Ok everyone, you know the drill. Spring Cleaning 2023.
For all the past spring cleanings, the stuff I found was brought home in my backpack on my bike, or just by carrying it home and walking, and that meant that I could never travel as far as I wanted to. But this year, things have changed, and I now have a bike trailer.
But I know what you're thinking, you must have THICK legs if you can move that trailer, which I don't. I'll admit, I cheated. I used my friend's ebike, which was actually the best biking experience I've ever had in my life. But that's for a future page, let's get to the stuff.
This was one of the few spring cleanings that I didn't actually find as much on the first day as on the second day, but here's what day 1 had to offer.
In front of my house there's this wooden retaining wall thing that had been in the process of falling over for the past 30 years... and we hadn't really done anything about it because it hadn't fallen over yet, and even though it looked like ass, it was still somewhat structurally sound. The street view imagery above was from 2020, and looked somewhat better than it did by 2023, but you get the idea.
But one day, on January 29, 2023, I awoke to find it.. fallen over on the ground. I didn't think much of it, since I had been expecting it for the last 6 years, but opun closer inspection, it was evident that this was no natural event. Someone did this - deliberately.
(41 minutes) Merry Christmas! This holiday season, dvd3000 is unable to convert VHS tapes to Digital, but a surprise gift from... SANTA!??! -turns out to be exactly what we've been looking for for 427 years.
I like messing around with old web browsers, but I hadn't messed around with Mosaic before, because it ran on Unix. Well, there was Pathworks Mosaic on Windows, but it absolutely sucks.
So I pretty much forgot about Mosaic until I heard about Floodgap Mosaic which is a fork of Mosaic with much better OS support and rendering, which was originally created to serve as a historical simulation, as well as a light, basic web browser for very old machines.
And some more poking around on the web led me to this page of running a modded version of Floodgap Mosaic on OpenBSD, and I already had an old laptop running OpenBSD, so I figured I'd give it a shot.
I've always liked the aesthetic of the old Windows and OS design stuff, with images like the good ol' Windows 95Setup background, but I haven't really though of it much more until I read How to Add Color to a Monochrome Bitmap on Razorback95's Guides.
That page is a great explanation for something I didn't even know you could do, add color to a monochrome bitmap with no color map!
I first heard about SSTV from covid2009 on neocities, with a page full of memes and other pix transmitted through sound.
What I get from the page, is that SSTV, or Slow Scan Television is a picture transmission method used by amateur radio operators.
You can also use SSTV just to encode images into audio, which can be stored on whatever audio format, and be played back to be decoded.
After hearing about this, I started doing some messing around with encoding and decoding SSTV signal using MMSSTV and decoded with RXSSTV on Windows.
Well, I don't know anything about all this HAM radio stuff, all I know is you can send images with sound, so here's some of my fun with SSTV.
For most people, spring cleaning is a time to clean out and refresh your house, getting rid of all that junk that's cluttering up your spaces. But for people like me, it's a great time to find cool stuff by digging through random peoples trash! You know what they say, "one man's trash is another man's... trash!"
So, finally, after 2 years, the official city spring cleaning season has returned. In the 2020 and 2021 seasons, I did look around, but found absolutely nothing. It was either that people were just desperate to get rid of some junk after 2 years, or I wasted more of my luck, but more junk found its way into the garage this year. This pic shows everything I picked up this season, but you should see the pics below for closeups of the stuff.
The Bt878 Analog Capture Device
New Garage Photos!
Find the Coleslaw Eater
