Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Tag: obsolete technology

  • New camera: Canon EOS 620

    Because apparently I don’t have enough film cameras in the house, I got another one recently: the Canon EOS 620. Film isn’t cheap right now, and some cameras are getting ridiculous. The Canonet QL17 rangefinder I bought in 2014, probably one of my best film cameras, costs roughly three times as much on the open…

  • videos, writing, programming, pocket computer

    I am sort of done with the Random Life project. There are 100 videos there now. It was fun digging through some old stuff, but I got almost zero reaction from anyone out of it, and maybe it was a dumb idea. Oh well. Maybe in two or three years, I’ll look at it again and…

  • The Death of the Good Internet

    I’ve been meaning to write a post about this forever, but someone else at The Ringer did such a great job of it. Check it: The Day the Good Internet Died The one thing I find interesting about this article is the thought that maybe it wasn’t that the death of Google Reader killed off…

  • The age of adapters

    Two disparate conversations got intermingled in my head this week. One was a long discussion about the days of AM radio and only AM radio in cars, and the other was a day where multiple people asked about various dongle issues, USB-C vs. USB3 vs. Thunderbolt or Thunderbird or whatever the hell Apple calls USB-C now.…

  • COVAD-99

    Ever since the COVID stuff started, I’ve had the term COVAD stuck in my head. There’s a reason for that. Let me explain. So back in 1999, I moved to New York to freelance and write fiction and do that whole lifestyle, and it lasted about six months and I ended up at a full-time…

  • flu, rom-com dreams, unix history, holiday mall-walking

    I think I have a bit of the flu right now. It’s the weirdest one, because I don’t have a lot of symptoms (congestion, throat, fever, etc) but I have been horribly underwater, unable to think, achy, and all I want to do is sleep. And of course this happens immediately before our Q4 deadline,…

  • The Death of Blockbuster

    Here’s an interesting long read over at Retail Dive on the death of Blockbuster Video: Who Really Killed Blockbuster? A couple of interesting (to me) takeaways. First, I like that this article gives all the details other than just saying “Netflix, duh” because that’s not what happened. The thing that annoys the hell out of…

  • WordPerfect for Mac

    A stupid memory… I was thinking about how I used to love WordPerfect on the Classic Mac OS. It wasn’t a port of DOS WP 5.1; a different dev team wrote their own program, and the company called it WordPerfect, so it worked much faster. I always found it better than Word on the old…

  • pre-digital observations

    A bunch of thoughts, no particular order: Try going in your kitchen or bathroom and finding a product with a printed package that doesn’t have a URL on it. Pick up food boxes, condiments, pet food, candy bars, canned drinks, toothpaste… anything. Everything has a web address on it. It’s like an address having a…

  • Death of an office

    I found out about this a bit ago, but my old Samsung office was bulldozed and replaced recently, which is strangely nostalgic. I took an electronics class last year with a guy who worked at the architecture firm that did the new building, and heard all about the grand scrape and replacement. I started working…