro design inspiration for my latest gear.

Mike Ford's Intense Recasing/Repurposing/Funkificating

Pinball Expo 2006

The 22nd Annual International Pinball Extravaganza will be held November 2 - 5, 2006 in Chicago. The Retro Thing gang will be prowling the exhibition hall at least part of the time, and there'll be a post or two if something catches our attention.

Show highlights include the 2006 World Team Pinball Championships, artist & designer autograph sessions on Saturday, and a series of seminars covering everything from Pinball in the 21st Century to DIY pinball. There's even an organized tour of the Stern pinball factory. Exhibit Hall admission prices are $15/day.

Visit the 22nd Annual Pinball Expo site for more information

Crazy shaped vinyl records

Ah, the combo platter of collectible records - shaped vinyl. We've said before that colored vinyl doesn't sound all that good, but is that even an issue here?  Most of the records you see on the left are more enjoyable to look at than listen to.

Top left is "Pac Man Fever", a novelty song that made it into the top 40 - the original LP even included strategies and patterns to win the game.  Top right - don't know much about it, shaped like a gun, made me laugh.

Middle row is the most recent shaped vinyl I have.  It's a song from John Linnel's (They Might Be Giants) brilliant CD "State Songs".  Next door is a Beatles bootleg interview - hence the Apple Corps rip off...

The fish head is probably the best shaped vinyl I've seen.  No, it's not a cut from a Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica"... it's the infamous novelty tune "Fish Heads" by Barnes & Barnes (I don't have to tell you that one half of that group is Lost in Space's Billy Mumy, right?). 

Finally - Pee Wee Herman!  One aspect that shaped vinyl shares is that it's often hard to figure out where the stylus goes on the record, but none is more difficult than the Pee Wee platter.  The music is some kind of typical 80's stuff, but who cares?  It's the only record I've got that looks back at you.

Impregnable Sega Game Gear

To look at it now, you might wonder what Sega was thinking.  It's first attempt at a portable video game was the Game Gear, and it was saddled with a number of problems.  The system is huge, has a weak and smeary screen, and chews through batteries like mad.  At the time of its release, it was a daring leap into the future.  Nintendo's portable Game Boy juggernaut was still ambling along in pea-green monochrome.  Game Gear goosed every possible aspect of portable gaming, so it was going to be a sure winner, right?

Let's start with the color screen.  The leap to color displays in portable gaming was inevitable, but Sega jumped in too soon.  The screen was expensive and blurry; fighting games and platformers smooshed by, while onscreen text was nearly impossible to read.  Okay, how about the game library?  Initial developers put real effort into the games, but there were few must-have titles. 

Add-ons included an adapter to play full size Sega Master System (their prior consoles) carts with the portable.  Innovative and it greatly expanded the game library, but didn't really make much of a mark.  How about a tuner (prized as a rarity today) to turn the Game Gear into a portable color TV?  Nope, not a nibble.

My favorite third party add-on is this completely insane case.  It's a hard shell case that holds the Game Gear, and is gasketed all the way around.  Buttons are sealed, and every switch is covered with a rubber hatch.  Were they dropping Game Gears to soldiers in the desert?  This overengineered housing makes me wonder how you could have time to play video games in the hostile environment this case was clearly designed for.

All of that aside, Game Boy ultimately won out because of their vast library of winner games, and more importantly - battery power.  It took Nintendo years to create a color unit because they were waiting for LCD technology to be more battery friendly (it took them several more years to commit to units with a backlight).  It turned out to be a good decision - the earliest Game Boy could run 10-12 hours on a pair of four batteries, while the Game Gear chewed through six AA's in about two hours.

So even if Game Gear had succeeded in bringing more fun games to market, or creating hardware expansion anyone cared about, it would have stopped being fun in the few hours it took to croak $100 worth of batteries.

Tankball: Armoured paintball battles

My first paintball battle taught me an important lesson: Women are dangerous. I don't mean in the usual psychological sense, I mean in the "lurk around quietly with a sniper rifle and calmly massacre the enemy" kind of way. I dread to see what would happen in a "friendly" guys vs. girls mechanized battle.

Southfields farm, near Husbands Bosworth in Leicestershire has a long history of paintball competitions. Farm owner Stuart Garner recently decided to up the ante with the purchase of five FV432 Armoured Personnel Carriers -- conveniently outfitted with gun turrets and custom-made 40mm ping pong firing paintball cannons. Armourgeddon has well and truly arrived:

"Their chosen ammunition, fired by compressed air, would be paint-filled ping-pong balls.

The first attempt blasted a ball into orbit. [Cannon inventor Jez Smith] lost sight of it after a mile-and-a-half when it passed the church spire. It also sent a small potato through the sound barrier. Over time, he calmed it to a legal and relatively modest 200mph. Jez then designed a 40mm, 8ft steel barrel to slot into the turret and the company now has five. 'Obviously, these aren't proper guns with rifled barrels or they'd be illegal,' says Stuart, 38. 'But a ping-pong ball full of liquid doing 300ft per second is lethal. That's why we operate with sealed hatches."

The cost for a couple of hours of heart-pounding tank warfare is anything but lethal: a 2 hour tank battle costs a reasonable £55 per person, as does a 45 minute driving lesson.

Armourgeddon: Military vehicle driving and tank battles
Weapons of mass decoration [Daily Mail, via Gizmodo]

Manneken Pis Surprise Drink Decanter

How drunk do you have to be before this becomes the funniest thing ever?  There are many fountains that duplicate Manneken Pis, the famous statue of the whizzing boy in Brussels, but who thought to use it as a drink dispenser?

In this case, the plastic replica has an electric pump siphoning booze from the glass bottle and out though his... well, you know.  From the box (styled to look like a box that wine comes in [no, not the kind of wine you DRINK out of the box!] ), I'd say that he comes from the 60's.  However, I found some pretty recent batteries inside meaning that someone tried to relive the hilarity not that long ago.

We shouldn't be surprised that this guy exists.  The original Manneken Pis statue dates back to 1142 (making him Brussels' oldest citizen), and continues to attract tourists today.  As we all know, where there are tourists, there are souvenirs - and an even larger quantity of tacky souvenirs.  The little whizzing boy has been realized as miniature statues, corkscrews (yeesh), and yes - even drink decanters.

The original statue is dressed in various costumes throughout the year, and the changing of these outfits is accompanied by much ceremony and the temporary turning off of the fountain.  The temporary increase in pressure gives the young master a boost when turned back on, spraying delighted tourists.  Seriously, people line up for this event!

It might seem weird to us to celebrate the visage of a boy and his wee, and it does point out an important cultural difference.  Here in the USA a statue like this would be controvertial, some would even label it obscene.  Definitely not the sort of thing that would be commended with novelty drink decanters.  Having said that, and even though I like to think of myself as an enlightened person, I don't think that I'll be drinking out of it.  After all, he's well under age to be serving drinks.

Even a statue can have an official website HERE

A collection of corkscrews you probably don't want to see

Radio Shack Remote Control Extender

We're getting closer and closer to the idea of having a central repository of all of our home media, then through digital jiggery pokery we'll be able to enjoy our media from anywhere in the house.  You can do this today by sedding up a Media PC that you control from terminals throughout the house.  Cool idea, but it requires a lot of work up front - besides digitizing all of your media, you also have to set up a bulletproof network, run a dedicated PC, and the time and space to tend to it all.

You know what's easier than all of that?  Really long wires.  I'm not kidding!  As an apartment dweller, it's just easier to run some long cables from my entertainment center to wherever I happen to be sitting at home.  Instead of discussing how nuts that might seem, I'd like to show yuo what I use to remotely control anything from anywhere in the house.

These Radio Shack pyramid shaped IR extenders have been around for a while (you can still find them for sale today).  You place one of the pyramids in front of the IR device that you want to control, then place the other pyramid in the room where you're watching TV.  Aim the device's remote at one pyramid and it'll transmit your commands to pyramid #2 and control the device. 

Mostly I use this with my Laser Disc player that is too heavy to trundle around between rooms.  I could use other solutions to get the video from the LD to other TV's in the house, but this is one of the few devices I've found that will let me control the player remotely.  Besides could these things look more like Doctor Who props?

Convergence IX: Panasonic Pop-Up TV

Here's a good little Panasonic radio & TV combo unit that I still watch from time to time (I like watching a lot of old black & white TV anyway).  It's got AM & FM Radio, a typically cheap all-bass all-the-time cheapie speaker, and even has (heavy!) built in rechargeable batteries.  Of course you can get VHF & UHF on it (is it a sign of my advancing age that pretty much everything I watch is on UHF?)  What makes the Panasonic unusual though is that the TV tucks away neatly into the base for portability.

The pop-up section has two benefits.  It keeps the overall unit smaller (after looking at this, you can imagine how much empty space would be left over in a more conventional cabinet).  It also puts the image at a pleasing angle when the unit is on a desktop near you; something that contemporary electronics designers would do well to remember.

Panasonic exploited the space savings by offering a much larger screen than normal.  While many portable TV's have an image that is only an inch or two across, this one offers a five inch picture and it makes a big difference.  The Panasonic even has an RF input  - great for hooking up a Pong game to it! 

The equivalent TV today would be much smaller of course, and offer more than two colors, but this set is worthy of interest because back then you had to be pretty clever to offer a TV this small.  It's all analog of course - the main tuning knob clearly means business, as does the power switch, and there's not a distracting power LED to be seen anywhere.

Most important is that you can quickly squirrel away the TV when the boss walks by, and he thinks that you're just listening to a dusty and outdated clock radio with... er, um... no clock.

Kenwood Marble Based Turntable

My father was a marble importer by trade, so we had a lot of marble "scraps" used around the house - marble tabletops, marble windowsills - anything possible.  Given his predilection for marble handicraft, I wish that my father could have seen this - a turntable from Kenwood with a marble base!  Okay, it's some kind of faux marble stuff, but it's heavy and cool to the touch just like marble would be.

Kenwood offered a few models in the late 70's with this marble-esque base, and they were a big hit with audiophiles because of their stability.  The design of the belt drive also dampened the turntable for the detailed sound that many music fans prefer (though there was also at least one direct drive model that I can find). 

Sadly, mine needs some repair but I'm looking forward to someday putting it on one of my father's marble tables, and listening to some of the old man's records in Czech.

Crookes Radiometer

I have long been fascinated by radiometers.  Usually they resemble a light bulb (the one pictured is more of a hanging Christmas ornament) with a four spoked vane inside.  Each vane has diamond shape at the end; one side black, the other white.  Shine a light on the device, and the vane starts spinning.  Bright sunlight can send the vane spinning furiously!  On a cloudy day, even the proximity of your hand can affect its movement.

In my life radiometers were a fixture of grade school science  classrooms, so imagine my surprise when I learned that the workings of it are still a bit of a mystery!  Instead of puzzling through the physics myself, I've linked the Wikipedia article that discusses the radiometer in action.  I guess that I'm a bit of a Luddite for just thinking of radiometers as interesting kinetic decor.

Solve the mystery by getting your own radiometer HERE
Wikipedia entry on the radiometer

Amiga Demo Video from the 90's

Well, there's no easy way to say this.  Today is my birthday - it happens every year around this time, I guess... I should stop being so shocked by it.  It's inevitable that one does a lot of looking back (even more than we already do on this blog!), and I was remembering just how much stuff I used to do on the Commodore Amiga computer.

I used an Amiga for video work heavily into 2000.  Many folks remember with fondness the Amiga's rollout in 1985 and the stir it created, but a lot of folks don't realize that the Amiga kept being cool throughout most of its lifespan.  Before "multimedia" was a common word, the Amiga could do all kinds of things with graphics that took much beefier computers years to catch up to.

In the late 90's, I did some work for a company called Nova Design.  Their flagship product was an image processor/paintbox/animation engine called ImageFX (I still wish that I could find a program nearly as cool on the PC or Mac).  Back then I had one of the fastest Amigas equipped with the Motorola 68060 chip (you could even get a Power PC accelerator) running at a blistering 50 mhz. 

Nova hired me to do their demo video for ImageFX as well as their 3D program Aladdin, and upgrade package for the Video Toaster.  Many clips in the video are from other company' projects, but the lion's share is stuff that I created custom for the video.  In the months that I worked on the project, I gained a new admiration for the Amiga and for ImageFX.  I created a lot of work that was the envy of my PC & Mac colleagues, and somehow the "much slower" Amiga was churning pit these mind-boggling fx with very short render times.

Nova's bossman (and my pal) Kermit posted the demo video (actually he edited together several of the separate videos I made for Nova - good job with the re-edit!) on You Tube, and I thought that folks here might get a kick out of seeing what the ol' Amiga was doing more than ten years ago.  I love the tools in my graphics grab bag today, but I miss those frontier days of creating all kinds of work on the Amiga that no one though possible.

Coleco Super Controller & Atari 2600 Adapter Unit

We're only a few short weeks away from another bitter war between video game consoles.  The marketeers are slinging around facts and figures about polygon counts & online connectivity, but there are a few new issues on the table this time around - controllers and playing retro games.

One of the nuttiest controllers for any system ever is the Coleco Super Action Controller.  Ya got yer joystick, yer numeric keypad (with easy-to-lose overlays), yer free-spinning wheel, and yer four trigger buttons - all housed in a cutlass-like package.  Some people still breathlessly refer to the Super Controller as the best controller for any system ever.  Not sure about that - I've got big gorilla hands, and it still seems a bit big.

Another unusual aspect of ColecoVision was its expansion port that was host to an unprecedented piece of hardware; a module that played all of the Atari 2600's library of cartridges.  Never before had one company's system played the games of another.  There was some legal wrangling of course, but in the end Coleco won out (and as a sideline was able to develop the Gemini 2600 clone that we've discussed before).

I'm certain that there will be a lot of internet static about the new consoles once they are in people's hands.  There will be many a forum meltdown over which controller is best, which system plays the most classic games.  I just want to stake our Retro Thing flag, pointing out that some of us already lived through these battles twenty years ago.

HUGE article on 1UP on the history of controllers