Three Video Tapes

I was at an interesting garage sale yesterday. This lady had her double garage absolutely filled up to the roof with crap, and she was grabbing random stuff to put out for selling. She had lots of stuff that qualified for the trash can: piles of beat up CDs with no cases - both burned and pre-recorded, knick knacks, and random miscellaneous stacks of video tapes.

So, I started picking through the videos. There was a few exercise tapes, a bunch of unlabelled tapes, and a few with very indescriptive labels containing only the month and the year the tapes were recorded. My guess was that these tapes were home videos, so I naturally grabbed them. Oh yeah, and I grabbed an old Nintendo game to boot - Snakes' Revenge!

She tried to charge me $3.50 for the whole shot. Christ, you'd think this crap was worth a lot of money! I talked her down to a somewhat satisfactory $2.50 for the whole shot. She asked "You ARE going to record over those, aren't you?" Of course I am!

So, I'm going to present to you pictures of the actual tapes, and show you what was on each one...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next week on Classical Gas Emissions, the junk I found while I was out of town on business last week. I found some great stuff!

Contents of the 60G Hard Drive

As promised, here's some interesting stuff I pulled off the 60G hard drive I found...


Psycho Baby


WTF???



And now, here's a comic strip I like to call "Crappy Christmas"


Allright, Let's see what the kids got me this year. Hmmm.... A pair of shorts?


Anything better in here??


Ah, something to hide how utterly disappointed I am.


...and a pair of pants. Yay.


They're XXX Large. Do I LOOK like an XXX Large? Well, maybe I can use them to cover my barbeque in the Winter.


Dear Dad, here's a little something to show just how much we appreciate everything you've done for us. Love, Jason and Kimberly.


A check for $20. Whoopty-do.


Woah, here's the big one! Okay, they were just building me up. I'll
bet it's that new Rigid cordless drill that I've been eyeballing!


Ah FUCK. Allright, I'll pose for the camera with this piece of crap you got me. Why would you get me a barbeque utensil set in the middle of winter when the barbeque is COVERED IN SNOW?


Okay, I'll at least try to look interested in this.


"Made in Hong Kong." Go figure.


Next year I'm going away for Christmas. Las Vegas and a cheap hooker is more fun than getting shitty gifts from the kids.

Fund This Blog! Cast Your Vote!

I don't have a Paypal button on my blog. I don't have Google ads either. All of the money I pour into buying all the crap on here comes out of my own pocket. Sometimes I waste money of pieces of shit such as the Rodney Dean album and the countless answering machine tapes that have old ladies talking on them. In other words, I waste quite a bit of money on duds that REALLY don't make the cut on here. But I think it's worth it for the few treasures that I DO find! Oh yeah, and there's also the cost of gas that I burn to visit my favorite thrift stores. That adds up.

I'm not asking you for money, but I'm asking for your help. I created a video about my Garage Jukebox and submitted it to a Linux contest, and it made it into the finals! First prize is $2000 and a Netbook. Do you know how much Thrift Store and Garage Sale crap you can buy for $2000? LOTS!!!

So, I'm going to make a request of all you. Please go vote for my video "Linux Powered Jukebox" which is located at THIS WEBSITE. In fact, vote twice (close your browser, then re-open it). If you're bored, vote a few times. The more votes, the better my chances are to have a shopping spree at Value Village and the MCC Thrift and Gift shop.

Again, HERE IS THE LINK.


Fun Facts About The Video:

- The song you hear throughout the video was written, recorded and produced by myself. I play every instrument. It's called "Sentimental Chains" and my vocal track was removed for the video.
- The song was recorded in Windows (TRAITOR!) just before I moved over to Linux. This instrumental version was mixed in a piece of Windows software running in WINE, a Linux program that lets you run Windows software.
- The entire video was edited in OpenMovieEditor, a nifty piece of Linux software.
- Here's the blooper reel. It makes more sense if you watch the original...



- That's my two year old at the end of the blooper reel, reciting my entire video dialog.
- Technical details about the Garage Jukebox can be found HERE.

External Hard Drive Made From Junk

I was bored this morning, so I built myself an external hard drive. Besides being bored, I need one for when I go out of town on business next week. I'm taking my laptop, my guitar, and recording some music instead of sitting around bored in my hotel room. My laptop's hard drive isn't large enough to hold a huge pile of .wav files, but a 60G external drive is!

First of all, you may remember version 2.x of my Garage Jukebox. It had three internal DVD drives and one external DVD drive. Since I upgraded the thing and started using flash drives, I no longer had use for the external DVD drive.

The drive was originally a CD burner I bought for $1.00 at a garage sale, and I hacked it into a DVD drive. So here I am yet again, hacking this thing.



This is the picture of it with the original CD burner sitting on top.


If you'd like to build one of these things for yourself, here's a list of crap you'll need:

1 External USB CD/DVD Drive
1 IDE Hard Drive (any size)
1 5 1/4" to 3 1/2" hard drive adapter
1 5 1/4" cooling fan plate
1 Drill (for modifications!)
Misc Screwdrivers

So, I take the thing apart. Here's a couple piccys of what it looks like when it's apart:





You'll notice that all they do is slap a regular IDE drive into the case with a simple adapter board. This particular version has a 'special' IDE cable (You may need to make note of this)

So, I remove the drive and prepare to install the hard drive. To properly get a hard drive into this thing, I needed an adapter that allows a 3 1/2" drive to fit into a 5 1/4" bay. You can usually find these things in old 386 and 486 desktop PCs, either with hard drives or 3 1/2" floppy drives. I believe this particular version had a floppy drive, so I had to drill a couple extra holes to make the hard drive mount properly.



I had to put in a slightly longer IDE cable because the old one wouldn't reach. The easiest way for me to accomplish this is taking an IDE cable out of an old PC and cut off the end that goes to the mother board. In other words, the connectors should be mounted on the same side of the ribbon cable. (sorry I don't have a piccy, the one I took turned out really blurry)



As you can see, I originally put a 5 1/4" bay plate in the front to seal it up nicely. However, the unit got pretty warm inside, so I took a nice 5 1/4" bay plate dual cooling fan thingy that I scrounged out of an old pc, cut the mounts off, and stuck it in place of the plate. It nicely interconnects with the hard drive which powers the whizzing goodness of the cooling fans.



So there it is, sitting nicely beside my laptop.

This drive happily works in Linux, which recognizes it as a 60G removable hard drive. Windows, however recognizes it as a LaCie external CD Burner AND removable media AND a Western Digital hard drive. How goofy is that? Regardless, it works fine in Windows.

Formatting was a bit of a different story. I tried to format the drive through USB in Windows, which took about 20 minutes and then told me that the format had FAILED. So, of course I tried using Linux.

Ubuntu has a tool built into it called "Gparted" which manages partitions, but it can also be used as a Live CD which can you can boot off. Gparted took about five seconds to successfully format the drive through USB.

So now, I have a nifty external USB hard drive to stuff all my .wav files on.

Incidently, I found the 60G hard drive in a box on hard drives I picked up from behind the computer recycling place. There were also a few 'interesting' things on the drive which I will be posting within the next entry or two.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy your new found knowledge and begin scrounging computer parts to make your own external hard drives! This would have cost me a couple hundred bucks brand new, but of course I prefer to spend $1.00, scrounge some parts, and take a bit of time to build something myself.

Baby Torture

This has got to be one of the most evil things I've ever seen...



It's a wall picture of a vast amount of babies in clay plant pots, and they're down right pissed off about it. I don't blame them. I sure wouldn't be happy if someone took my clothes off and placed me in a cold pot.

The person who created this "art" is Anne Geddes. This woman is 'famous' for her photographs of babies, many of which consist of pictures of babies' bare butts. Because Anne Geddes is a woman, she can get away with this because it's art. If a MAN were to take these pictures, it would be child pornography and he'd end up in jail.

But this is worse than child pornography... it's child torture. Let's take a look at some of the victims:



This poor kid is the first one you notice in the picture because he's front and center. I really can't figure out what the selling point of this picture is, since this baby is the star of the show. What would it say about the person who bought it and hung it on their wall? Perhaps "I like torturing helpless humans."



The one in the front here desperately wants to get the fuck out of the pot, because if he doesn't get away from the screamer behind him, he's going to JOIN him.



While the one in front is crying because he's cold and potted, the one behind him has much, much bigger issues. Not only is he having a coniption from being cold, hungry, and trapped in a stupid pot, his parents gave him a fucking mohawk.

If you'd like to buy this sad picture for your infant torture chambre, you can buy the original for around $50 here.

Or you can just happen across a cheap knock-off like mine for five bucks.