Peter Hosey

@boredzo

Also @boredzo@mastodon.social.

they/them
boredzo.org/

Breaker of binaries. Sweary but friendly. See also @TheMatrixDotGIF and @boredzo-kitchen-diary.

Mastodon

mastodon.social/@boredzo

Blog

boredzo.org/blog/

Peter Hosey @boredzo9/1/2023, 8:37 PM

luna @lunasorcery

luna @lunasorcery9/1/2023, 3:27 PM

what’s the oldest man-made thing you own?

Peter Hosey @boredzo9/1/2023, 8:37 PM

A Dictaphone wax-cylinder player

(Picture stolen from Google Image Search, as I don't have a photo of the unit I inherited and it's not somewhere I can easily get to at the moment)

I don't know why or how my parents had this. Thrift store find? Inherited from an ancestor? Leftover plunder from my parents' secret past life raiding the high seas? At least two of those are credible guesses.

These days, some folks use “dictaphone” as a generic term for a tape recorder, particularly of the type that accepted microcassettes and later evolved into digital voice recorders. But before that, the Dictaphone was this thing.

I also have a collection of wax cylinders that, as far as I know, came with it. I have never attempted to play any of them, on the assumption that doing so would permanently fuck up whatever recording is engraved.

#Dictaphone #voice recorder #wax cylinders

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in reply to @lunasorcery's post:

Discontinued @Discontinued9/1/2023, 3:30 PM

My grandfather's Gibson from the early sixties

Lapis the Nevrean @lapisnev9/1/2023, 3:31 PM

I have a Timex Sinclair 1000 in a box somewhere. I have never successfully powered it and don't have a compelling enough reason to bodge a power supply onto it but it looks cool

Thew @Thew9/1/2023, 3:37 PM

Mechanical calculator from 1953. Which is wild because it beats everything else in my apartment by like 40+ years lol. Like I think second place is some SNES carts from the early 90s

Jeran @Jeran9/1/2023, 4:00 PM

silver Roman coin from Hadrian's reign in 120 AD! I have a few old coins, but thats definitely the oldest. There's also some prehistoric pottery sherds in my storage somewhere that were uncovered out of context, but definitely OLD.

ana @totebug9/1/2023, 4:07 PM

my dad went to Rome for work when I was a child and he took a literal piece of rock out of a wall of the colosseum and gave it to me so I guess that lol

Flaming Spork (tired era)@spork9/1/2023, 4:26 PM

currently, my grandfather's Yashica-C camera

liffy 💜@lifning9/1/2023, 4:45 PM

grandfather's pocketwatch

stroggo @stroggo9/12/2023, 4:32 AM

A Greek stater from ~334 BCE. One side depicts a Chimeria, and on the reverse a dove with a wreath.

It was a gift from my paediatrician, before my family left the UK. I never realised the significance of it until I was in my teens. Quite the gesture 😌

Daniel Martin @fizbin9/16/2023, 1:04 PM

Were it not for a book I have from 1854 (Intellectual Arithmetic for American Youth, on the Analytic Method), I'd say the core portion of our house which dates to 1860.

@rrika9/18/2023, 10:22 AM

probably my father’s Sharp PC-1403

in reply to @boredzo's post:

jckarter @jckarter9/1/2023, 8:59 PM

I wonder, could you use photogrammetry to scan the cylinders at high enough resolution to model playing them and extract the audio?

Peter Hosey @boredzo9/1/2023, 9:02 PM

I also wonder this. I know that technology exists for vinyl records (and is bloody expensive) so presumably it could be adapted.

(one web search later) Looks like that is a thing, at least for professional archivists: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-librarys-mysterious-trove-of-wax-cylinders-will-soon-break-its-century-long-silence-180979982/

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