Category: Tech

Old German Volk Tale

There’s still plenty more here that requires my attention, both paperwork and household repairs. But I’ve gotten through enough of it that I can return to doing some light blogging. I’m hoping to be able to also indulge some light jogging this year.

My German-made Thorens turntable is now 39 years old, and so far it has required only minor maintenance that I have taken care of myself. This video is about restoring a German-made 1959 Volkswagen. Whatever happened to white sidewall tires?

When my parents ran a florist shop in Wisconsin for a few years, my father bought a ’59 Volkswagen bus for the business. There’s a brief glimpse of one that looks exactly like it at 6:00 into the video. There was no gas gauge, and when the gas started to run out you had to turn a valve on the floor to open a small auxiliary tank, then look for a gas station.

You Can Get Some Satisfaction

I have just made one of my occasional checks of YouTube to see if the complete Rolling Stones in Mono playlist is still there, and yes it is. The Rolling Stones have 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube, but I am one of only three subscribers to the mono collection. This is crazy! It isn’t a playlist that some fan threw together, it’s official. I bought the set for $110 as a collection of 96 kHz/24-bit FLAC files. In MP3 quality it will cost you a hundred bucks, and the CD set goes for over $200. But here it is, complete for free.

The attention paid to curating and mastering this set in original, true mono was unprecedented. Read all about it here: https://theaudiophileman.com/stones-mono/

Touch and Gone

“Everything I touch gets ruined!” – Charlie Brown

All of the gadgets below have been de-registered and retired. Not shown are my first three Rokus, or the first two Amazon Fire TV streamers that came after them. And people laughed at my reluctance to get a smartphone, which I finally did a year ago.

Discarded electronics
Lenovo Yoga Tab 3, Amazon Fire HDX 8.9″, Kindle Keyboard, Fire TV stick (2), Fire HDX 7″

For one reason or another, these devices are no longer useable. The Kindle Keyboard’s battery died, and I bravely replaced it, only to learn the battery wasn’t the problem. A Fire TV update came with an audio sync problem. For video streaming I am now back with Roku.

The Lenovo Yoga Tab 3, that I really enjoyed using, got me through my many trips to Arizona, starting five years ago. It was perfect for watching video on the plane, and on land with a Bluetooth keyboard it was my laptop substitute.

So much electronic waste! I wonder if Best Buy still offers recycling? On the positive side, the Oontz Angle Bluetooth speaker I bought in 2014, that I also took to Arizona, is still going strong.