Investing in the past
I quite like keeping old things alive, longer than they were meant for maybe, but also repairing things that got broken. For example toys my children play with. Currently I am listening to music through a setup involving a device my dad bought new in 1983 and I like the fact that he bought whilst being in his 20s and me in my 30s are still using it. I have speakers in the living room that belonged to a woman I have known in my youth that lived to be slightly over 100 years old. These speakers are from Marantz. When I took them to the shop where I bought my vinyl record player, the owner who is an expert in his field said I did not even know Marantz made speakers. They are hooked to an amplifier my parents in law bought in the late 80s. Back to the device my dad bought though.
JVC SEA-33
It is a JVC SEA-33 Graphic Equalizer. This thing was made in the time that everything was analogue, and when mixing was not always done correctly. So what you could do is hook this thing up in your sound flow and change the amplifying or suppressing of certain frequencies to help bring out a better sound experience. Now my laptop has a 3.5mm Jack to two RCA adapter cable, and my headphones has a 6.3mm to two RCA adapter cable to hook everything up. Of course my laptop has a digital soundcard so it is not as effective as it could be, yet still I can tweak things and I just like the fact I have it working. Furthermore I can hook it up again to my record player into my amplifier in the future and then it will all work as it should be.
Kintsugi
This brings me way totally into another area, but we ordered a cake platter and it got delivered shattered. Yeah I know, there is no segue into this. Instead of returning it, we heard of kintsugi which is basically using a golden glue substance to mend broken vases, porcelain- and glassware. I liked this idea and now have a cool set piece which looks much better than the new version we got after reporting this broken delivery to customer service.
Limiting waste
I like the idea of minimizing waste and not just throw out stuff that could be repaired for a smaller fee than buying it new. What I do miss sometimes though is the fact that it is not appreciated by the companies who make their products that you start repairing them instead of buying new stuff. They will make it so difficult and hard to get into stuff or have the parts you can use to repair in a catalog somewhere.
Like the old days when the first PCs came to the market for consumers, everyone got a giant list of part numbers and you could just order more specific parts if you needed them again. Now we actually have to fight for our right to repair stuff we already bought. It should be ours to do with what we want, but that control has long slipped from us consumers.
Knowledge
I also have the idea a certain body of knowledge has been forgotten, or is in the process of being forgotten and that is worrying. Not only because it might set us back in development as a species but also because it might mean we are stuck in a loop or will repeat past mistakes.
Advice
My advice is to just buy old stuff and repurpose it if you feel like it. I still want to buy an old radio from the 60s and put in a Raspberry Pi Zero or equivalent and make it a bluetooth enabled speaker system that can also play YouTube and other songs, yet it still being a wonderful piece to look at. It will be a nice hybrid between analogue and digital, the past being brought into the future.
I have an old PC, 486DX2/50MHz, lying here that will have a running server on the network serving a real site. Obviously behind a TLS offloading proxy but it will still be serving the webpage. I hooked it up to my giant 65” Sony TV and I just loved the fact I held 30 year old tech that still worked and could fulfill a job today.
I also operated a saw that belonged to my great grand father, who I've met, and I learned that it might have been my great great grand father's even. That tool easily has been in my family's hands for more than a 100 years, and I intend to further that lifespan. It is wonderful that still exists. It works beautiful and you cannot buy a similar product anymore these days.
There something beautiful in that old things keep finding purposes and trying to get old things to fulfill a new purpose is fun to do. I do not think my dad in his 20s ever thought my son in his 30s will use this. Who knows what kind of tech I will buy that my children will repurpose in the future.