Went for a shopping trip with my partner and sister over the weekend, and of course I sneaked in a few thrift stores! - Here's my haul:
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PC Software and games, dvd and a DIY arcade game!
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Paid 6.50 for the DIY Pong game
3.00 for the Wrestlemania DVD
CDs 4 for 1.00
DVDs were 0.50
Went for a shopping trip with my partner and sister over the weekend, and of course I sneaked in a few thrift stores! - Here's my haul:
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PC Software and games, dvd and a DIY arcade game!
.
Paid 6.50 for the DIY Pong game
3.00 for the Wrestlemania DVD
CDs 4 for 1.00
DVDs were 0.50
I bought a secondhand Philips BDP3000/05 earlier this year and when it works, its great! An inexpensive bluray and dvd player - however sometimes it gets stuck on its "STARTING" phase of bootup.
I've gone through so many Google searches and Gemini questions about it and it seems that older Philips models of bluray players had a somewhat known bug in some firmware revisions, and the later/latest update patches the bug - which makes sense, except I can't find the patch for download anywhere!
As I understand it, formatting a standard usb drive to fat32, extracting the file to it and plugging it into the bluray player triggers it to automatically launch straight to the patch, and I believe 1142.1 is the last update Philips put out for the BDP3000 series. While the official Philips website does still have the webpage for the BDP3000/05 (with a downloads and updates tab), the file to download leads to a dead link (this causes an ethernet connection from the player to my router to also not work).
I found a couple of forum pages mention the update, but lead to either dead or questionable links.
Does anyone have the file they could pass onto me, or know of some archived pages that might host the file? It'd be greatly appreciated, I just wanna use my bluray player reliably 😅
Many thanks in advance!
I bought a secondhand Philips BDP3000/05 earlier this year and when it works, its great! An inexpensive bluray and dvd player - however sometimes it gets stuck on its "STARTING" phase of bootup.
I've gone through so many Google searches and Gemini questions about it and it seems that older Philips models of bluray players had a somewhat known bug in some firmware revisions, and the later/latest update patches the bug - which makes sense, except I can't find the patch for download anywhere!
As I understand it, formatting a standard usb drive to fat32, extracting the file to it and plugging it into the bluray player triggers it to automatically launch straight to the patch, and I believe 1142.1 is the last update Philips put out for the BDP3000 series. While the official Philips website does still have the webpage for the BDP3000/05 (with a downloads and updates tab), the file to download leads to a dead link (this causes an ethernet connection from the player to my router to also not work).
I found a couple of forum pages mention the update, but lead to either dead or questionable links.
Does anyone have the file they could pass onto me, or know of some archived pages that might host the file? It'd be greatly appreciated, I just wanna use my bluray player reliably 😅
Many thanks in advance!
Growing up, my parents had a Toshiba tv in our second living space/dining room.
God only knows what happened to it/where it ended up, but going through some old family photos, I found a picture with it in the background.
Out of sheer curiosity, can anyone help identify the model? It'd be neat to put a model name to it! 🤔
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\"picture with it in the background\"
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I asked Copilot if it could scan the photo and identify the model, and it while it couldn't give me an answer, it gave me some suggestions.
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Many thanks in advance! 📺
Over the past couple of months I've been gradually playing through Star Trek Voyager Elite Force (PC) at my mums house.
She and I have a Youtube Channel (it's a family channel where we record gameplay videos, and upload them, nothing fancy) and today I finished Elite Force.
I only acquired the game as I'd started watching Season One of Voyager on dvd and thought I'd give it a go - ended up really enjoying it.
It's a straight forward fps game, centered around the Voyager crew and has the structure of an episode arc.
Controls were standard and felt easy enough to work with, graphics and sound were what was to be expected for a 2000 release (I also played it on a lower/mid specced laptop). The game wasn't too long either, playing for an our or so (which equates to two or three chapters in the game) in seven sittings was enough to finish the story.
One thing that did get quite frustrating was the weapons in the game require both ammunition as well as energy - which get's annoying when you're stacked on ammo, but you run out of weapon energy! Having to use your Phaser while circle strafing around the room hoping to find an energy pack.
Overall, had a good time with this game.
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Sometime last year my mum and I found her old Samsung VP-U10, 8mm video camera - she genuinely thought it'd been lost years back, and I fell in love with it.
We have a handful of home movies (which my uncle converted to digital a long time ago) on 8mm tapes, so getting to watch them on the camera was a different kind of nostalgia!
However .. of course, nothing can be too easy.
The batteries are long dead and don't hold a charge, and when I plugged it into the AC adapter and opened the cassette door, it made the noise of nails on a chalkboard and hasn't closed since!
The spring mechanism for the cassette works seemingly fine, and the tape door clicks shut and begins sliding itself back into the camera, stopping - then ejecting it again.
[ I may do a separate post on this with videos showing its symptoms at a later date ]
I found another VP-U10 on ebay for a decent price, listed as untested and thankfully it works fine. So I was able to run some home movies through it and feel that authenticity of the 8mm film.
Now having a working VP-U10, I absolutely love the idea of actually using it, regularly. Filming family gatherings, BBQs, days out.. to have those kinds of memories on a HD or 4K video on your phone is convenient, HD.., and easy to record/watch back - but the thought of having those memories on an 8mm strip of film, just hits different.
I found a 3pk of sealed tapes and a fresh battery, and intend on keeping the battery charged and a tape at the ready. My biggest worry however, is putting a camera like this back into service and it seeing use, is it not lasting very long.
Of course, nothing lasts forever, especially 30yr old battery driven mechanisms inside an analogue video camera - so I'd love to hear of any hints, tips and tricks to keep it running the best it can, for as long as I can. In particular, any good and easy good-practice way of keeping the gears well lubricated and performing well. (as I think the gears are the fault on my mums original one)
Many thanks in advance! 😊🎥
I have a couple of floppy disk holders lined with 3.5" floppies that I brought home from my mums last year - most of them are blank, but are fully working.
However I have a stack of 10 blue diskettes from "PC Line" - labelled as "3.5 DS DD 1.0Mb"
Whenever I insert any of these into my test-drive (which is a generic USB floppy drive), I get a very slow response and if I run formatting software, it takes 60+ minutes to run a scan before just reporting an error.
I would simply put this down to it being 30 year old hardware, but it seems too coincidental that it's all the blue PC Line diskettes - all my other various brand disks all read and write just fine. I also noted that they are labelled as 1.0Mb opposed to the standard 1.44Mb size, which adds a variable to them.
If I run a format through explorer, it attempts to comply, but then reports the disk is protected(?)
I've attached a couple images below, anyone have any clue or idea what could be causing this or if I'm missing something with these diskettes?
Many thanks in advance!
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I have a couple of floppy disk holders lined with 3.5" floppies that I brought home from my mums last year - most of them are blank, but are fully working.
However I have a stack of 10 blue diskettes from "PC Line" - labelled as "3.5 DS DD 1.0Mb"
Whenever I insert any of these into my test-drive (which is a generic USB floppy drive), I get a very slow response and if I run formatting software, it takes 60+ minutes to run a scan before just reporting an error.
I would simply put this down to it being 30 year old hardware, but it seems too coincidental that it's all the blue PC Line diskettes - all my other various brand disks all read and write just fine. I also noted that they are labelled as 1.0Mb opposed to the standard 1.44Mb size, which adds a variable to them.
If I run a format through explorer, it attempts to comply, but then reports the disk is protected(?)
I've attached a couple images below, anyone have any clue or idea what could be causing this or if I'm missing something with these diskettes?
Many thanks in advance!
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I bought a beautiful 1982 Hitachi color CRT earlier this year and hooked an RF-box to it to actually watch movies/shows/content.
One of the things I really enjoyed watching was The Computer Programme (an educational show from the BBC Archive) - I found the entire series on Youtube in acceptable quality, and found Episode 1 on BBC iPlayer in original master quality (rounded to 720p). Thought I'd download the entire series in this master quality.
This would have been fine, except, BBC iPlayer only seem to have the first episode!
A shame, as it'd been really nice to have the show saved locally in master quality, being able to watch it via my RF-box on my Hitachi TV set.
I've done a brief search online and can't find episode two and onwards in original quality. While I do a deeper dive for them, or a similar show (educational computer show) I thought I'd ask the Reddit community if they know of any/know where to find any online.
[I hope this post makes sense and is worded correctly 😅]
Many thanks in advance! 💾📺
So I hoard too many computer parts and always come up with silly ideas for themed-builds I could piece together. Just recently Scooby-Doo (2002) was on TV and my partner and I watched it.
I mentioned that the Mystery Machine in that movie is my favorite version of the van (crucify me in the comments lol), I just love its slick 2000s look, feels like something out of Pimp My Ride! 😂
Jokingly I said we should buy a van and make our own Mystery Machine - obviously that is far.. far easier said than done, a financial money pit and neither of us drive.. so kind of pointless.
However.. 😏
>I hoard too many computer parts and always come up with silly ideas for themed-builds
I had this vision of a mid-tower case, painted with a teal green and blue Mystery Machine pattern and some 60s flower decals on the sides.
The more I thought of it, the more I warmed to the idea.. and surprisingly, so did my partner.. which was all I needed for the go for launch!
I already have the parts to throw a pretty mid Windows XP machine together, just needed a case. I had a vague idea what kind of case I wanted, but wasn't having much luck finding one that suited the 'look' especially not for the price point I had in mind.
While moving some computer bits around, I remembered that I have a Dell Optiplex 990 SFF that my partner bought me for my birthday a year or two back, that I hadn't made use of (I disassembled it, deep cleaned it and rebuilt it - but outside of that it'd just been sitting pretty), it didn't even have a hard drive installed.
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The Optiplex 990 comes preinstalled with a Dell OEM copy of Windows 7, however a Dell OEM Windows XP CD seems to be completely compatible with it!
Wanted to go with XP, opposed to anything else as the majority of Scooby-Doo PC games are from the 2000s, so XP is the best era-appropriate choice - and its very customizable.
To test the waters, I put a spare 240GB SSD in for the C drive and booted a Dell OEM Windows XP CD and installed it. Then installed a few Scooby-Doo games onto it (the only three I have physical copies of), tweaked the PC and User information to fit the theme, and overall I'm really happy with it!
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Satisfied that the 990 will be more than capable to play Mystery Machine, I went ahead and threw a design together for the side panel.
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I like it.
I really like how simple, yet instantly recognizable it is. The colors, the wave pattern, the Mystery Machine logo. Of course the green and blue color scheme would be mirrored on the rear side panel, the green continuing over the top of the PC and I'll do something with the front grill/panel.
It'd be a combination of the cool exterior paint/decal design and serve as a goto PC for us to play mystery games on. Obviously the Scooby-Doo games are going to all be installed to it, but also, there are hundreds of murder-mystery style games on PC from the 2000s. Point and click games where you gather clues and solve mysteries.. if only we had a Mystery Machine..
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So that's where I'm at with this idea.
I'm happy with the Windows customization, I have enough games to make the project worth being a dedicated machine and that fit the theme - and if I'm going to go all out and decorate the actual PC case, then I think I've got a pretty good starting point for the design!
A while back I saw an ad on Marketplace where someone had listed a "PC Parts Bundle" including a motherboard, cpu, heatsink and fan, memory, some cabling, dvd drive, a network card and a PCI video card.
Initially priced at 20.00 which was not a bad price, I kept my eye on it. After a while they lowered it to 15.00 and eventually 10.00. I was interested and was teetering on messaging them, and then they lowered it to 5.00! 😲 So I promptly messaged and arranged to buy it the following day.
Once I got the bundle home and started going through the parts, I was even happier with it, beyond the price!
The motherboard ended up being an Asus M2N-E SLI (Rev 1.00G). An AM2 board with four DDR2 memory slots, dating it around mid 2000s.
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The CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 (AD04600IAA5CU). Released in May, 2006 confirming the rough date and age of the build these parts were pulled from.
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Four sticks of Crucial Ballistix DDR2 (BL25664AA80A) memory modules (assuming these are 2GB each to total the motherboards maxed out 8GB).
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The cabling ended up just being a really smart Asus brand IDE cable and the wires from a front panel IO - so I'll just chuck those in my parts bin and mayb they'll be useful one day.
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A DVD drive with an IDE connection, LG 6SA-4167B. Dated from July 2005 and Rom Version DL10. (The black front panel, not the beige one).
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The network card is a Netgear WG311T 32-bit Wireless PCI Adapter. A standard PCI card with an external antenna that screws in.
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The video card is personally quite an exciting one, because it's not what I thought it may have been. It's not a video card-in the graphics card sense, it's an analogue and digital video input card. As someone who is/has always been interested in capturing gameplay and old media formats, this is really cool!
It's a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1100 94009 Rev C3A0. A PCI card with FM Radio, RF aerial, S-video, composite, and a line in - inputs. I look forward to throwing this into one of my machines, tracking down the drivers for it and seeing what it can do!
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Overall, really happy with this bundle! I'm sure the seller had it all laying around and just wanted rid of it all. The cpu heatsink was unfortunately missing the plastic bracket that sits on the top side of the motherboard, I've ordered a replacement, so I'll need to wait for that to arrive before I can fully assemble a build with the parts.
And I'm sure at one point in time, all these parts belonged to a pretty solid build. Useful for mid-2000s web browsing, officework, media management, legacy gaming and overall serving as a family PC in the corner of the room.
The Asus M2N-E SLI motherboard does not have any integrated graphics, so there must have been a PCI/PCIE video card that maybe got repurposed or sold off.
What'yall think of these parts, have any experience with any of them? 😁
Whilst out thrifting today, I came across this VTech Smart Start Speller toy computer from 1989. Having never seen one before, the overall design and colored buttons intrigued me enough to stop and look at it.
On looking at it, I realized it was an educational spelling toy - nothing particularly interesting or significant, but the design and form factor of some sort of 1980s POS terminal or something (and imitating a 5 and a quarter inch floppy drive in the top right!!) was just enough for me to cave in and buy it - especially for 5.00!!
Got it home and had a quick look through the instructions and the workbook (which was thankfully included, and even more thankfully hadn't been written, drawn or scribbled in!). It all works and the battery compartment is pristine! Reading both the instructions and workbook, it seems to have a mix of spelling-practice and spelling-games so there is possibly something worth looking into with this - and above all else, I actually kind of love how this thing looks!
These aren't incredibly valuable or rare, but is a good example of something I wouldn't seek out and buy online, but to find it randomly on a thrift.. yeah.. why not.
What'yall think?
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