Good Evening EST Time-Zoners!

Firstly, the song of the day! Today, it'll be Sorry About Your Penis by Smash Mouth. No crazy reason to it this time. It's a clever song, and well written, and fun to listen to, but frankly I'm only picking it today because it's been stuck in my head and I think it's hilarious LOL

Welcome to Cyberia — to my tech collection!

I've always been bewitched by technology. (Somewhat neurotically even.) As a kid, I would stay indoors all day and mess around on my grandpa's work computer instead of playing soccer in the park with all the other boys. And I didn't just play flash games all day (though I did a lot of that too,) I was surfing the web like my name was Christopher Poole, going from wiki page to forum to imageboard – I didn't just scratch the surface web, I polished it clean. Then when I reached high school, I aced all my computer science courses by creating graphing calculators in Java while the rest of the class was still figuring out console apps (most of my classmates took those courses as easy credits). It is up to no debate that I am a bonafide lifetime nerd.
So I started collecting cool tech around three or four years ago. The cooler or more obscure something was, the more I wanted it on my shelf. Specifically, I've always have a space in my heart for old technology – the analogue, the assembled, the rough-around-the-edges, the ingenuity of cathode ray tubes and oscilloscopes – anything that whined and whirred with mechanical and electronic spirit! Back when engineers were artisans and not prosthetics for executives – when those who designed electronic devices were practically forced to come up with real gimmicks and innovations if they wanted their products to sell. Simply, before all tech devices on the market followed the same formula: minimalist grey brick with as many cameras as possible.
I will clarify, however, my love isn't limited to the analogue. Regular digital devices harbor a similar enthusiasm from me, but the more moving parts, flashing lights, and satisfying sounds, the more it excites me. (Do mind, however, that you don't cross the line from Turing to Rube Goldberg machines. Are there any octogenerians in the crowd to appreciate that joke? XD)

Today, I'm writing about the newest additions to me collection. Recently, I came in possession of a Panasonic CT-20D10B CRT Television. My dear friends Trent and Rob helped me pick it up from some guy in town who was selling it on Facebook Marketplace. I later came to learn this seller was also a tech collector! But he had plenty of TVs and little space left what with his dog and children and all, so he decided to part ways with some devices he's not especially attached to. Soon as I got my hands on this TV (as well as a VGA to AV DAC) I connected it to another member of the collection: my Lenovo Thinkpad R400. 

"Spirit! [...] Artisans! [...] Ingenious!"

Well... I know those two black polyphenylene boxes don't exactly scream Red Dot Design Award worthy, but those two aren't really meant to be. The TV is just a regular consumer television: no bells, no whistles, hardly any settings, and a jungle chip that doesn't even accept analogue RGB. As for the Thinkpad, the R400 comes from the R series of mid-tier business laptops; "the ThinkPad R40 is a trusted friend for the traveler and desk jockey," as it was described in <this CNET review>. Despite being a simple business laptop it still had more features than most laptops you'll find nowadays! But that was the case for any computer back then. Contrary to the modern laptop's two or three USB-C ports and nothing else, the R400 came stuffed with more ports than — that joke is inappropriate actually. It has three USB ports, a VGA port, ethernet, dial-up, TWO expresscard slots, a 1394 serial bus port, a DETACHABLE optical drive, aux – both line in and line out, AND if that wasn't enough, it also has expansion slots at the bottom for the infamous Thinkpad docking stations. HOLY COW! I get that most of those technologies have become obsolete since then (rest in peace Firewire) but honestly, modern computers not being equipped with even one regular USB port or video output makes me sad. I understand the tech industry is trying to make USB-C the one and only type of interface you'll ever need, but what will you do if you need to connect a computer to an older display or something? Just carry dongles and adapters everywhere you go? :(

Well anywho, I've been messing around with those two for a couple of days. Between watching Grease on VHS on my VCR (my dad's old VCR, which he gifted to me,) I've been distrohopping on the Thinkpad. Although I'm not really sure if distrohopping is the right term to use here since I only hopped over to a single Linux distro XD. I went from Windows 7, to Windows XP, to Vista, to Lubuntu (of all things), then I finally settled back on XP. That poor Thinkpad must've gone through ego death the way I kept wiping those disk partitions. The reason I chose Windows XP is twofold: firstly, it's incredibly lightweight and designed to run on the meek little core 2 duo my laptop is equipped with (though nothing special now, it used to be quite formidable two decades ago!) Secondly, it's very accessibly customizable! Immediately after installing all the drivers I needed, I went on to scour the web for themes and modifications based on my favourite anime, Serial Experiments Lain. Now When my laptop boots up, instead of the iconic startup sound, it sings "And you don't seem to understand~" and when it shuts off, it goes "I am falling - I am fading - I have lost it all." Pretty cool stuff, huh? And I certainly needn't point out the Copland OS wallpaper I found somewhere on DeviantArt. Along with this, I also found a Lain iconpack and a cursor that – while not inherently Lain themed – still matches everything else aesthetically.

After finally settling on an OS, I loaded up some retro games on the Thinkpad, which all ran rather seemlessly after a bit of tinkering with settings. I got a copy of Touhou 6, an SNES emulator with Super Metroid on it, and Tekken 6 on a PSX emulator (that one's my favourite.) Every geek worth his weight in discarded RAM sticks will tell you that watching old shows and playing old games on a CRT is superior to doing so on any other display in almost every way. But I know that I'm only scraping the surface of what fun can is to be had with this TV. 

The thing I REALLY love about analogue technology is that it's all the same stuff. You can't plug an Android phone to an iPhone and expect it to do much, because the code is simply incompatible. But with analog, your code is tubes, logic gates, and electrons. So if you wanted to wire a CRT to an Arduino and some potentiometers, you could totally make a guitar out of your television! They're called CRTelecasters which I think is a pretty rad name. There's a Japanese band that records all their music with stuff like that, they're called Electronicos Fantasticos and you can check them out on YouTube!
Now, this is the kinda stuff I want to do. Frankly, I don't know the second thing about electrical engineering or really, any of the skills involved in making such things, but I can't think of a better project to spend the summer working on! And, after I'm done that, I wanna work on a bit more of a radical project. I want to hook my brain up to my computer.
— Not as invasively as you may be imagining! But if I could learn the skills to make a CRTelecaster, then I'd like to eventually work my way up to making a homemade electroencephalograph. Now, according to what little online research I've done, it seems shockingly simpler than you may imagine! And if I manage to do that, perhaps I could find a way to wire it to my TV so that my brain's signals get mapped out as sine waves directly on the TV, or maybe played as a sound. Can this even be done? Theoretically, I suppose so, I mean it's just a matter of converting electromagnetic waves to a visual input. But do I even have the slightest clue as to what I'm getting into? Absolutely not. So if you, my esteemed readers, have any knowledge regarding that matter, please reach out and tell me if I'm crazy and this can't be done! Or if it can, and whatever advice you may have for me!

I'm definitely diving into the deep end. But it'll be fun huh? :)
And no, I have NO earthly clue what I'm talking about.

Well that's all the greymatter I have left to dump for today.

LOGGING OFF --
JUPITER