The factory i work at occasionally still uses them for delivering tests to the lab, pretty cool to hear them swish around in the pipes.

I’m not crazy old, but I’m old enough that the supermarket I went to as a kid had these at all the checkout aisles and the cashiers would use them to send cheques/reciepts/ whatever.

It was awesome to see.

Some downtown big cities had the buildings interconnected.

Big hospitals still have them to send medications and random lightweight stuff around the complex. My wife has worked in two large hospitals that had pretty extensive tube systems, used especially with pharmacy.

Hate someone in the office? Pour hot coffee into the container and send it to your victim.

Yes although I would argue cars and highways are just evolutions of horse carts on dirt roads, a way older technology than trains.

Trains aren’t old tech though. Just tech that got pushed out by auto-maker lobbying. In places (like Japan, or China, or parts of Europe) where they kept evolving they only got better.

YEYEYEYEYEYEYE

One of my dream projects would be to get a dead iMac G3 and make a modern-day sleeper build inside it. It was honestly the COOLEST a computer has EVER looked.

I bought the translucent nitro purple back plate. Very easy to install.

I miss plastic electronics. Oddly enough glass and metal feel more fragile.

YOOOOO that purple one! I wonder how hard it would be to do this to mine… time to add this to the Christmas list lol

My kid’s car is like this. I’ve been calling it retro-futuristic, which I think is a pretty apt description.

Many receivers and amplifiers still have VFDs to this day. I still wonder why, LCD has to be significantly cheaper.

They look cool as hell though, so I appreciate that they go the extra step.

VFDs are the shit!

Newer, but I quite like the gentle amber LCD (not LED) displays of my car. At night it’s bright enough and sharp enough without being visually loud. I wish more of these displays were still being made, I’d love to use them in car-centric Arduino projects and data displays that would be consulted at night or that sort of thing.

I always ask my friends “How the fuck do you live like this?” when I hop into a car and the music UI is a garish color searing itself into my retinas permanently.

Thankfully, advertising companies have identified this marginal comfort I find in the warm interior lighting of my car and have proceeded to mount insultingly blinding screens all over the city.

The city being the midrise urban sprawl north of Beirut. What do you mean regulations on brightness habibi? You think you live in Paris? Imagine this: half the street is unlit because the power is out, but the advertising company’s invasive bullshit budget™ has enough foreign cash to burn to keep generators running all night for these shitty ads. Gotta beam an extra few kilowatts of photons straight into this sleepy driver’s eyeballs while they operate a motor vehicle, on a highway that a lot of people cross by foot. There’s a special on fish at the fancy supermarket, how will I live without that knowledge?

Thankfully, the “state” of Israel has identified that the civilian structures of Lebanon mildly inconvenienced me, and has proceeded to

I fucking hate cars, including electric ones… And I still agree. Combustion engines are cool as hell.

Suck, squeeze, bang, blow

Please tell me this doesn’t run on gas! Gas explodes, you know?

And the fact is “mechanic automated” system for me is what makes it even cooler. All you had to do to start is twist it a couple revolutions and bang, it works as long as you have fuel because everything simply works. Of course, today you have electronic fuel injection and so one, but if you want you can make it works just with a lot of metal to do the right parts.

Man, I’ll miss combustion engines (but I hope its use ends ASAP because planet can’t wait anymore)

As a subset of this, the fact that carburators worked as well as they did, until we had the technology to invent the simpler fuel injector, I think is pretty cool.

Drag disagrees. If you want transportation with fire, ride a dragon. No need to pollute the earth. The emissions make it uncool, just like the ridiculous Mad Max cars.

I never knew the complexity of ICE until watching the Garbage Time YouTube channel. They repair old cars (and sometimes break them to fix them later) and show the whole process, but do it as a hobby, so it’s all for entertainment.

This was a really cool video!

Considering LEDs are so good at producing a very tight wavelength, I wonder if this could be replicated with more energy efficient lamps.

Or if non visible spectrum lights can be used to make similar alpha channel masks that don’t affect lighting the scene.

Also, when they catastrophically failed they wound up looking like industrial lovecraftian horrors and produced some of the loudest non-nuclear man made explosions.

None of which is a good thing, but is still pretty cool.

Also:

FUCKING LASERS DUDE! Lasers will never NOT be cool.

And the technology has evolved that I can actually record and re-record to these plastic discs using lasers and it all fits inside a 1cm-tall drive that sits on my desk. And if the manufacturer uses high-quality materials, the disc will last hundreds of years.

Also some discs I can then either ink-print or laser-print on the top of it? Simply amazing.

This sounds like a gadget specifically designed to make people fall off their bikes and break their bones.

… Cool.

To make sure I understand, you reached back and grabbed those levers while pedaling and riding the bike?

How many people lost fingers by sticking them into the spokes, I wonder?

Honestly those are terrifying. I can’t imagine doing any of that whilst on the move.

The fuck!

Hi there

… We (as in humanity) made a lot of cool shit before we realised it was slowly killing us.

You’ve set off something in the woodworker’s side of my brain.

There’s a style of furniture called Arts & Crafts. The Arts & Crafts movement was bigger than furniture, but in the furniture world there was kind of a clap back at both ostentatious Victorian furniture a la Chippendale, and the mass produced crap the industurial revolution brought forth. So a style of well built, hand made furniture arose. The joinery was often exposed and in fact celebrated as features of the piece; through tenons would stand out proud, pinned joints would be done in contrasting wood exposed on the face side of the piece. I’ve heard it described as “in your face joinery.” The intention is to say “Look at this table. This table was not manufactured in a factory, it was built in a workshop. Look. At. It.” In the United States this movement often went for an aesthetic reminiscent of the furniture and fittings of old Spanish missions, so over here we often call it Mission furniture.

Compare this to the shaker style of furniture. The shakers were a sect of Christianity who were so celibate that men and women were required to use separate staircases, which is why this paragraph is largely written in the past tense. They led very modest lives in communal villages, and were known for their simple and yet extremely well made wooden furniture. A shaker table is the universal prototype table. It has legs, a top, and whatever apron or other structure is required to hold it together. Decoration was often limited to choosing pleasing proportions and maybe tapering the legs. I think a shaker craftsman would see the exposed joinery of the Mission style as sinfully prideful.

I got one that slid up to reveal the keyboard after watching The Matrix, and I thought it was the coolest phone ever. I still have it, and I still think it is pretty cool.

Edit: it’s not an actual keyboard though, it’s a phone keypad for dialing or sending texts with t9 input.

It was the Samsung A737.

It looks like this closed

And here it is open

Pictures under glass: literally the only affordance anyone has now for device interaction

Mine folds in half, so that’s kinda cool

Somebody answer the phone

Micheal Fisher’s kbin account.