Andys Computer

With smartphones having excellent video recording capabilities, and being always with us, it's easy for everyone to record their own video footage and share it easily with friends and family or even share it with strangers by uploading it directly to a site like YouTube. Of course, it wasn't always like this... Before smartphones we would have been carrying a dedicated video camera of some sort and for the longest time, essentially up to the mid 2000's, they would record to some type of magnetic tape and getting the footage off that tape and onto your computer so that you could edit and share it was complicated and time consuming. Enter a new company called Flip Video in 2006...   Flip video realized hardware video encoding chips and flash storage has finally come down enough in price that you could produce a low cost video camera that recorded directly to it. They also figured out that plugging it in to your computer via USB2 would be a quick and easy way to transfer the c...

  As a teenager in the early 90s my Walkman was a treasured possession. It was a fairly low end model it was at least a real Sony one unlike the third tier brands many of my friends had, largely due to my dad being such a fan of Sony stuff (for people born after the millennium just trust me that Sony was the top dog of electronics back then). He later bought me an expensive metal bodied Aiwa model which not only had a built in digital radio, but even a recording mechanism. Sadly after that it was downhill for Aiwa who were bought by Sony and used to provide budget offerings, as evidenced by the plastic bodied model I had when I had by the time I was leaving college. I decided I wanted to play with tapes again so I went looking for good condition high end models on eBay and it seems I'm not the only one experiencing similar nostalgia, the prices for models held in high regard by collectors are outrageous... so I decided to avoid the expensive and tricky to fix direct d...

I was recently browsing through eBay looking at old digital cameras with the theory being too buy an earlier example than my 2.1 megapixel Mavica. For my younger readers, 2 megapixels is actually quite a lot and marks the first time it was worth switching from film to a digital camera as you weren't sacrificing too much quality, at least not for photos you'd primarily be looking at on your screen and uploading to the internet. So I decided to try and find an earlier 640x480 pixel model that was in some way interesting. 640x480 cameras were available in some form from the early to mid 90's, like the Apple QuickTake models but back then you'd have to part with $750 to get one. Prices did come down rapidly as the number of pixels went up, and by the mid-late 90's you could get a 640x480 model for about $200 - $350 depending on the manufacturer and features. I did consider grabbing a used early Mavica but as I already owned one floppy disk based Mavica alr...

  Windows 2000 SP4 Unofficial Service Pack 5.1 Unofficial Rollup 2 Daylight Savings Fix dotNet 2 7z 9.20 Winzip 14 WinRAR Acrobat Pro 8 iTunes 7.2 mRemote 1.50 Microsoft Office 2003 MS Office SP3 FileConverters (Office 2003 .docx support) PaintShop Pro X1 (11.2) K-Meleon 74 Goanna WinAmp 5.63 FileZilla Nero 

    Retro computing, or to be more specific retro gaming, is something of a trend at the moment. Some people are happy using DosBox to emulate old hardware on their modern PC, but some get a kick out of using real retro hardware. Old desktops can be bulky so if you're not fortunate enough to have the space for one the next best choice is a period correct laptop. A scan through YouTube shows a lot of people hunting down old IBM ThinkPads and their prices on the used market have risen accordingly. The thing is... while you do get very nice build quality (at least in terms of the casing, many models in the early 2000's had problems with failing components on their motherboards ), contrary to what you may be led to believe by recent displays of ThinkPad fetishizing, they were never lusted after by the younger demographic when they were new, primarily because their specifications were business not gaming focused, not to mention they were what I would generously descri...

  I remember my first portable MP3 player, it was a Samsung Yepp YP-E32 that I bought in early 2000 from a shop on Tottenham Court Road in London. For those who are unfamiliar, Tottenham Court Road is, or strictly speaking was, the place in the UK to get the latest tech gear. Think of it as the Akihabara of London. No big box store sold MP3 players at that time, heck most people didn't know what an MP3 file was. But I knew that if I could find this extremely sleek and classy looking new player anywhere, it would be on Tottenham Court Road...   And they didn't disappoint, it could be mine for a little under 200 UK pounds after the customary haggling. 32MB of on-board RAM meant it could hold 32 minutes of music at the 128kbps quality rate I and most others used at the time, so I coughed up another 65 UK pounds for a 32MB Smart Media card which gave me an hour of music for my commute to work, although I'd have to listen to the same music again on the way home. So...