Puzzlement

[ellarien]

I have spent much of the day doing battle with the study closet, which as I seem to remember mentioning recently is a bit of a glory hole. Among the things I found back there -- along with floppy disks and packaging for software that ran on long-gone computers and mysterious redundant cables -- was my small collection of commercial PAL VHS tapes. It's small because in the days when I had a use for such things I had much less space and less disposable income than I have now, and it's here at all -- along with the couple of hundred lovingly-labeled home-taped cassettes -- because when I moved here I thought it would be easier to find a multiformat VCR than it turned out to be. (I did once see one in a store, but I couldn't quite see my way to paying $1000 for it.)

So, most of these I recognize; the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Stargate movies, of course, Hitchcock's Spellbound, which is my all-time favorite classic movie, four random Star Trek movies, and a copy of the BBC The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that was a freebie from the Radio Times. The one that puzzles me, though, is the solitary volume 6 of Babylon 5. I liked B5, but not enough to spend a month's salary and six feet of shelving on collecting the whole series on tape, so the existence of this orphaned volume is somewhat baffling.

Incidentally, it occurred to me when I found a small stash of unused CD-RW disks that I haven't used one of those in years. I used to use them for scratch purposes, back around the of turn the century but before I started carrying a laptop to and fro; these days flash drives have pretty much usurped that function, being much more convenient though still somewhat more expensive on a dollar/megabyte basis.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

mysterious redundant cables

I'm sure they breed in the dark boxes and drawers where they live. We have all sorts of connecting cables that we have never used and now can't even remember what they belonged to in the first place.

I only ever had one or two CD-RW disks. I briefly experimented with them, but they only seemed to work on the computer that had made them. But perhaps I was formatting them wrong? Anyway, the appearance of flash drives was a big improvement.

[ellarien]

I think the oddest cables in my collection were probably meant for connecting various cameras to the TV, but I seem to have more USB cables than gadgets to go with them. There's also enough spare coax cable to run the TV signal to the other end of the apartment, but I think I remember where that came from.

There used to be a special format for CD-RW that let you treat the disk like a giant floppy, but it wasn't very backward-compatible. It was useful for me because for a while I had a home computer and access to a work computer that could do that, until the one at work got unreliable. Also, I think that some very old CD-R drives (like the one on my 1997 laptop) couldn't read CD-RW disks at all -- not reflective enough, or something.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

It must have been something like that. I just know that some years ago I made a CD-RW disk to send some photos to my daughter and her computer wouldn't read it. After that I shifted to using CD-R for archiving and various memory sticks for transferring stuff between computers. Currently one of my favourite gadgets is my mobile HD which will hold all the stuff from my work area in the main college, plus a goodly number of photos. This means that whichever out-station I'm teaching at, I have all my resources with me.

This is so much better than scrambling through the heap of floppies trying to find the one that had the vital spreadsheet file on it. :)