Project Insomnia

Project Insomnia is many things, but in this context it is simply a "braindump" of whatever I happen to be thinking/reading/watching/doing at the moment. Parental guidance suggested.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

The Obsolete Man (or, now what do I do with this?)

In less than 24 hours all full-power broadcast TV stations in the U.S. will flip a switch to stop broadcasting their analog TV signals and will only broadcast TV signals in digital.

This will make my cherished Casio TV-400 LCD minature color television obsolete. I bought it in early 1990 from a Radio Shack store in a shopping mall near Fort Gordon, GA, where I was stationed for the second half of my Army training. Getting the common room TV tuned to whatever station "Star Trek: The Next Generation" was on was generally not going to happen, so this was my solution.



Since then, the little TV-400 has been useful now and again for baseball games (bring it to the stadium to see the instant replays they won't show on DiamondVision), for breaking news (brought it to the office on 9/11) and, with the appropriate adapter, as a quick way to see if a given cable-TV outlet was active.


As of tomorrow, all but the final use will no longer be possible, and as cable TV companies gradually move their entire service to digital that one won't last much longer either. I could always get a government-subsidized digital-analog converter box, but for a tiny portable TV that seems kind of silly.

It still works perfectly and I am loathe to simply throw it away (e-waste recycle it, that is). What would you do with it and why?
|| Andrew, 1:09 PM || ||

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