nostalgia

Photos: The centennial of Tin Lizzy

You don't have to have lived a hundred years ago to appreciate the Model T. All you have to do is look at the world around you today.

The Model T put the auto industry on the road to standardized parts and the assembly line. It helped make cars affordable for ordinary folks, by the millions. And if John Steinbeck is to be believed, it was instrumental in bringing into being the generation born between the two World Wars: "Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born … Read more

I'll pass on the Pixies LP, but here's 10 bucks

Earlier this week, The New York Times had a nostalgic little piece about the Princeton Record Exchange, a music store in the eponymous New Jersey college town.

It was, as one might expect, the sort of narrative that could be written about any beloved indie-music haven these days: it's a quirky anachronism in a world that really doesn't need it anymore, but it keeps on trucking.

It was a story that hit close to home for me. I lived in Princeton, which lies roughly halfway between New York and Philadelphia, for roughly 15 years, from preadolescence into my … Read more

Mix Tape USB

It's been raining '80s nostalgia gadgets around here lately. Between the Lasonic iPod boombox, Plusdeck EX cassette ripper, Speak & Spell speaker mod, and buckets of Transformers tschotkes--we're just waiting for Prince and John Cusack to pull up in front of CNET in a Delorean.

Here's another gadget to throw on the '80s retro-tech heap. The Suck UK Mix Tape USB is a Flash thumb-drive cleverly masquerading as a vintage Hitachi cassette tape. No word on pricing, but the product is poised to launch in the UK in September. But why wait? This looks like a totally … Read more

Nostalgia: A desktop app for Flickr

While I was in the Vloggies booth at SXSW, I peered over Robert Scoble's shoulder as he was shooting a video with the guys from Thirteen23. The people at this design-and-coding company have made Nostalgia, a very cool application that acts as a front end to Flickr. I can't wait for Scoble's video to post, so here's my take. And yes, I'm a bad person for stealing Scoble's scoop--even though he said it was OK.

If you're a Mac user, stop reading now.

The Nostalgia player is a slick desktop client for the … Read more

Alarm clock features old-school TV design, incongruous remote

This cute little alarm clock that i read about on Tokyomango looks like one of those little portable TVs that made a brief splash in the '80s. Actually, in my opinion, it looks more like a toy radar device that would be found in a Fisher-Price "My First U.S. Navy Ballistic Missile Submarine" playset. But that's beside the point.

So it looks like it operates just like your average alarm clock. And since this is the Age of Laziness, it comes with a remote control. As Tokyomango's blogger points out, the remote control is, well, … Read more