It holds the Guinness World record for best-selling single computer model of all time, so who had a Commodore 64?

My family had one when I was growing up, and I enjoyed playing hours of games on it.  I remember how novel it was that we could create a sign, card, or banner on the computer and then print it out –  complete with pixel-riddled graphics and what-do-you-call those side strips on the paper with the holes in them that you tear off and either discard or twist them together and make art out of them.  My uncle had a subscription to Loadstar, which was a Commodore club of sorts – he would get magazines and new games monthly in the mail.  I used to love some of those Loadstar games, unfortunately, I can’t find them to play on emulators now.  I really enjoyed an Activision game called Toy Bizzarre, and my all time favorie game for the Commodore 64 was Maniac Mansion – I was addicted to it until I won it, and then I had to go back and win it with  all the different character combinations.  They did make a version of Maniac Mansion for the original Nintendo, but I was biased toward my Commodore version.  I always thought that game would make a great movie (think Clue), and when I was younger, I tried to write the game into a novel but never finished it.

So what’s got me thinking back to the 80’s days of the Commodore today?  I came across an article on cnn.com about how advance orders are being taken for the resurrection of the Commodore here in 2011.  It’s being made to look just like the Commodores of the 80’s, but it will have today’s computer capacities since the ’64’ in Commodore 64 referred to the unit having 64 Kilobytes of memory – about the equivalent of one long email, according to the article.  If you’d like to read the article, click here.

Another blog here on tangents.org who was describing cool kids’ Halloween costumes reminded me of some high tech Halloween costumes I saw on the internet last week and forgot to post.  Click on this link and enjoy, maybe get some ideas for next year.  I especially like the first one; gadgets and gizmos that make it seem as if there is a giant hole right through a person!

While reading my daily geek.com, I came across this article they blogged about.  For those of us in our middle years it is really quite interesting.  To get you started, I have reprinted two or three from each section, but to read them all you will have to click the title or end of the article to go to the source.  What really makes me feel old is the inclusion of 90s things like the Playstation… 😮

Oh, be sure to click the link at the source about the young teen trying out a Walkman for a week, the MP3 player of the 80s.

UPDATE: I just visited Worthy Christian Forums, and apparently someone posted this same article, but with 37 more things (plus more in the replies)!  At a glance, I could see they weren’t just tacked on to the end and I’m too lazy to figure out which are new, so CLICK HERE TO GO TO READ ALL 137 THINGS

Audio-Visual Entertainment:

1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.

8. 8-track cartridges.

Computers and Videogaming:

19. The scream of a modem connecting.

22. Using jumpers to set IRQs.

33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.

The Internet:

38. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.

44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.

56. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.

Gadgets:

58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?

69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.

Everything Else:

70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.

81. Han shoots first.

86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.

(beginning of actual article follows below)

100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

By Nathan Barry
July 22, 2009
8:00 am

There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.

That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias …

[CLICK TO READ FULL ARTICLE ON WIRED.COM]

This is one to be appreciated by spy show enthusiasts everywhere.  Apparently someone in Italy was caught with a gun disguised as a cell phone.  Read on:

A 28 year old man was arrested by the Italian police in a Naples suburb. He was caught with a gun disguised as a phone. The phone gun – complete with a dummy display – holds four .22 bullets. The phone transformed into a gun by sliding the keypad section.The stubby antenna is the barrel, and a touch on a particular key fires a bullet. A gun disguised as a mobile phone, the Cool gun! A police spokesman said: ‘This is the first time such a weapon has been seized and shows the sophistication that the crime syndicates are turning to.

Article with pictures and video can be found at this Likecool.com link.  Well, since the video is hosted at youtube, why don’t I just post it here:

Oh, and happy Thanksgiving!  I think among the important things like my family and Jesus Christ’s free gift to me, I can be thankful this was found half a world from me and not here… 😮

As I write this I am trying out three different weather gadgets on my desktop sidebar to see which one I will keep.  Right now Accuweather says 74° (okay, I just right-clicked and selected options to see which one it was and it updated itself), MSN says 76° (jumped to 79° after I checked its options!), and the Weather Channel was at 79° and just hopped up to 81°.  Well it seems that the Weather Channel one gets points for changing on its own, but which one is right? If I could just find the answer to that I would know which one to keep.  The Weather Channel one, by the way, also loses points for having its logo blatantly on the gadget while the other two conserve space a little better, but then again it has more options.  Sigh.  Until these three, I had used WeatherBug, which not only let me choose the location but also what thermometer I wanted to use in the area from a list of 8-10.  Unfortunately for some reason, after restarting the computer it would no longer connect to wherever it got its info from.  And reading the comments it would seem that I wasn’t the only one with this problem.  So here I am looking for a working gadget.  Well, if I don’t like these three there are always more on the gadget website- seems weather gadgets are a dime a dozen.

This Vista sidebar is pretty nice.  At first it had a little slideshow viewer, a clock, and an RSS headline reader (100 headlines, four at a time, and only the first few words of each one?  No thanks!) in addition to its own weather gadget (similar to the MSN one, but less frills).  I replaced the weather gadget, left the clock gadget- a pretty realistic looking analog clock by the way, and removed the other two.  I also downloaded a CPU/RAM meter and a wireless networking meter, the latter of which is waiting on the bench for me to get a wireless router.  There are also stock tools, search tools, and a lot more for the sidebar.  There are even some mini-games that can be installed.

Well, looking at the weather gadgets again, the accuweather was three degrees below the next higher one, but once again I had to manually update it so this one is probably gone.  However, the other two are at a three degree difference themselves- so which is right??  Sigh.

Well, if I happened to waste your time with this post I just have this to say- sorry, no refunds! 😛

I have a love/hate relationship with electronic technology.  I love and appreciate the advances that have been made in the world, and I use lots of technologically savvy stuff every day.  But I hate learning the new stuff, and if I procrastinate, it seems that when I finally break down and learn it, something new immediately comes along to replace what I have just learned.  And I am married to a technology addict.  I know it’s a common thing for men to be into electronics and the latest gadgets and all of that, but I think our house is exceptionally up-to-date on the electronic gadgetry, especially when it comes to computers.  My problem with it lies where the technology becomes more of an inconvenience than it is a convenience.  I have a few examples I will share:

1.  Hi-Def Tv – My husband will sit and flip channels in the middle of a show just to try to find the hi-def version of the show.  Of course he doesn’t choose to do this during a Chicago Bears game or something he is inclined to watch.  For those shows, he will actually think about it ahead of the show’s start time.  He’ll sit and flip looking for high-def while I’m watching something, during shows like Dr. Phil or pointless reality shows.  I know, these are dumb shows, so I shouldn’t care about missing them.  But if I’m going to sit and watch something, then I want to watch it, I don’t want to miss any of it, otherwise I’m wasting my time.  So, if I’m watching Dr. Phil, and hubby comes over and tries to find Dr. Phil in hi-def, I might just miss the backround of a guest’s story and not know what is going on for the rest of the show.  Like I said, it’s not like we’re talking about high quality tv here, but who needs Dr. Phil in hi-def anyway?!?

2.  GPS –  I cannot tell you how many times our GPS guy has gotten us lost.  Yes, we have a GPS system in our car with a male voice – he was on sale.  I’ve always thought I was pretty good at navigating; pretty good at being a human compass and learning the layouts of strange cities and towns pretty quickly.  In the years before we had GPS (and kids!) we used to travel by car A LOT, and I was always our navigator.  I’d like to think I got us out of more than a few scrapes with just my sense of direction and an atlas…  But my past experience gets me no where compared to the GPS guy.  He has taken over.  My husband will insist that we follow Mr. GPS’ directions, even while I’m saying they don’t make sense.  For one thing, he’s led us into a lake before, literally.  Well, luckily common sense did prevail there at the last minute…  my husband stopped the car before he drove into the lake, but he was tempted to trust Mr. GPS, and drive into the lake, I know it.  Maybe it sounds like I’m jealous of Mr. GPS, but I’m not, really I’m not.  I just suspect that he might have it out for us, or that he is a practical jokester who gleefully directs us into predictaments just to see how we get out of them…  Kinda sounds like a dumb sitcom – tune in each week to see how we maneuver our way out of whatever mess Mr. GPS has finagled us into this time…

Don’t get me wrong – I do appreciate all the technology most of the time, in a way.  If my husband weren’t so into all these things, I wouldn’t have all the cool gadgets that I have, and I would not know how to use anything, including my computer probably!  But how ironic is it that this post has been sitting in my drafts for weeks now, not getting finished, just because other things kept coming up that I wanted to write about, so I wasn’t getting a chance to finish it.  But how ironic, that today when I went to tangents.org, I got the following message about learning new technology?!?  If you don’t hear from me for awhile, I’m just procrastinating learning the new “back end” of tangents!

Well my friendly bloggers…  I have some great news that is going to make you all very mad!  Yes, you read that right.  Tangents will be updated with the latest versions of the blog software by next Friday and as soon as today (whenever it is released).  Why will this make you mad?  Because the backend you have worked to learn is going to look significantly different.  But don’t worry!  You have the basics down.  Once you take a few minutes to get used to the new layout you will be comfortable again and blogging on Tangents.Org will be better than ever!