I have a graveyard of technology in this flat: 3 VCRs and way too many tapes, two televisions and monitors based on cathode ray tube (CRT), and more computer junk than I care to admit.
Out in the consumer marketplace, some items are affordable to the point of disposable. For example, Last year I purchased my second consumer level digital camera, secondhand, shipped to my holiday location in Canada from the seller in Australia. Whilst awaiting delivery I relied on my old single megapixel camera for one week out of the three I was there, and as usual, because I had used this older model for four years, but the 4MP model was a new arrival and I was learning it on holiday, some of those technically inferior snaps just look better.
Even if I had the money to throw away those four CRT-based TV and monitor screens and put a flat screen in every room, if these TVs cost me nothing to £30 and can last up to 15 years, and British DVB Broadcasting (or Freeview) has been introduced by way of set top boxes to keep them working in a digital handover which will not finish before 2012, I would need to be rich or crazy not to save money in the meantime. My family's unwritten motto for technology is "use to destruction", only replacing consumer goods of any kind when they died. That's how one of our fridges lasted 26 years.
However, returning to my digital camera example above, when I "handed over" from film to digital, I could no longer afford film processing costs but wanted to carry on taking photographs. It became cheaper to buy a memory card for a 1 megapixel camera, which was old hat when I started to use it, and carry on snapping for instant results. The ratio between price to convenience for the new technology had been passed, and I haven't returned to film despite my romantic attachment to celluloid. If I ever chose film again I'd just carry a disposable camera on holiday as a backup if the batteries for my digital camera(s) ran out.
Since I have the opportunity to recycle many of the blank videotapes in this flat courtesy of work, I'm taking it. If I ever needed a new blank videotape, they're now in Pound shops for, well, GBP £1, and most of them are manufactured by JVC, the inventor of the format. Unless it's a big concert broadcast where you need hours and hours at a time, it's now the right time to keep the environment in mind, recyle these things and reduce the clutter in my flat as a fringe benefit.
The challenge is to get digital, from a media point of view, in less than five years - that's how long it took me to put my audio tapes on CD-R. At least this time, unlike music, there are few video recordings which I want to save that haven't already been repeated more than twice through Freeview.
So that's the name of the blog, explained.
Out in the consumer marketplace, some items are affordable to the point of disposable. For example, Last year I purchased my second consumer level digital camera, secondhand, shipped to my holiday location in Canada from the seller in Australia. Whilst awaiting delivery I relied on my old single megapixel camera for one week out of the three I was there, and as usual, because I had used this older model for four years, but the 4MP model was a new arrival and I was learning it on holiday, some of those technically inferior snaps just look better.
Even if I had the money to throw away those four CRT-based TV and monitor screens and put a flat screen in every room, if these TVs cost me nothing to £30 and can last up to 15 years, and British DVB Broadcasting (or Freeview) has been introduced by way of set top boxes to keep them working in a digital handover which will not finish before 2012, I would need to be rich or crazy not to save money in the meantime. My family's unwritten motto for technology is "use to destruction", only replacing consumer goods of any kind when they died. That's how one of our fridges lasted 26 years.
However, returning to my digital camera example above, when I "handed over" from film to digital, I could no longer afford film processing costs but wanted to carry on taking photographs. It became cheaper to buy a memory card for a 1 megapixel camera, which was old hat when I started to use it, and carry on snapping for instant results. The ratio between price to convenience for the new technology had been passed, and I haven't returned to film despite my romantic attachment to celluloid. If I ever chose film again I'd just carry a disposable camera on holiday as a backup if the batteries for my digital camera(s) ran out.
Since I have the opportunity to recycle many of the blank videotapes in this flat courtesy of work, I'm taking it. If I ever needed a new blank videotape, they're now in Pound shops for, well, GBP £1, and most of them are manufactured by JVC, the inventor of the format. Unless it's a big concert broadcast where you need hours and hours at a time, it's now the right time to keep the environment in mind, recyle these things and reduce the clutter in my flat as a fringe benefit.
The challenge is to get digital, from a media point of view, in less than five years - that's how long it took me to put my audio tapes on CD-R. At least this time, unlike music, there are few video recordings which I want to save that haven't already been repeated more than twice through Freeview.
So that's the name of the blog, explained.
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