grumpyf1

They don't write 'em like that any more, do they..? I don’t want to imply that I’m some sort of tough guy, but I didn’t even sniffle when Jack slipped into the icy depths at the end of “Titanic”. There was no lip-trembling when Bambi’s mum died either. Excluding the time I realised I’d run out of coffee and the shop was shut, I’ve avoided tears for some considerable time. A story from America tested my resolve this week, though. A chap called Matt, from St. Louis in Missouri, sold a VHS player on eBay. (Don’t laugh – we only got rid of ours last year.) His old-school tech sale received a similarly vintage-format response from the buyer, in the form of a letter through the post. It came from an 86 year old man In Phoenix, Arizona, who praised Matt for “your care, your efforts, and your promptness”. Wow –someone actually thanking someone for something. That’s got me pretty emotional already. The old chap’s story is so much more than that though. Having found a pile of...

Hilarious. Yours for 99p. RIP DVD? It’s been a bad week for the shiny 120mm discs, with retailer John Lewis announcing that they are no longer going to sell the players in their stores. As far as the UK goes, the format has only managed to drag itself to it’s 20th birthday, although tech-wizards the Japanese have been spinning the video format since 1995. It was always going to have a troubled existence, with no-one ever really agreeing if it was a Digital Video Disc or a Digital Versatile Disc right from it’s earliest days, when it successfully killed off VHS tapes, in the same way it’s kid brother the CD bumped off audio cassettes. Once found nestling under virtually every TV in the country, the continuing rise of streaming video on demand services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix, along with free-to-air catch-up, mean they’ve been gathering dust for a few years now. I can vouch for that – I moved house six months ago, plugged the DVD player in... and haven’t switched i...

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

It’s fair to say that ‘the footy’ has decimated the TV schedules. Imagine if you could travel in time though, and watch TV from any era you wanted! As a TV-related year-hopper, being able to swirl back through the mists of time should be amazing. Clearly, going forwards isn’t an option – not because of any complicated space/time coefficient stuff, but based on the inescapable fact that TV is generally pretty terrible now, so the future only holds Celebrity Reality Kitten’s Big Brother’s Essex Jungle. Probably fronted by Bruce Forsyth. This will be immediately followed by 24 hours of every person that watched it sat on their sofa saying why they thought it was fab-u-lous, then a programme discussing why the people on their sofas are idiots. So, the past it is. Imagine your disappointment if you’d set the controls for TV heaven, but a problem with the time capacitor interface circuit (yes, I am making this up as I go along) meant you landed in 1996. Having run out of progra...