Retro Thing

The Briefcase Stereo

 

I might be revealing a bit too much about my deranged psyche, but if I owned this portable stereo I'd be inclined to take it along when traveling by air. Yes, I'll be the guy who holds up the security line while attracting the attention of a gaggle of screeners and a couple of nasty looking characters with guns.

And I'll take up three seats in the departure area -- one for me, one for my lunch and one for my "briefcase." Of course, I won't be able to hear your grumbling because I'll be blasting chiptune 45s through my stunningly pea-green Panasonic cans.

Uh. Forget I said all that. Well, except for the bit about chiptune 45s -- they'd be wickedly cool.

This Arc Stereo Sound System is thoroughly awesome. It'll cheerfully spin 33s, 45s and even your great-grandpa's 78s. There's a throroughtly modern AM/FM radio, cassette player, two pull-out speakers and it runs off either AC or batteries -- just like an ipod. Heck -- unlike an iPod -- it has two microphones, just in case you want to record the goings-on in a LaGuardia departure lounge in glorious stereo.

It goes without saying that this much 1970s hipness requires heavy security, provided by a pair of keys and a genuinely lockable lock. For once, I am speechless.

It can be yours on eBay for a mere AUS$349, plus a gazillion eurobucks to ship it from Australia. Unless you're already in Australia, in which case it's an absolute bargain. [thanks, Claymore!]

First Orbit: 50 Years Of Manned Spaceflight

April 12th, 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's orbit of earth. He was only 27 years old, and his epic journey lasted a mere 108 minutes.

To mark the occasion, British filmmaker Chris Riley worked with Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli to shoot a film from the ISS. They determined that the ISS takes roughly the same orbit as Gagarin's flight every week or so. However, when one takes the time of day into account, it matches only once every six weeks.

The result is a 108 minute film that unfolds in real time. It traces Yuri's flight as accurately as possible, including a 40 minute stretch of near darkness over the Pacific. NASA provided some additional footage, including a moonrise -- something that Gagarin didn't have the opportunity to witness on his own journey.

As he recounted afterwards, ""I could have gone on flying through space forever." He never got the chance to experience weightlessness again, perishing in an aircraft accident at the age of 37.

The film will be available for free viewing on YouTube, starting on April 12th.

Yuri Gagarin's First Orbit - A Free Film

The Pinhole Hasselblad - Now Downloadable!

It has been a long while since a pinhole camera graced these pages. To fix that unfortunate oversight, here are some pics of Kelly Angood's stunning pinhole Hasselblad. It's screen printed on corrugated cardboard and accepts 120 film. The original in her portfolio is accompanied by hand processed prints and an A4-size guidebook.

Best of all, she has plans to release released a downloadable 35mm version that can be printed at home and constructed using a few household items. It'll snap 12-14 images per roll and should be available within a few weeks.

[Update: Kelly just emailed me to announce that the camera is now available for download as a rather fantastic pdf booklet. Enjoy!]

The Pinhole Hasselblad [via Red Ferret]

Play The Pica Pic Retro Handheld Collection

Rich writes, "I was forwarded this by a friend. I'm a retro game aficionado and find this site a winner. Not only do they nail the game play, but the implementation of the control scheme really does a good job of simulating the button pushing."

The project was created by Hipopotam Studio, the brainchild of Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielinscy in Warsaw. Pica Pic currently offers 18 recreations of vintage LCD games from the 1980s, including classics like Nintendo's dual screen Zelda and Russian Game & Watch clones such as the cartoon-based Nu, pogodi!

The controls are mapped to your computer keyboard, making it easy to enjoy these monochromatic classics in all their bleepy glory.

Explore the Pica Pic retro handheld game collection

Koss PortaPro Headphones

I am always on the lookout for decent portable headphones. The foam-covered earbuds that come with Apple products just don't fit my ears that well and fall out. I have had decent luck with those rubber-tipped in-ear models, but I am too cheap to spend more than $10 on earbuds, so I expect them to invariably fail quickly. Which is why I think my next on-the-go headphones are going to be the Koss PortaPros.

The world of portable music has changed quite a bit since the PortaPro came out in 1984, but the headphones represent a nice compromise between big over-the-ear cans and tiny earbuds. They don't provide the noise-cancellation or the full musical privacy of full over-the-ear headphones, but they fold into a much smaller package than their bulkier brethren. And, by most accounts, they sound great.

The "temporal pad" above the speaker is an important design element of the PortaPro. The pad appeared on the PortaPro's predecessor, the Koss Sound Partner, and is designed to transfer headband pressure to the temporal bone above the ear. Koss says the design worked so well that John C. Koss "actually stood on his head on the convention floor of the Consumer Electronics Show to demonstrate its ability to stay put."

The PortaPro has a much more sophisticated speaker housing than the Sound Partner. An adjustable "comfort zone" setting for the temporal pad and pivoting ear cups allow the speaker to actually float over the ear.

Two years ago, Koss issued a special 25th anniversary edition of the PortaPro with a fancy case, an all-black finish and a cloth-covered cord. They seem to be sold out, but I probably wouldn't spend the extra money for them anyway. Standard PortaPros with retro blue accents run about $35 and come with a lifetime warranty.

Sounds good to me.

Ebay: A Forty Year-Old Box Of Cereal

When we find out how much our old baseball cards or comic books are worth today, some of us like to get mad at our moms for throwing out our precious collections when we went away to college. I could see having pangs at the throught of mom taking your carefully curated treasures out to the rubbish heap, but don't be mad at her for throwing out the cereal box that looks like it's going to fetch a couple of hundred bucks in the next few days.

This Ebay auction offers an intact cereal box with a record featuring the stylings of the Jackson 5. That's right - you're bidding on a box of petrified cereal from 1972. I have this record somewhere, and as I recall it's the full song.

Super Sugar Crisp cereal has gone through a couple of name changes over the years - specifically to eliminate the word "sugar" from the brand. Funny that they don't want to remind parents that the cereal is caked in sugar, but it's okay to have a mascot who's clearly high off his fuzzy ass all the time. I actually remember cereal boxes coming with records laminated onto the back like this one. I still have one from Alpha-Bits cereal that tells the spooky tale of Sleepy Hollow. You'd impatiently wolf down the cereal, and carefully cut off the back panel that had a thin vinyl record glued on to the back.

The fidelity of isn't great, but it isn't bad either. The record uses flexi-disc technology, those thin sheets included with magazines that played on your record player.

It's over $150 with two days to go, but I expect it'll get several times that once the hammer falls. There are several points of interest in this auction that will attract collectors of Michael Jackson, unusual records, and even cereal box fans. I'm fully expecting a bidding frenzy in the last seconds, probably by jangle-nerved collectors on a sugar high after consuming too much kiddie cereal. 

Super Sugar Crisp Auction
Collection of cereal box records
evolution of Sugar Bear

related:
Cardboard records
Flexi-Sheets - those weird paper thin records
Breakfast With Nintendo: It's Not A Cereal, It's A System

A Decent NES Controller For Your PC

I'm always a bit suspicious when it comes to reproductions of classic gaming hardware. NES controllers are a case in point -- the original rectangular design wasn't particularly pretty, but it could take a massive pounding before succumbing. The same can't be said for many clones. Most just don't feel right and are prone to frustrating failures as they age.

However, Gtron's Classic NES USB controller looks like a step in the right direction. It has received excellent reviews, with most users finding it pretty close to the real thing. It's plug-and-play on Win98/ME/2000/2003/XP (I'm guessing it'll work fine with recent flavours of OS X and Linux, too) and features a 6 ft cord with standard USB-A connector on the end. Apart from that, there's not much to say -- the D-pad, select/start and A & B buttons are precisely where you'd expect to find them and do what they're supposed to do.

Best of all, it's only $14.21 on Amazon. At that price, it's easy to ignore the hideous box art.

Vintage Arcade Hardware Emulator

The FPGA Arcade Replay board can be configured to emulate classic video game and home computer hardware, including the Atari ST and Amiga. We first wrote about it almost 2 years ago, but it's finally nearing release.

MikeJ says, "The board will support all the games on the FPGA Arcade site, as well as my Atari ST core and a customized and supported MiniMig Amiga core. Other platforms such as BBC B, Commodore 64 and Spectrum will also follow shortly.

The board has an ARM processor which interfaces the FPGA to the SD card. Hard disk images, ROMs and floppy disk images can be used from the SD card. There are two expansion boards, one with TV out and some rear mounted connectors for the joysticks (fits in a mini-itx case), and a second board with a prototyping array. There are around 130 pins available on the expansion connector.

The board has DVI and Analogue out. The DVI connector can be used to drive a HDMI input of a flat screen TV, so you can play PacMan on the big screen. I am planning to do Asteroids in true 1080P :) The analogue audio output uses a very high quality Wolfson DAC."

The Replay board already emulates the original arcade hardware for Scramble/Frogger, Asteroids Deluxe, Space Invaders, Pac Man, Lady Bug and Galaxian. Supported gaming consoles will include the Odyssey 2, ColecoVision, Bally Astrocade, and the Adventure Vision. This promises to be very cool indeed.

FPGA Arcade Replay emulator board

What DSLR Photography Would Have Looked Like In 1929

There were no digital cameras back in the 1920s, of course. But that didn't stop intrepid photographer Jonas Kroyer from pairing a vintage lens from a Zeiss Ikonette with a modern Nikon D300.

His plan came together when he came across an old camera with a chipped lens and separated the lens and shutter mechanism from the body. He then created a t-shaped steel adapter to hold the bellows and lens firmly in place on a Nikon Bayonet mount scavenged from an old no-name lens. From there, it was just a matter of mounting a couple of brass knobs to adjust focus. A tiny spring from a ballpoint pen forced the shutter open, to allow the Nikon's shutter to snap each image.

The lens functions as an 80mm prime with full-frame cameras, or as a 120mm with a modern DX sensor. Because the optics are uncoated, pointing it at a light source results in all sorts of ghosting and lens flaring. Still, beautiful results are possible with a bit of care and attention.

Jonas reports, "I have spent a lot time using only this lens on photo walks and I found it to be a fun challenge as it requires quite some thought as to what you are pointing it at. It also reminded me of the fact that good photography has nothing to do with the quality of the gear you are using, but your ability to compose a photo."

Ikonette a DIY DSLR-lens [thanks, Sally Perkins!]

Nixon on Super 8

Penny and Brian have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund their upcoming found footage documentary, Our Nixon. It's composed entirely of shots from 204 reels of Super 8 home movies confiscated during the Watergate investigation. The confiscated films were home movies made by Chief of Staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, Chief Domestic Advisor John Ehrlichman, Special Assistant to the President Dwight Chapin and Deputy Assistant Larry Higby.

"They filmed big events: White House performances by Bob Hope, Dionne Warwick, Johnny Cash and Raquel Welch; hordes of anti-war protesters on the National Mall; legions of adoring fans on the campaign trail; visits from heads of state like Haile Selassie, Nicolae Ceausescu and Indira Gandhi; their historic trip to China; and Tricia Nixon’s Rose Garden wedding.

But they also filmed each other: Chapin goofing around with his camera; Ehrlichman clowning with Kissinger on the beach; and Haldeman filming Higby filming Haldeman at the Great Wall of China. Ehrlichman filmed birds. He was especially fond of hummingbirds. The home movies record every aspect of their experience of the Nixon White House, from the prosaic to the profound. These four men carefully documented their time with Nixon because they believed that Nixon would transform America. And in a way, they were right.

Today, when we think of Nixon, we think first of Watergate. But Our Nixon isn’t a film about Watergate. It’s a film about four of Nixon's men and the story they thought they were a part of – before Watergate changed everything."

The campaign has already reached over 15% of their $10,000 target, which will go to pay for sound design, color correction and an original score. Pledge $10 and they'll send you a retro-style campaign button. $25 gets you a DVD copy of the film when it's released, and they'll give you one of the original reels of film if you donate $500 or more.

Visit the Our Nixon Kickstarter Campaign page for more

The Jaguar E-Type Celebrates A Half Century

As a young boy, I was obsessed with aircraft. More specifically, British WWII machines like the De Havilland Mosquito, Bristol Beaufighter, Hawker Hurricane, Boulton Paul Defiant and the formidable Supermarine Spitfire.

The style of these machines hard-wired my brain to love the sleek and aggressive lines of the Jaguar E-Type, which paid homage to the fighters of a generation earlier. When it arrived at the 1961 Geneva Motor Show, the machine appealed strongly to successful 40-something year-olds who were in their early 20s during the war.

Driving a spitfire to work was out of the question. But if you squinted just right, the massive bonnet of the E-Type could pass for an engine cowl. Even Enzo Ferrari fell under its spell, declaring the Malcom Sayer design, "The most beautiful car ever made."

Over the course of 14 model years, some 72,000 E-Types were manufactured in three series. The Series I machines debuted with a 3.8 L Jaguar XK dual overhead camshaft (DOHC) inline 6-cylinder engine. They're my favorite version, with glass-covered headlights and a distinctive mouth opening in the front, along with signal and tail lights that seem to have been tacked on above the bumpers as an afterthought.

By the time the last E-Type rolled off the assembly line in 1974, the wretched wide-collar excesses of the early seventies had wrought a 5.3L 12-cylinder V12 engine that drank its way thirstily through the oil-starved OPEC Crisis. The more powerful engine was accompanied by more capable brakes and power steering as a standard feature.

All good things come to an end, and the E-Type was replaced in 1975 by the XJ-S -- an angular touring car that hinted at the sterile, straight-edge design that was to dominate much of the next decade.

Oddly enough, the last E-Type wasn't built at Browns Lane. It was hand assembled by Ray Parrot in 2008, cobbled together from a vast array of spare parts that had been languishing in storage for over three decades. It took 8 months of hard work, but over 95% of the vehicle was crafted from factory new components.

[Update from Martin in the comments... A Swedish designer, Bo Zolland, paid tribute to the Jaguar E-Type by designing the Growler E. Quite stunning!]

Unplanned Obsolescence

This week's media frenzy around the iPad 2 has been interesting, to say the least. More than a few people who received iPads as Christmas presents are perturbed that their machines are now yesterday's hot thing. It's a familiar phenomenon in the tech industry, but on a far greater scale than ever before. We're in uncharted waters, and things seem a tad out of control.

A Slightly Used 1961 Soviet Space Capsule, Anyone?

On March 23, 1961, twenty days before Yuri Gagarin electrified the world by orbiting the earth in his Vostok 3KA-3 capsule (later renamed Vostok-1), the Soviets queitly sent Vostok 3KA-2 into space. It contained a life-sized mannequin dubbed Ivan Ivanovich along with a dog named Zvezdochka. They returned safely after a single orbit, setting the stage for Gagarin's earthshattering ride.

It goes up for auction at Sotheby's in New York on April 12th, 2011 -- the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's flight -- with an estimated sale price of between $2 and $10m. That's quite an increase from a previous appearance at Sotheby's in 1996, when the guide price was between $800,000 and $1m.

As Sotheby's recounts, "The flight lasted 115 minutes. Vostok 3KA-2 completed one orbit around the Earth and returned safely to a snow-bound Russia. The landing site was near to the city of Izhevsk, but almost impossible to reach because of deep snow. Thirty paratroopers had been sent to guard the weather-bound site, where the ground lay under almost five feet of snow. The rescue party of engineers required a ski plane, and in an ultimate irony, a peasant's horse-drawn sleigh to reach the landing site. An eyewitness records finding the capsule, 'Half scorched, slightly bent over the ground, it seemed an enormous animal driven too hard, lying in a narrow snow-covered gully, the snow melting around the charred and still hot body of the unit.'

The life-like 'Ivan Ivanovich,' ejected on descent, had fallen close by. In one of the more amusing episodes of space history, the local peasants were convinced that the inflexible paratroopers who had been instructed not to touch Ivan were cruelly preventing the rescue of a downed flier. Restless and angry, the peasants relented only when one of their elders was allowed to approach and touch the waxy rubber face of the mannequin."

Sotheby's to auction 1961 Soviet space capsule [Dvice via Reuters]