People are wasteful

[Carmine]

I found this set at the curb near my rental house.

Since my last tenants threw away an entire computer system/monitor (and a $300 carpet cleaning machine that works fine) I already had a cord, the only thing that was missing from this 1990 RCA.

I plugged it in, and what did I get? An excellent picture, in a perfect condition swivel cabinet. I don't get people... I at least would have donated this thing to charity I see so much nice stuff on the curbs, kids toys, etc. that I'm sure some needy family could use. Shame on them.

Of course, I made sure to get the truck and car in the picture.

[Carmine]

Better screen shot with our worthless Channel 38... Great signal, nothing but HSN crap all day!

...Almost forgot, on the off-chance, anybody got anything old they'd like to swap before I put it on Craigslist.org?

Recently saw a similar tallboy RCA like that at an estate sale. They wanted $50 and I was sorely tempted......but I have more than enough modern sets. I suspect that they ended up giving it away as there was NO interest in it at all. That's one handsome set though!

Anthony

[maxm]

A few months ago, I found a 1992 20" Sony Trinitron set just half a block down from me in the alley. I expected it to be broken, but it works perfectly and is now being used daily in my grandma's Dining Room.
Then there is the year old HP priner somebody threw out because they installed the new ink cartridge wrong.
And the 10 working computer monitors...
The best was finding about 2000 old and some very rare Jazz and Blues LPs. You think somebody wold donate these, but they put them in a bunch of plastic garbage bags and put them out. Nobody would have know what was in the bags if I hadn't seen an album poking out of one of them.
I could go on...but everybody here probably has something that can add....

Thanks for listening

[RetroHacker]

I agree with you 100% - people are extremely wasteful. Not too long ago, I met someone throwing away a really nice (forget the brand) 27" TV, and I asked what was wrong with it (planning on dragging it home and fixing it). Nothing. He said it worked perfectly, he even gave me the remote, with good batteries in it to boot! Apparently they got a nice new TV (probably one of those ugly HD things, ugh) and didn't want this one. He said he'd tried donating it to Goodwill, but they wouldn't take it - apparently they already had too many TV's. So, he was throwing it away. It's a nice set, table model, simulated woodgrain sides, stereo, with video inputs, cable tuner, remote, external speaker jacks, the works. Not a thing wrong with it either. I've got it in the basment/workshop now, haven't had time to set it up where I want it yet, that sucker's heavy, but it's nice. It'll be a nice upgrade to what I've got there now, an old 15" Colortrak with a limping picture tube.

Also, a couple months ago, I found a computer monitor on the side of the road, in one of the 'poorer' neighborhoods at that. It was a 17" flat CRT Viewsonic, not more than three years old. I dragged it home, and it worked absolutely flawlessly. Nothing wrong with it. Clear, sharp picture, nice and bright, and the casing looked brand new. It's a flat tube monitor, so I don't particularly like using it (makes me feel like I'm falling into the screen, I like curved tubes much better), but it works great on one of the extra machines I've got hanging around here.

I can't believe the things that people just throw away. Now some things, like my Grundig hi-fi, I can understand, some people just don't appreciate the finer things in life, but the new stuff, the stuff that's still very recent and very functional, that's what I don't get. Oh well. Their loss, our gain. Now let me know the next time someone you know is throwing out a round color set, and I'll be there in a heartbeat <grin>.

-Ian

What do you expect from a generation that woulnd't know quality electronics if it bit their @$$?

[RetroHacker]

UncleDon
What do you expect from a generation that woulnd't know quality electronics if it bit their @$$?

Too true. Technically, I'm from that generation, but I somehow managed to miss that aspect of it... I could go on for hours complaining about modern electronics, my favorite things to complain about being computer keyboards, television sets, phones, VCR's, any consumer audio equipment, contol layout/insanity on consumer electronics... the list goes on. But, it seems that these days, new is synonymous with better/best, and anything that even looks a _liittle_ outdated is 'ancient'. But, from what I have seen, newer is rarely better, and it typically breaks so quickly anyway that some of my friends are astonished that I've got stuff made in the 60's that still works. My generation has been conditioned to believe this, and conditioned by the media to flock like sheep to the next 'improvement'. Never mind that nobody will ever _use_ picture-in-picture, or the fact that having a TV on top of which nothing can be stacked is just plain silly and made even sillier by the requirement that the remote work so that any functions beyond on/off can be accessed, but the mass of cattle that is the American population will stampede for it.

What's even worse is when people will refuse things if they're not new or hip enough. A friend of mine was complaining that he didn't have a TV in his bedroom at his new apartment, and that he didn't want to go out and buy one. I offered him an extra set I had here, an RCA XL-100 15" color set, complete with a cable box to compensate for the knob tuning. He didn't want it. Some people would rather live without than have something deemed outdated or inconvenient.

-Ian

[RichPA]

But ... there is some perfectly good stuff that people won't even steal! CRT computer monitors are a prime example - I've found that you can't even give them away. And stuff with intermittent problems - that might even be accidentally "fixed" when whatever it is is plopped down on the curb - is often not worth fixing if you can't do it yourself. I had a 26" Mitsubishi TV with intermittently bad vertical hold, and a repair estimate of $250! I took it to our local recycling center's annual electronics recycling day, but if not for that it would have ended up on the curb. I also took some old audio stuff that I would have offered here for the price of shipping if I'd known about AK at the time.

Not to deny that people are wasteful, they definitely are, but sometimes I've left pretty good stuff at the curb on our twice-a-year "Riff-Raff Day" (aka "bulk waste collection) in hopes that one of the scavengers roaming around would take it and get some use from it. What's really a shame is that we don't have really effective ways to get cast-offs to those who might make use of them.

[RetroHacker]

Yeah, I go out scavenging on bulk pickup day - being an electronics hacker, I've gotten some interesting things that only needed minor repairs. Yes, the flakey/intermittent stuff is one of those things that is not worth the expense of repair if you can't fix it yourself. But... this brings us back to our wasteful throw-away society. If stuff was made better, it wouldn't break so easily, but if it was made better, it would be more expensive, and would be worth fixing. But, with the way things get outdated and cast off these days, it makes sense, make lots of cheap crap, with the intent that it be thrown out in a couple years when it breaks.

Unfortunately, there's really no way to really make sense of it, prove that one method is better than another, or even make good sense of it. Yeah, stuff could be made better, but then less people would be able to afford it, but then again, there would be more jobs in the manufacture, design and repair of such items. I'm sure it goes hand in hand with the global economy, etc, etc. In other words, impossible to understand or predict. But it's still something to complain about nonetheless.

-Ian

[asynchronousman]

I got a General Instruments digital cable box with Dolby Digital 5.1 for a dollar at the auction...Now I know that it's probably locked up after being dormant like the cable tech I've known for 20 years says and that it's not used on our system therefore not addressable, but there's a perfectly good chipset in there and I could build a nice outboard decoder if I had the skills...

[asynchronousman]

Originally Posted by RetroHacker

Too true. Technically, I'm from that generation, but I somehow managed to miss that aspect of it... I could go on for hours complaining about modern electronics, my favorite things to complain about being computer keyboards, television sets, phones, VCR's, any consumer audio equipment, contol layout/insanity on consumer electronics... the list goes on. But, it seems that these days, new is synonymous with better/best, and anything that even looks a _liittle_ outdated is 'ancient'. But, from what I have seen, newer is rarely better, and it typically breaks so quickly anyway that some of my friends are astonished that I've got stuff made in the 60's that still works. My generation has been conditioned to believe this, and conditioned by the media to flock like sheep to the next 'improvement'. Never mind that nobody will ever _use_ picture-in-picture, or the fact that having a TV on top of which nothing can be stacked is just plain silly and made even sillier by the requirement that the remote work so that any functions beyond on/off can be accessed, but the mass of cattle that is the American population will stampede for it.

What's even worse is when people will refuse things if they're not new or hip enough. A friend of mine was complaining that he didn't have a TV in his bedroom at his new apartment, and that he didn't want to go out and buy one. I offered him an extra set I had here, an RCA XL-100 15" color set, complete with a cable box to compensate for the knob tuning. He didn't want it. Some people would rather live without than have something deemed outdated or inconvenient.

-Ian

Even if a gun was bad I could crank it down to B/W and DX with it or watch it in the workshop area. BTW The little Sony thread mentions my KV-1214 (mine as I bought it for less than $5.00 two daze ago) and I'm going to go look at the little screwdriver-turned knobs in the hopes somebody played with them (HEEHEE they can't seem to keep their hands off of them you know) and I don't have to dig in there looking for bad caps

[RetroHacker]

I generally pick up the old cable boxes that I see at thrift stores, flea markets, etc. These aren't the digital kind though, they're just the old outboard tuner type, that are nothing more than a VCR tuner without the VCR. Perfect for all the old television sets I keep dragging home. While the old boxes are technically property of the cable company, they don't care. Time Warner has been dumping hundreds and hundreds of the old analog, and even the older digital boxes lately. They could care less if you had a few old boxes kicking around. Now, attempting to decode digital cable and steal service, that they might frown on...

Some of the newer old cable boxes had composite video output, and the TV in my main shop area is actually an old Amdek composite computer monitor connected to an old cable box. Works perfectly. I've been meaning to take one of those boxes apart, to see how hard it will be to add composite video _input_ to them. I've added composite video and line level audio inputs to tube type televisions before, it's really not all that hard, but keeping the signal isolated from the hot chassis is a pain - don't want to go feeding power into whatever signal source you're trying to patch in, or zap the living hell out of yourself either. Those old cable boxes have power transformers, so adding inputs won't be a big deal, provided I can get the signal interfaced properly, and biased correctly for the existing circuitry. Sure I could just go and buy an RF modulator at Rat Shack, but what's the fun in that?

-Ian

[asynchronousman]

I don't give a damn about cable. If it contains AC-3 stuff it will be nice to use in HT or HDTV homebrew (god, SOMEBODIES gotta come up with one of those). I have 30 channels analog or digital OFF THE AIR...

[mbates14]

if thats a CTC167, i need the chassis. The chassis in mine is gone. vertical will not work no matter what I do, keeps blowing out the vert IC.

[RetroHacker]

Even if a gun was bad I could crank it down to B/W and DX with it or watch it in the workshop area. BTW The little Sony thread mentions my KV-1214 (mine as I bought it for less than $5.00 two daze ago) and I'm going to go look at the little screwdriver-turned knobs in the hopes somebody played with them (HEEHEE they can't seem to keep their hands off of them you know) and I don't have to dig in there looking for bad caps

I was suprised at this little RCA, it seems to work pretty well, I haven't done anything to it other than clean it, it warms up pretty quick and the picture is decent. The tube seems fine, I need to spray out the tuner some more though, but I figured - hey, Channel 3 works, good enough for use with a cable box. Amazing what people throw out, but at the same time, it seems that nobody even wants to think about a television with knob tuning. If it's not cable ready, most people don't want it. Not that there's much of anything on cable worth watching, but hey, they've got TVLand and Sci-Fi.

I keep doing things like that too - hey, I can use this in the shop area, so what if the convergence is a little off. Hey, this set would be great for the shop, so what if there's a missing knob? Now I've got these little TV's perched on top of shelves, off to the side, hooked up, I guess with the intent that I'll watch them while I'm working. I don't know really, I generally don't use more than one of them, but hey, I might... I normally listen to music while I work though, I've got an old receiver down there connected to an old set of TV rabbit ears, a record changer out of an old Magnavox solid state console rigged to run alone, albiet naked, propped up on scrap wood, and a computer CDROM drive that I'm using as an audio CD player. I've since fixed up or found a lot of nicer hardware, and plan on fixing up that set-up, but just don't seem to get around to it. Actually, there are a LOT of things I need to get done around here, and a lot of things I want to fix up to make my shop area more useful (right now it's a disaster, picture a hurricane hitting an electronics store). And there's one thing that I need now, and I need it badly, but unfortunately I can't really buy more of it - space. Why can't there be a way to store stuff in another dimension, or slightly out of phase with normal matter? Quantum storage...

Hmm, once again random ramblings of a madman. I really need to get off my butt and get working on these things, but no... I sit here and refresh AudioKarma looking for something else to ramble about.

Ugh - help!

-Ian