@jdslyman Funny. Just got notification of your comment. Two months later.

I miss the old siri voice. now that was good

"THE TIME IS 5:12" "lmao wtf was that goofy ass voice" "my phone" "SHUT YOUR MOUTH RICARDO"

Pavlov's cat effect

I actually LIKED that aspect. A "timeless", definite Radio Shack look! I also was NOT a fan of the "melty" look of later years.

@@jamesslick4790 The "melty" look units were also much lower quality too.

Eh chrome and wood still existed in the early 90s as well.

@@audiophile6475 Perhaps on some audio components, But the majority of small electronics were largely of the melted plastic design school.

@@jamesslick4790 yes for sure but that style wasn't as outdated as you would think by the 90s.

Now, if I could only get my ham radios to do that which some do or now that TVs with digital if I had a voice activated or a embedded I meant 60,000,000,000 inch screen! speech television otherwise I can’t tell by the white noise if the channel is active or not being blind! Though I did tell also people I met the digital TV would suck, but nobody believe me they all wanted to see their football players on a 60000,000,000 in stream!

@@chadvandam7179 There are surprisingly a lot of blind hams. Ronnie Milsap was probably the most famous one. He had a ham shack at his house in Nashville.

@@5roundsrapid263 Unlike many hobbies it makes no difference whether a person on the other end of a radio like can see or not. p.s. A recently purchased Baofeng 2M handheld seems to have voice announcements built in as standard.

@@MrDuncl It’s a lot more fun than watching TV without video!

@@chadvandam7179 I got a radioiddity GD-77 that out of the box is not blind friendly at all a group got together and made a fork of the open software others had done for it. The modes firmware is called accessible GD77 now the radio talks and everything. All settings are blind friendly. The same group has also did the same for the the TYT MD 9600 so there are some nice low cost possibility’s out there. 73

hmm?

I wouldn't say it is cool at all anymore with modern decayed software industry forcing updates to continue using the software, needing high-bandwidth connection to be able to download that unnecessarily hundredfold-bloated crapware and keep it in constant connection to cloud to allow telemetry, forcing to replace the phones every few years to be able to use the forcibly-updated versions from which they dropped the support for too old Android API or just made it too bloated to be able to run by the artificially obsolete-declared phone. Smartphones are cool as a hardware concept, but the thoroughly corrupted, greedy software industry has made their coolness pretty much useless. For me, as a non-blind person, this situation is such a deep PITA that I cannot even imagine how unbearable the situation is for blind people relying on a working smartphone setup and not being able to do all that clumsy and purely unnecessary setup work by themselves. The greedy software industry with planned obsolesence and other dirty business tactics is nowadays the no. 1 root cause for all the inequality as well as environmental problems of the world. Funnily enough, all those leftist-green snowflakes never give a shit about this issue, as they just happily keep on replacing their iPhones every year, regardless of even any actual need. Old times were way, way cooler, when kilobytes or very few megabytes sufficed for even speech synthesis, without cloud, without telemetry, and everything once made to work stayed working with the same functionality as long as you wanted, without being broken by forced updates and support droppings.

My dad was a watchmaker and he repaired a lot of mechanical watches for the blind in the day. Those watches were great conversation starters because those watches were so unique. You could push a button on the side, the lunette with the glass flipped off and you could touch the hands and the dial directly. The numbers were embossed in braille. I still have one.

@@albinklein7680 Now that is cool and fascinating!

I went through a lot of watches growing up, but now I don’t even use a watch because of my phone.

I believe that is/was required by law. If it's not real wood, they had to put a sticker on it indicating that it's simulated woodgrain.

@@vwestlife Oh, is that so? Interesting. Makes sense, although personally I'd probably immediately peel that off, so it's unusual to see no one has over all these years.

Obviously the timber-industrial-complex throwing its weight around in Washington DC to pay lobbyists to write ridiculous regulation. 🙄🙄🙄

Still not as creepy as the TikTok voices!

It at least didn't require cloud service connection and place ads into the voice stream.

Really? Maybe it’s just because I grew up with them, but for me they’re too artificial to be uncanny. Just like low poly graphics. Certain Google or Siri voices on the other hand, until I notice the new and ever more subtle artefacts, can creep me out.

@@5roundsrapid263 when the only tell is the consistency of their cadence, or weird mispronunciations, I do not like!

Too artificial to be in the uncanny valley. For me a lot of the newer voice assistants fall into uncanny valley because of how much more realistic they sound but not quite there.

The door of that vintage car used to be a jar, holding all that condensing water inside. Now it is in fact not anymore, as it has rusted the bottom portion away ;)

and not your zipper😂

"Battery Sentinel" was a Radio Shack trademark. They kept renewing the trademark registration until they filed for bankruptcy, and the trademark was cancelled in 2020.

@@vwestlife They certainly got their moneys worth out of it throughout the years. Aside from RadisShack’s Battery Sentinel, General Motors’ Twilight Sentinel is another one that comes to mind.

The battery of the month club was available for EVERYONE! (I was well into adulthood when I was still a "member" It kept my smoke detectors supplied for FREE! 👍😊👍

@@jamesslick4790 I always got the 9V because it was the most valuable and used in my RC car radios.

@@BusWithUs. Me too. 9V was the BEST ones to get! That's what smoke detectors used, so you could "time" the replacement schedule for each. LOL In rotation, I did not pay for them for two decades, LOL. It still worked out for Radio Shack, as there was ALWAYS something ELSE I'd end up buying anyway!

Or the giant grey colour five cell flashlights. Often given away for free if you bought a full set of batteries.

@@MrDuncl Yep! And it made sense for them to do that. 1, A free item creates customer loyalty. 2, Flashlights by nature are battery hogs, So repeat battery sales! Source: Worked at RS in the "day", LOL.

This is something I've been wanting for quite a while, especially with regard to their AV equipment. For example I've found that Radio Shack's first CD player (Realistic CD-1000) was a Hitachi, and one of their later ones (Realistic CD-1600) was a Sony.

Many of the Realistic receivers were built in Korea for Radio Shack by Foster Electronics and do not have an equivalent from Pioneer, Sansui, Akai, etc.

@@LakeNipissing their one and only Reel To Reel deck was a rebadged Teac X3.

Their early police scanners were basically Uniden bearcat

Danish person here, most of the digital clocks I have are 24 H, so that might be a location thing

There may be an internal jumper that can be set to 24 hour mode, one would have to get the data sheet for the chip inside if it’s available. Also if there was a 24 hour model available, it may be possible to see if the chips can be jumpered similarly

@@RickTheGeek Almost all of those simple LED clocks have a 50/60 Hz jumper and a 12/24 jumper which are easy to find on the PCB. However, in my experience, nearly all of them put the "correct" display in, so you won't get the leading 2 in the hour, it will show as a little bar.

Me too, I find a time system that has 2 x 1 o clocks, 2 x 2 o clocks etc in a day rather silly!

@@simonbeasley989 The problem with 24 hour time is with mechanical/dial clocks. First, you need a separate minute scale because 60 doesn't divide evenly into 24. Second, the 24-hour scale is too fine. Both problems make it difficult to read. What you need is metric time.

I'm almost positive the talking function in this clock and other similar ones at the time was simply a novelty, part of a passing fad, hence the quirks and its not being really suitable for blind people.

I have the timex one Sometimes, when you unplug it and plug it back in quickly it circuit bends itself and spazzes out spitting out garbled dialog and unused audio data like a westminster chime, a rooster sound and the word timex. This sometimes happens if the power goes out.

@@coolelectronics1759 Interesting, very interesting. I've seen a few devices that behave strangely after a brief power interruption, I just can't think of what they are right now. This is why you should always wait about 5 seconds after you turn a device off before you turn it back on. It can be fun to see devices behaving strangely, but you may be running the risk to breaking something.

Yep that was the biggest gripe on it. I went to VSDB a school in Virginia for either blind or deaf students boy in the dorm room next to mine had that exact clock. In fact, he’s the one that sent me the link to this video and asked me says that clock look and sound familiar.

You can do that today on eBay.

of cource you would have one haha. I have the timex Brown, shaped kinda like a bench with big red led and takes a 9v sram batery.

Zinc! Zinc! Please come back ! What have i done ?

And Dollar Tree in America too.

I definitely heard it on some phone menus.

VTech??

@user-nv2ql6oe7c The voice sounds like a synthesized Jack Webb from the old Dragnet TV series!

The voice sounds like that of my parents' old answering machine. The way it says "Ten. Eleven. PM."

Classic!

Radio Shack had a French version of their stores ?? What was the name please.

Lower volume as you described is one of the few things that actually can be caused by weak capacitors! :) I know people say that about everything, but, I’m not one of those people lol

Which of course prompts the old joke: "Why do the British drink warm beer?" "Because Lucas makes their refrigerators." 😉 Back in the '90s I had both a Triumph TR7 and a TR8, and both had plenty of electrical components badged "Lucas Electronics." Never had any electrics problems with either car, though......

Reminded Eddie Murphey joked on that in an old album I had of his standup comedy from the early 80's.