Retro Thing

Apollo Space Program Commemorative Matchbooks

It would be easy to argue that among mankind's greatest achievements are our journeys to the moon. What better way to commemorate such a magnificent acheivement than to issue a limited edition set of a dozen matchbooks?  RCA put out this set of matches in a fitted case (with a serial number even) to commemorate the astronauts and the spacecraft of the Apollo program, while not-so-subtly listing the technology that RCA created for the space program inside each matchbook.

I can imagine some hardened anti-smokers taking issue with the depiction of these true American heroes on matchbooks. While I'm not a smoker, I'd hasten to remind critics that we wouldn't have gotten to the moon without the mountains of cigarettes that everyone seemed to smoke back then.

Name That Tune Electronic Game

A tie-in to a famous US game show, the electronic version of Name That Tune seems promising.  In the game show, players would wager who could name a song upon hearing a scant few notes.  The Name That Tune game does the same, but the music is a bit bleepier and a bit more public domain.  The problem lies in the limited nature of electronics at the time, the unit only holding 32 songs.  It didn't take long for the replay value to erode away.

Though there is an unexpected bonus within the plastic heart of this game.  You can record songs for your friends to guess as part of the game, making the Name That Tune game a quasi-keyboard/sequencer.  I doubt that Goldfrapp will cut their next album using this thing, but it's amusing nonetheless.

If you really want to get trivial, one of these games was used as an on-air prop in Mystery Science Theater 3000 (pictured here with an ur-Crow & proto Tom Servo when he was known as "Beeper") when MST3K was still a local TV show in Minneapolis.

What AllofMP3.com could teach the music industry

[Editor's note: Sometimes one re-reads a piece and realizes that an essential piece of background information has been left out because it was considered absolutely obvious. In this case, I'd like to make it perfectly clear that I don't condone AllofMP3.com. They steal music and distribute it without compensating the artists who sweat and suffer to create it. I also don't seriously believe that any record company would ever purchase AllofMP3.com, although I could foresee a situation in which the domain is turned over to a recording association as part of a legal settlement. The original title -- "Why Allofmp3.com could become the saviour of the music industry" --  was an attempt to draw in readers. Unfortunately, it merely served to pull people's attention away from the important elements of this piece.

I firmly believe that the major labels should set up an international site similar to AllofMP3.com that pays artists properly while offering affordable music downloads which do not restrict my fair-use rights. In other words, I should be able to use the music I download in exactly the same way I use a CD: I deserve the freedom to play it on my stereo, in the car, or on my iPod. I deserve the right to take it to a friend's place and play it there. I also deserve the right to resell it or give it away.]

AllofMP3.com is a Russian music download service that charges "by the megabyte," just like a dodgy buffet restaurant. You choose the bit-rate and they serve up unencrypted mp3 files that you can play anywhere. Their prices are unbeatable (most songs cost less than 20 cents) because they [illegally] sell millions of dollars worth of music without paying license fees to the people and companies who own the source CDs. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are [quite rightfully] working extremely hard to get the site shut down, but I have a better idea...

Lomolitos - A rainbow of single use LOMO cameras

Lomolitos are "disposable" LOMO cameras, designed to snap a mere 24 frames of 35mm before being handed off to a developer for destruction and processing. The magical look of LOMO photography stems from the use of a rather dodgy plastic lens combined with a vividly colored flash filter (available in yellow, blue, red or green). I'm surprised no one has released a digilomo yet.

I'm not wild about the idea of tossing a camera after shooting a single short roll of film. Apparently the company agrees with me, since they provide instructions for busting it open to reload. I can't help thinking these would make excellent cameras for capturing a wedding -- if you don't mind capturing guests in hideously artistic shades of yellow and blue.

LOMO cameras (including Lomolitos) at TURNTABLE LAB 04

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The Last Few LOMO Cameras
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Verv Design - Space Age furniture for the new milennium

Mass production is a wonderful thing when you're shopping for a reasonably priced car, but owning the same IKEA light fixture as everyone else in the neighborhood gets boring in a hurry.

Lance Tankersley -- who also works as the director of the Omnisphere Theater at Columbus State University's Coca Cola Space Science Center -- creates "made by hand" retro-inspired lighting and furniture. He models his designs in 3D software to get a feel for an object's proportions before creating the physical object. The crown jewel of his collection is the $1200 Verv Lamp: "This retro-spaceage lamp incorporates hand spun aluminum polished to a mirror finish, hand blown art-glass orbs and blown acrylic. LEDs in each support tube illuminate each glass orb."

Tankersley's other notable designs include the $550 Tron coffee table and my favorites: funky $150 Sputnik-inspired speaker stands (steel with wooden ball accents) that are guaranteed to be one of a kind; perfect to add a bit of Space Age angst almost anywhere.

Explore the Verv Design site

Red Raven Animated Records

When portable CD players were relatively new, a friend of mine had a unit with a little window in the lid.  I thought that it would be really cool to create a CD that had sequential frames on it that would seem to animate through the window.  There are a number of technical reasons why that wouldn't work (the window doesn't have a shutter, every CD player has a different window, etc.), but it still seemed like a good idea.

Just like so many good ideas, mine had been done forty years before by Red Raven records.  These were cardboard children's records with the animation printed right onto the disc itself (later versions like the one above had the animation on the label of regular colored vinyl).  The Red Raven included a little mirrored device that you pop onto the turntable's spindle that reflected the animation in such a way that while the record plays you get to see a little cartoon.

The effect is rather hypnotic (the mirrored device is an ersatz praxinoscope for all of you optics junkies), and a neat addition to the typical children's fare on the record itself.  Sixteen Magic Mirror Movie records were released by Red Raven (making for 32 animations of course).

Nice video from Kempa.com of the Red Raven in action

Fatman: Shiny Valve Amplifiers From the UK

Fatman is most famous for their £299 vacuum-tube iPod amplifier. But the company is much more than a one-trick pony; they manufacture professional audio gear and also offer us consumer-types several slightly more powerful "valve amps" that would be right at home in an audiophile's living room.

This particular model is the iTube 182. Its 7 tube design puts out 18W x 2, weighs a mighty 11 kg and and will cheerfully drive 4 or 8 ohm speakers. The only controls are a 3-position "Source" selector and the volume knob. I love the mirror finish and graphics, but I'm not impressed with their inclusion of an evil little blue LED power indicator. I wonder if they'd make me one with soothing green or yellow instead?

Fatman iTube 182 stereo valve amplifier

Hit Miniature Camera

One of my earliest objects of longing was a Hit miniature camera.  At the grocery store near my house growing up, there was a gumball machine with the Hit proffered as the best possible prize.  Needless to say that I never won it.  The same camera also showed up in comic book advertising as a prize for selling True Grit magazine subscriptions or other detritus.  Never earned enough points to win one...

It sounded so cool - a real miniature camera that took real pictures.  The compactness made it ideal for a child... or a spy... or a spy with childlike hands, I guess.  But the main thing that I didn't understand as a kid is where one would get the pictures developed, or where the film came from.  I didn't remember seeing teeny boxes of film at the drug store.

Clearly you can see that as I child I tended to overthink things.

Imagine my thrill when I recently scored the camera at a thrift store for 50 cents - twice what some lucky bastard paid to get it out of the gumball machine 30 years ago.  Poking around on the internet, I see that Hit cameras aren't quite as exotic or rare as I thought.  It seems to be pretty easy to pick one up on Ebay for as little as $10.  Perhaps the bottom fell out of the miniature camera market when espionage went digital.

I think that the film is just 16mm motion picture film rolled with a paper backing, but I doubt that anyone but the most ardent hobbyist is going to use this for actual photography today.  Unless you're a spy on a budget, that is...

Nice web page featuring a photo taken with the Hit

 

World's First Printed Atlas Sells for £2.1m -- Mistakes And All

Sotheby's auction house has sold a copy of the world's first printed atlas -- the Cosmographia -- for the record sum of £2,136,000. The 1478 book was the crown jewel of a 600 piece collection owned by Lord Wardington, who passed away last year. It was one of only two copies still in private hands and went to an unnamed private collector (just look for the befuddled billionaire who can't find New York).

Ptolemy -- a second century Greek-speaking geographer, astronomer and astrologer -- compiled information from the Greeks and Romans to create a 'Geographica' that eventually became the foundation of the 1478 printed work. As you might expect, there are some gross inaccuracies; the undiscovered Americas are entirely absent and familiar landmasses tend to be distorted, resulting in a slightly alien world.

Don't fret if you haven't got a couple of million quid lying around for your own copy; a team of Swiss researchers at Bern University published a complete German version at the end of September, and an annotated translation of the technical chapters can be yours for a mere $32.95.

Old atlas breaks auction record
More on Ptolemy's Cosmographia

Play Vintage Williams & Midway Games Online

Are you trapped at work (or school) with an uncontrollable urge to play a few classic games? Midway feels your pain. Their Midway Arcade Treasures site offers ten flash-based vintage arcade games including Joust, Defender, Robotron 2084 and even Sinistar.

About half of the titles are Midway classics, while the others were originally released by Williams (they joined forces in the late 1980s).The game play isn't half bad, although it feels wrong to play these old standards on a snazzy new LCD panel. [thanks, Karen!]

Visit the Midway Arcade

Related posts:
Williams MultiGame - 6-In-1 Arcade Game Uses Original Hardware
MAME: Bringing the arcade experience home
ZVG vector arcade interface

Stylish Ampex Micro 24 Cassette Recorder

I love the look of this briefcase-styled tape recorder. It's oozing with good looks (can't you totally see Napoleon Solo or Commander Straker using this?), and it has a lot of features that I wish were still common on the recorders of today. It's got several different input and output jacks, compartment for hiding away the AC cord, tone control, a level meter and manual control of the recording level (damn you, auto gain control!).

There isn't a carry handle, rather there are lugs on the sides to attatch a strap - so this is clearly an on-the-go kind of recorder (especially if you're willing to flip for the 5 "D" cells to power the Micro 24).  Too bad that this particular unit is as dinged up as it is (though it still brings the jams in glorious mono!).  I guess that spy work takes its toll on secret and stylish gadgets.

I've said this before, but sometimes the most important time to inject style into a device is when it doesn't necessarily need it. Coming from a time that I remember all cassette recorders having the aesthetics of a shoebox, Ampex's Micro 24 is a breath of fresh air.

Wild West Toybox

Believe it or not, I'm not much of a cowboy.  But I can appreciate havin' a purdy box to stow yer gear in after a long day o' ridin' and ropin'.

Okay - I promise that I'll stop writing with a Western drawl.

Anyway, I got this from a friend of mine who gave me his parent's wild west themed furniture living room set from the 50's.  The pieces are brilliant - finials on top of lamps are bullets, there are horse heads stitched into the leather, and the armrests are wagon wheels!  It's not that kitsch furniture from the 50's is a big revelation, but what is amazing is that it's of such high quality.

The furniture set is in storage right now, but the toy box remains useful to be even today.  You might  expect a toy box to be made of cheap plywood & particle board, but this baby is solid oak!  The rest of the wild west furniture I mentioned is also of sturdy caliber.  It's sad to think that, at least in this case, the fad furniture of yesterday has much superior workmanship than a lot of contemporary stuff.

I also feel a bit nostalgic for the time when I could actually fit all of my toys into a single box!

Tele-Test Prank

Back in the 50's, TV kitsch didn't just fetishize the shape and function of the actual TV set.  Here's a great prank that plays on anyone's vanity, and the mystery surrounding that fantastic 20th century breakthrough: television.

The Tele-Test is about the size of a pack of cards.  The text asks "Are you photogenic - What will you look on television?  Press button".  Your "friend" (sucker!) presses the button, and the screen reveals... the hinder of a jackass.

Boy, you're some pal, eh?  What actually makes this really funny is that I keep this right by my editing desk, and it still works.  More than 50 years later, and this prank it's still duping sophisticated people holding college degrees in art & media.  Hope that someone comes out with a new one for HD!

Holophone H4 Surround-Sound Mic

I've been meaning to write an article about classic quadrophonic and holophonic recording systems for quite a while, but I haven't found the right angle yet. In the meantime, modern manufacturers are coming up with new multi-channel recording techniques that might prove revolutionary.

The recently announced $2495 Holophone H4 SuperMINI is a 5.1 channel surround-sound mic intended for use with prosumer camcorders. The incredibly compact microphone 'head' contains five microphone elements (L, R, C, LS, RS) with 20Hz to 20kHz frequency response. The device includes a built-in multichannel preamplifier and a plethora of useful audio outputs including 6 discrete analog connectors, a virtual surround headphone monitor and matrix encoded line-level stereo output for connection to stereo inputs on your camcorder.

I suspect this product would be more useful for capturing live performances than it would for video work. After all, corporate videos, indie films and porn flicks just don't need on-set 5.1 ambient recording.

Holophone H4 SuperMINI Surround Microphone

Casio SK-1 Sampling Keyboard... In Pink!

The Casio SK-1 was mind-bending piece of technology toyware back in the 80's.   Like many other mini keyboards, the SK-1 had a couple of good sounds, cheesy white-noise rhythms (like your grandma's organ, even a limited editable synthesizer.  Eclipsing all of those abilities was that the SK-1 was the first affordable sampling keyboard.

The groundbreaking SK-1 (one of mine still has its original $139.00 price tag) would let you sample any sound in the world - any 1.4 second long sound, that is - into this little battery powered dream.  By speeding and slowing down the sample, any noise at all becomes an instrument that you can play on the keyboard.

Perhaps some of you had the moral strength to use the sampler only for good, wholesome recordings.  But who among us can truthfully say that he (or in the case of this pink keyboard, "she") hasn't burped or "cut a muffin" into the microphone to play a rude version of Jingle Bells?  Or slowed your voice down to a snarling crawl to terrorize siblings?  My favorite trick was to find the demo unit at local stores, turn the volume all the way up and sample "Don't touch me!" into it.

Casio SK-1's are quite easy to find on Ebay starting at about $30.  This pink variation however is crazy rare.  It must have been some marketing boffin's idea to appeal to girl musicians.  Bad for social progress, good for those of us who love weird keyboards.

Lots of musicians still use SK-1's for fooling around, or to get that signature low-fi sound - I actually saw Portishead use one in concert.  What's weird is that for such a tremendously fun instrument, nothing has taken its place today. 

We all know that the tech for digital sampling in toys costs next to nothing, so where are all the cool tiny keyboards with tons of power?  Has sampling returned to the domain of the professionals again?  I hope not.  For one thing, no one is going to make an 88 key sampler with turquoise colored keys...

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