Boomers
Old fashioned record players
78 shellacs are fucking amazing. to hear sound from a record where everyone, everyone, involved is long dead is like magic.
I’ve got some 78s from late 1800s early 1900s. every time I listen to them it boggles my mind.
Combustion engines
Combustion engines are used to ship cargo worldwide, mine all the material for everything we use, among other things that require dense energy storage and quick refills of fuel. They won’t be going away anytime soon
Fax machines.
Also maddening and frustratingly!
Fax may outlast landline telephony.
It already has. Vast majority of companies still handling fax are using VoIP fax modems with digital receivers that turn it into a PDF. I haven’t seen a functioning copper landline probably since 2015…
They still have some uses (Invidious: mirror selection or Nadeko).
The amount of “modern” companies I had to fax shit too when my dad died was infuriating! Hyundai, Target, etc etc etc. Email is a thing dumb ass companies! Fuck me.
Many government departments and private companies consider faxed documents as a duplicated “original”, instead of a copy. Because that totally makes sense.
IT MEANS FASCIMILE GOD DAMNIT
Totally… 🤦
I can’t exactly recommend the service which can be a bit annoying but clicksend allows you to send faxes and actually letters for pretty cheap. the letter thing is pretty nice when something demands a physical one. you upload a pdf and it gets printed and mailed out. fax works same way. fax is way cheaper obviously.
Why would someone need that instead of just printing it and mailing it themselves?
just faster. you have to have a printer and paper for it and envelopes and stamps. with the service you just upload the pdf and put in the address and hit send. I mean I think most could see how it can be useful. Bit cheaper to print and fold and seal and stamp and drop in the box but with as unoften as I need to send a physical letter I like it.
Then you need a printer, printer ink, an envelope, and stamps. If you really don’t send mail out that frequently, I can see the appeal of it. Could easily be cheaper. I also imagine it might have some utility to ADHD folks.
It just occurred to me: I doubt my 26 year old son has ever sent anything in the mail himself. If he wants to send a message, it’s email or text, and if he wants to send a gift, he’ll order it on Amazon and have it delivered. I’ll have to ask him if he’s ever actually mailed anything.
winfax.exe is looking at you and sneering…
we did all this, in a cave, with a 14.4 baud modem on windows 3.0
Can’t exactly trusr anyone with such sensitive documents that I’d have to print out and mail.
Why did target and Hyundai need to know your dad died?
He had accounts with them, that’s part of the probate process. Letting them know.
Did you know that it would have been possible for Abraham Lincoln to send a fax to a samurai?
I think the reason I didn’t know it is because it isn’t true.
Unless you’re a Lincoln truther who thinks he wasn’t killed in 1865 way before fax machines were available in the USA and Japan.
The first fax machine was invented in 1843.
But of course they had to wait for the second one to be invented…
there was a period of around 12 years where it would have been possible, given that they had both been in scotland at the time. between 1853 and 1865 it would have to have been an ex-samurai.
I see the potential for a historical fiction masterpiece here
Erotic Lincoln-Samurai Fax Fiction
Faxes are common in healthcare facilities and hospitals. I would imagine that they’re safer when it comes to sensitive data.
Not really safer, they just work with the existing infrastructure. Personally, I think there’s still a place for fax, it’s essentially a convenient way to scan and transmit, and these days you can get them to your email or phone (not in healthcare because that’s not HIPAA compliant). Sure, not anybody’s first choice, but I think it’s still valid.
With a mail-enabled printer, you can send your scan directly to an email address.
I fail to see what you’d need a fax for.It’s only convenient if you have access to a fax machine, which the majority of us don’t
They are analog modems on a telephone line. There is no encryption at all, because they still need to be compatible with fax machines from the 1970s.
There was also an exploit where someone sent a manipulated image via fax, which would exploit an old bug in a jpg library that is used in the software stack, so you can run your own code.
comes to sensitive data.
not really. there’s no encryption to faxing, and the software to fax from pc’s directly (enabling faked records for example) has been ubiquitous since the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFax
THANK YOU.
You know another fun thing that can happen? A doctor moves practices and changes fax numbers, and the old number gets assigned to a new, completely unrelated non-medical group. But no one told the medical entity that sends faxes, and no one updated the relevant records. All of a sudden several months worth of PHI has been getting sent to a women’s clothing store.
Fax in the medical field needs to die. Between the possibility of this happening, higher probability of transmission failure, paper (where offices are still using physical faxes) getting misplaced before getting filed in charts, etc., it’s just a plain bad way to send medical information in 2026.
Edit: OH, and don’t get me started on fancy, marketing-designed lab reports that use colored indicators to communicate treatment-critical information that no one checked for legibility in black and white, yet still get sent by fax. Like, fucking WHAT??
on’t get me started on fancy, marketing-designed lab reports that use colored indicators to communicate treatment-critical information that no one checked for legibility in black and white, yet still get sent by fax. Like, fucking WHAT??
holy fuck
Film production and development. Yesterday I dropped off a couple rolls of 120 film shot on a 60 year old camera at a lab to develop and print it for me.
We’re in a bit of a renaissance!
Kodak just put out brand new Kodacolor 200 and Ektachrome 100 film
I’ve not even got one developed yet!
Hell I just got my daughter a disposable camera for her school camping trip. No electronics allowed but they encouraged them to bring those. I was surprised to find one. I told her (11yrs) it was a one time use camera. The look on her face was priceless. She looked at me as if I were dumb and said, “so it takes one freaking picture?? That’s stupid, my phone takes all the photos I want!” She got further confused when I explained why there was no screen and how she had to get those photos lol.
Should’ve showed her the clip from The Office where Erin(?) takes a picture with a disposable camera and then throws the it in the trash and wonders why people use them, seems such a waste to throw it away and never see the pictures.
Film is infinitely upscalable. No video format has ever been able to touch it. You can take films shot 100 years ago and upscale them to 4K/8K/etc. You can’t do that with any video format.
Not infinitely. I had a film scanned at 14k and it’s starting to look a bit grainy.
Boomers.
It used to be a era of time. Now, it’s a full blown personality type.
Paper visas. You have my passport number, is it not enough to check if I have valid visa?
Sundials date back at least as far as Egypt and Babylon. They’re still found in gardens and old cities. Can be tricky to set the time accurately! helps to have a compass.
I’ve got one. It’s somewhere where the clocks change twice a year. It took me about a second to decide to align it for summer time; made the most sense.
Without a compass you can set it perfectly around midday on the 23rd / 24th of June.
Cnidarians. (The sort of animals that includes jellyfish and sea anenomes and coral and such). Theyre so old that the first known predatory animal as far as I’m aware was one of them, and some of them still resemble those ancient versions to a significant degree. Even tho every time theres a mass extinction corals seem to be some of the first things to go, and jellyfish tend to be slow, stupid and not very good at controlling where they go, it somehow works out for them.
Wow, that was an evolutionary dark alley.
Basically the minimal assembly kit of a higher organism.
They need a skin bag to put all that stuff in, and cover it with some pretty scales or feathers or something.
Nah, it’s all modular. No size fits all.
Oxford University started sometime around the year 1100.
Japanese here, it is still crazy people need to bring a big wooden stemp around to sign government documents and contracts. and bringing physical documents around in a suitcase.
How else will I sign for packages in dog form?
Mail man just thinks im a good puppy.
I see nothing wrong with a giant wooden stamp.
Bring back melted wax letter seals too.
I made a wax seal last year so that I could be an extra bitch when sending letters to my friends.
I like sending people letters and postcards, because the added friction of the physical process makes it feel more meaningful. It’s almost got a ritual feel to it.
A wooden stamp or is stemp something I’m unaware of?
Speling. It’s spelled speling.
/s
Its \s, actually
*I’ts
It’s actually called a hanko! I think they’re pretty neat. You get a custom one that counts as your signature.
Kind of silly in he modern era, but also neat. Maybe they gotta start putting in security chips for like cryptographic signatures.
Teletext
Freedom of speech…but they’re working on it
Me.
I mean, I’m not particularly old — only 29. But I’m super surprised I still exist. And it’s not for lack of trying. It just turns out that even though I’m pretty mediocre at living, I’m even worse at dying. Fortunately, I’m in a place now where that’s a thing I’m happy about, for the most part.
I’ve got at least 8 different attempts under my belt, and the way that some of them failed makes me feel like it’s almost offensive to be an atheist. For instance, when I swam out into the sea, as far as I could until I couldn’t anymore, and the next thing I remember was waking up on the beach, not super far from where I’d swam from. I thought that was a thing that only happened in movies. Granted, I’m not a strong swimmer, so I didn’t get very far out, but still.
That was one of my attempts as an adult, but I had a lot as a teenager too. When I was about 16, I was resentful of all the people who cared about me, because the guilt I felt over hurting them was the only thing keeping me alive. Building off of the crisis management advice that I’d seen that said it’s good to try to put some distance between you and your suicidal feelings by trying to hold off until the next day, for instance, I resolved that I would stick around until I was 20, and if nothing had improved by then, I would kill myself and fuck anyone who begrudged me this escape — no-one could say I didn’t try.
Well, it turns out that some things did improve by age 20 — enough that it suggested there was a non-zero hope that I could some day live and actually be happy to be alive. I still struggled a lot after that point, because it’s not like my mental health was magically resolved (it still isn’t), but I’m glad I stuck around.
In a way though, things got harder after age 20. Ironically, there were countless times throughout my late teens in which looking forward to my death was the only thing that saved my life. When things were particularly rough, I would work out how many days I had to go before I could rest, and it soothed me. After I was 20, however, I was unanchored. I had a life that didn’t feel like it was my own, because I never expected to make it this far. Even now, it still sometimes feels like I’m in a bonus level. It’s a bizarre feeling.
But yeah, I, and many of the people who know and love me, are surprised that I’m still around. I’m proud of myself, even if a significant part of why I’m still here is sheer luck. Obviously this wasn’t what you meant when asking your question, but I’ve been reflecting on my progress a lot lately, and the idea of giving this answer amused me. It feels healing to joke about this stuff a bit, I think
Sometimes it’s good to fail, even eight times, and I’m glad you did. Thanks for sticking around. I hope you continue to do so.
Coffee grinder. The pure mechanical one: a wooden box with a stylish crank on top.
I use the one from my grandma daily. Must be about 60 years old now (the grinder, not my grandma).
I love those! My mom still uses the one that her mother used. It’s close to 100 years old now.
I have a more modern one, it’s an aluminum cylinder with the crank on top. Still a nice morning ritual, and much easier to hold.
