Retro Thing

Is A Fake Security Camera Like A Scarecrow For People?

Some parts of the world keep a watchful CCD eye on the people all the time. It hasn't quite happened here in the states yet, but obviously some places are old hands at it. Stores and banks have always had a secret room in the back that's a nest of wires and a sleepy art school student keeping a bleary eye on a row of black and white monitors.

The tech may have changed to tiny discreet cams and a single computer, but has always been tremendously expensive to set up a real security camera network. Some places will mix a few fake cameras in with the real ones to save money, then someone discovered that as long as the staff can keep a secret (and the bad guys never open a Radio Shack catalog), ALL the cameras can be cheap fakes and still be an effective deterrent.

This camera is far too heavy to be a fake. I can't tell too much about this cam. The only information is a sticker on the back and "Video Surveillance System" helpfully stencilled on both sides. The sticker is for "Advanced Metal Technologies" in O'Fallon Missouri which looks to be more of a manufacturing company than a security service. The camera is a heavy sucker, so let's open it up to see the technology powerhouse keeping our lives safer.

Whoops...

Let's review... we've got a fake camera that sees nothing, does nothing. Oh wait, to be fair, it does blink a little red LED on the front. I expect that giant lantern battery kept that little flashy LED circuit going for months, maybe years! I can't tell when exactly this phony camera is from, but I'd guess the 70s or perhaps a misguided 80s. Real security cameras were ugly affairs, and this fake sure qualifies. So even though this camera looks quite fake, I think that in the dark it might just pass. Just.

Obviously it's all about saving money on an elaborate security system while still fooling the non-distinguishing criminal element. One shabby video store I used to go to employed the fakeout camera, but were a little too cheap about it. They nailed up an old super 8 camera. Perhaps the bad guys aren't also camera connoisseurs, but it does seem a bit of a giveaway to have a big bolt sticking through the word "Kodak".

Today's security conscious don't need to concern themselves with a phalanx of expensive fakes. There are dozens of models of fake security cameras out there, many for just a few dollars. More elaborate models have what looks like a glass lens (instead of a shiny black plastic fake like most cheapies), and use a motion sensor to start panning and blinking a light when someone lurks nearby. Even the cheap ones look relatively convincing, and the light and motion may draw the potential thief's eye and enourage him to pack up his stripey shirt and domino mask, and head back to the hideout.

It may even be easier than that to make your place look more secure. So many genuine security cameras look like a little golf-ball webcam, and no one expects those to move or beep. You can just hit the thrift store and dot an armload of webcams all over your store and hope for the best. Though it stops working if someone nips in and steals the webcams...

Inventor of Rockafire Explosion Discovers 1992 Demo Tape

A few years ago an internet community reared its mechanical head via YouTube. Fans who idolized the robot band that performed at Showbiz Pizza (a cousin of sorts to the current Chuck E. Cheese Questionable Pizza Emporium) bought the entire robot setup from closed restaurants and started programming their own shows. This became a sensation on YouTube, spawned a documentary, and efforts to mutate pop music through these pizza shilling robots continue.

During the production of the documentary, filmmakers spooled through hours of tapes that inventor Aaron Fechter hadn't seen in decades. They found these demo clips that show off what else Fechter was working on besides the Rockafire band we all know. There's an alien band, a Wizard of Oz show, and a Santa who I'm pretty sure started in a little early on the egg nog.

Polaroid Z2300 Digital Retro Camera - It Prints!

Polaroid has never been willing to let go entirely of their on-the-spot printing roots. From time to time they march out a new "fun" camera, but with the individual prints costing good money, and the ubiquity of camera phones for sharing memories instantly, who was going to carry around an old Polaroid camera these days?

The new Z2300 is an interesting hybrid that just might hit the right balance of old and new ways to share photos. For $159 you get a 10 megapixel pocket sized digital point and shoot (note the nod to the retro styling of older Polaroid gear with that rainbow-esque stripe on a white body). The camera has got built in  special effects filters, shoots video... it even mentions something called "Classic Polaroid Border" which I hope means you can create pictures with the offset white frame like an old Polaroid print.

Speaking of printing, that's the remarkable part of this camera I'm going to like. You can go through your digital shots, and chose to chug out an honest-to-goodness physical print. The camera even has simple cropping so you print just what you want. The camera uses Polaroid's "Zink" cartridges which have paper and ink in a single cart. A cartridge can print 50 2x3" images (that are also stickers!) for $25.

I was a big fan of Polaroid's i-zone camera from some years back... tiny 1" prints with sticky backs so you could put pictures up anywhere - which was a big part of the fun. It was still a fully "analog" system, so you didn't really know what your pictures were going to look like until they popped out of the camera. This new Z2300 camera promises a new breed of photo sharing fun. Not only can you share your photos digitally, but your choicest snaps can enter the real world via a mini print you can create anywhere. With the Z2300, stick your photos up on Facebook, or stick them right onto your face.

Help out Retro Thing when you order your Polaroid Z2300 from Amazon

M*A*S*H Turns 40 Today - Awful Merchandise Memories

Worldwide hit TV series M*A*S*H was first broadcast 40 years ago today. The show teetered on cancellation throughout its first season, but then grew into one of the most popular shows on television (like stablemate "All In The Family" which it was often paired with on CBS). The series finale "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" 11 years later was the most watched television broadcast at the time, with an audience of 125 million dewey-eyed fans.

There are so many lessons to learn from M*A*S*H, a show that somehow balanced heart-wrenching drama and bawdy comedy. One that has always resonated with me isn't so obvious. It's that maybe cancelling a promising idea after 2 episodes isn't always the best policy. If today's network hatchetmen were in power in the 70s, you'd never have seen M*A*S*H beyond the first season. Same with "All In The Family" (which had soft ratings until summer reruns made it a hit). Can you imagine if the only examples we had of 70s TV potential was Three's Company and The Gong Show?

Another lesson is that not every TV show is a rich vein of tie-in merchandise. Even M*A*S*H couldn't dodge the shrapnel of a lot of lousy cash-in crap. I don't mind lunchboxes and posters, and the like... but M*A*S*H action figures? What kid is supposed to enjoy these? I guess it's like playing with army men, except the more tragic side of the equation. The figures are of the main cast, with one variant; you can get Klinger in fatigues or in a dress. Tri-Star rolled out these figures in 1982. Klinger had stopped the "bucking for a section 8" drag routine years before, but even so... is this the first action figure depicting a cross-dresser? 

Back in the early 80s, 20th Century Fox was raiding their licenses to cash in on the video game craze. They made some mighty odd choices. There's Alien, a Pac-Man clone based on an R-rated movie, and there's M*A*S*H - a mash-up (forgive me) of Defender and the classic board game Operation. Oh, and an even more depressing chip-tune rendition of the show's theme song "Suicide is Painless". This came out in 1983, the year that M*A*S*H went off the air, right in the thick of the video game industry crashing. You can suffer through this on either your Atari 2600 or Colecovision.

So we learn that even one of the best ideas in television history isn't immune to a constant barrage of really rotten ideas all around. I doubt that even Radar's strange pre-cognition could see these lousy concepts coming...

Lanier VW35 Microcassette Recorder, And The Days Of Moving Parts

[after publishing this post, eagle-eye reader "GaryShadyray" pointed out that this Lanier unit isn't for microcassettes, but the incompatible "minicassette". The main point of the post doesn't change much, so here it is. Thanks for helping us keep the story straight, Gary!]

James and I are interviewed from time to time about this whole "retro" world that we trade in. One recurring question we get every time asks what we think makes retro gadgets special. Of course there's the nostalgia and sentimentality that we imprint on our retro favorites, whether it's your first first car or your first Atari game... That personal connection is one that no one can tell us is right or wrong.

I also tend to bring up miniaturization. In the past, if a company managed to miniaturize a sophisticated mechanical something, that used to signal real quality and precision. A modern MP3 player is a matchbook-sized collection of off-the-shelf bits; mostly commodity electronics. Even the cheapest no-name MP3 player can be impossibly tiny - the only thing keeping audio players from getting any smaller is that our human sausage fingers still have to work the buttons.

There were note-taking cassette players that were about the size of a Walkman, but they were still kind of bulky. By making the cassettes smaller, the entire recorder could fit comfortably in the hand. It's the smae idea behind scaling down camcorders by introducing smaller cassette formats like VHS-C and Video8. Back in the days of moving parts, this was quite a trick. Amazingly, microcassettes worked. The format neve proved to be proactical for music reproduction, so microcassettes brought their barely-there fidelity to handheld notetaking gadets and answering machines.

When I got a microcassette of my own in the 80s, I marveled at how small the machinery of the microcassette player actually was, but then recently I found this Lanier VW35 that's even smaller. Even when sheathed it its leatherette case, the entire player is only about the size of a conventional cassette. Heck, I've seen modern digital recorders (with no moving parts, mind you) at about the same size.

You can still find blank microcassettes, and even the handheld recorders in stores... and it's not just legions of Twin Peaks fans buying them up (for those who may not remember, Twin Peaks featured Kyle MacLachlan as a peculiar detective recording his observations for someone named "Diane". I still have a theory that "Diane" was actually the name of the microcassette recorder itself... but I digress...)

We are at the point where a cheap digital audio recorder and a $5 memory card has pretty much seen the microcassette run out of tape. I do marvel at the Lanier's astonishing small size, but I don't feel like I'm going to get a lot of use out of it. At least until some crowd of hipsters picks microcassettes as the latest retro smug and ironic music format. Which I guess wouldn't actually be that crazy. Conventional cassettes were first used as a lo-fi dictation format for businesses. Who knows if someone in the 80s could have goosed microcassette performance to be a format suitable for music?

Fidelity aside, this truly miniature microcassette recorder is an amazing achievement. Lanier didn't have to wait until the digital revolution for things to get miraculously small.

Michael's Shortwave Holy Grail: Hallicrafters SX-100

[Here's a guest post from Michael Nyberg - Ed.]

I have been listening to shortwave stations since I was probably 9, give or take a year. Spent many a night in front of my Dad's Realistic DX-150A shortwave receiver. Later on, I would come to find a Realistic DX-160 and brag to my Dad I got a newer model. All in fun of course. It was still about 25 years old when I bought it. However, I would "DX" (DX = listening to "distant" radio stations) all up and down the AM dial and log them as best I could. Of course, night hours are when you actively DX. I grew up at a time when "modern" electronics (like an LED wristwatch) was prohibitively expensive (in 1974) and yet things that ran with tubes were considered old fashioned ( I still remember when we bought our first color TV in 1975).

As time moved on, kids like me kept trying to reach to the latest electronic thing only to see it obsolete within a year or two. Much like how video games replaced pinball machines, digital watches replaced analog watches, etc. It seemed that those modern electronics always stayed out of reach.

So, fast forward to today and suddenly much of the baby boomer generation is selling off to the younger folks but most of Generation Y and the Millennials don't want anything to do with dated technology. Sure, a few hipsters may buy old bikes and convert them to fixies, but even that trend seems declining now that bike companies offer fixies as a brand new product for the masses. However, in the smaller Generation-X crowd, it seems there are some real gems that we still love and can be found with little or no competition from older, more deep-pocketed people. Either that or I am simply the last sucker born, one of the two.

Sure, some technologies are indeed so limited that paying for the media is prohibitive enough to discourage their use entirely (35mm photography and Super 8mm film-making are two examples that pretty much everyone bypasses for the essentially free digital version), but some things like radios, stereo systems, and turntables are remain useful and supported by major companies to this day. They still offer a difference that is discernible and, perhaps most importantly, are inexpensive enough to encourage the continued pursuit of the hobby.

In the case of vintage radios, replacement vacuum tubes are still available and foreign countries are still broadcasting. "Recap" kits are available to those who have the patience and skills to replace leaking and dried out paper capacitors with modern replacement versions. Not quite plug and play but very close.

As most people with collector-itus do, I searched Craigslist on a whim to see what was out there. The pickings were slim but up popped a Hallicrafters SX-100 radio. Now, since the last radio guide I had read was the 1972 White's Communication Log with the annual rundown of newest shortwave receivers, I knew the SX-100 was a quality unit and that it offered pretty much every feature I would want in a dream radio short of a digital readout. Remember, in 1972 a digital readout was a BIG deal. But these days, I no longer require that as everything is digital and very few things are analog. Call me crazy, but I still do not like the way my bathroom scale magically shows my weight on its digital readout with no run-up in the numbers. I would prefer an old-fashioned scale in that regard.

Kickstart a Stop Motion Remake of Jonny Quest

About a year ago, we featured a stop-motion remake of the opening title sequence from the classic Jonny Quest (1964) cartoon series. It generated a significant buzz on the Intertubes and Roger Evans has decided to kick things up a notch by remaking a full 20 minute episode of the show in stop motion.

This is where you and I come in, because he's crowdfunding the project on Kickstarter.

Roger has been an enthusiastic low-budget filmmaker for decades and you may know him as the founder of Moviestuff, a company that produces a range of 8mm and 16mm film scanners. He has the technical chops and determination to pull this off.

Here's his plan: "I will break one 20 minute episode down into separate cuts and do a frame count of their length and use those cuts as illustrated guides to what the animation should look like and how they should move. Like the title sequence I have already produced, the separate sections will then be cut together to match the original sound track, thus preserving the original feel of the show but with the added value of being in dimensional stop motion."

Above, one of the original opening shots. Below, Roger's stop motion title sequence from 2011:

So, what are you waiting for? This is the kind of over-the-top project that Kickstarter does best. To learn more and pledge your support, visit the official Jonny Quest Episode Kickstarter page. Tell 'em Race Bannon sent ya.

"Drive Ya Nuts" Puzzle Does Just That

The Rubik's Cube quickly spun beyond being merely a puzzle. It was a huge fad, a phenomenon, and has since grown to become an icon symbolizing the entire 80s. Not too bad for a frustrating little plastic puzzle. Of course other purveyors of plastic puzzles of the time weren't going to be caught twiddling their cubes. In addition to cheap knockoffs of the cube itself, there was a sudden market for other mind benders, and lots of companies vied for a piece of the puzzle.

Parker Brother's Drive Ya Nuts puzzle is what enthusiasts call an "edge matching" challenge. You can see that each of the large plastic "nuts" has numbers on it, and the goal is to match these up with neighboring pieces. There's only one solution, and it is terribly frustrating. I dislike puzzles where there's no rational way to build to an answer. All you can do with Drive Ya Nuts is keep trying to find the fit. There's no logical solve to find. I even consulted a mathematician. A child has about as much of a chance solving this time-waster as does an adult.

Here's a photo of the puzzle in its solved form (ignore the bright orange mathematician marks). It was less of a brain challenge, and more of a test of patience. I can't say I feel any better seeing it solved than not solved. Here's a link where you can print out your own version and see if it brings you more joy than it did me. There were other Rubik's Cube era puzzles that managed to delight (which we'll examine in future posts), but Drive Ya Nuts still leaves me just scratching my head.

link:

puzzler conquers "Drive Ya Nuts" with charts n' graphs