rleete

iTrader: (21)

Class C with a trail bike/scooter strapped to the back.

And you really don't need a hell of a lot of room. I camp frequently in my 1979 Trillium with the wife and son. We use the camper mostly as a secure, dry tent. Cooking is usually done outside. Unless it's poring rain, we can stay comfortable under the small side tarp. More modern units are easier to use, but this little 6' x 10' box is all we really need. I towed it easily through the hills of the Finger Lakes with the Tacoma, and with the new Ford it's barely noticeable.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I disagree.

About the diesel part, not the large part.

In fact, I kind of specifically don't want the diesel. Way too much extra cost and complexity for very little tangible benefit in this specific context.

I have put a heck of a lot of cross-country miles on the gas-powered E-350, in the form of a Penske 16' moving truck pulling my car behind it on their all-steel four wheel car carrier. Florida to Ohio to San Diego to North Carolina to Florida to San Diego to San Jose to Hoboken (that one was without a car in tow) to Chicago to North Carolina to Chicago again.

I have no idea how much literally everything that I own weighs, but I do know that an NB is 2,350 lbs and a Penske car carrier is a shade under 2,200. And while the Penske trucks did struggle a bit going up the steep side of the Rockies, it's not like I didn't make it.

The 4x4 DRW crew-cab F-350 with an 8' bed and the 3.73 axles is rated to tow 16,000 lbs on a 5th wheel hitch with the 7.3L gas engine. Opting for the 4.30 axles brings this to an even 20k.

A Keystone Cougar 27SGS 5th wheel RV has an empty weight of 8,101 lbs, and a max gross of 10,290.

Which seems like a reasonable combination.



Who knows what engine options will exist in 2031. I wouldn't be surprised if the only choice was a 2.5L compound-turbo diesel hybrid, and I also wouldn't be surprised if they were essentially unchanged from today.

But I do have faith in the belief that there will remain sufficient demand for the Superduty-style chassis for vocational applications that it's unlikely to disappear.

I am now, in all seriousness, setting a reminder on my Google calendar to re-visit this post on June 24, 2031, to see if my prediction holds merit.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

The reversing characteristics of a long wheelbase truck pulling a conventional-hitch trailer are... poor.

Source: see previous post as to my considerable experience towing Miatas across the country with Penske trucks.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Yeah, I like that idea a lot, as a concept.

The problem is that two-wheeled vehicles and I have a pretty rough history. Until I left NYC four years ago, I've used a two-wheeler of some variety or another (bicycle, moped, motorcycle, e-bike, etc) on a pretty regular basis since I was 18. I've had three noteworthy "impact with pavement" events in that time, and the effects on my body have gotten worse with each successive one over the years.

Honestly, I think I'm done with two wheeled vehicles.



Need? No.

Want?

For a fulltime home in my autumn years, I want some room. I want a big, comfy sofa that I can stretch out on (I'm 6'2"), an office-style desk and chair, a decently large compressor fridge, 8 kWh worth of LiFePO4 batteries, enough square footage on the roof to accommodate solar panels to charge said batteries, and plenty of space for tools, food, toilet paper, multi-season clothing, peat moss, etc. Basically as much luxury as possible, in a package that will still fit into a National Park campground.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Documenting the Last Pay Phones in America

A photographer in Rochester, N.Y., tries to capture an obsolete technology before it disappears.

By David Dudley for CityLab


ABC School of Driving, State Street. PHOTOGRAPHER: ERIC KUNSMAN


We’re heading north up Rochester’s Goodman Street, past pizza places and gas stations and narrow wood-framed homes, when Eric Kunsman spots a red-crowned kiosk in front of the parking lot of a convenience store/smoke shop. It’s a pay phone, one he’d probably seen many times before but had never truly seen until now.

“Look at that!” he says. We pull over, and he pops the hatch on his Toyota SUV. “I can’t believe I missed this one.”



Family Dollar, Lyell Avenue, 2020 (left) and 2021 (right).


In the back, Kunsman keeps photography equipment—a vintage Hasselblad film camera in a suitcase-size case. It’s an attention-getting rig, and as he sets it up and trains it on the battered telephone, the owner of the smoke shop emerges, frowning.

Kunsman is very familiar with this part of the process, and with an enormous grin he explains himself: He’s a photographer, and he takes pictures of pay phones.

Specifically, Kunsman, who teaches photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is engaged in a multiyear project to document every surviving pay phone in and around the city in upstate New York. As of 2018 that would be 1,455 phones, according to a dog-eared list of locations provided by Frontier Communications Corp., the telecommunications company that operates the machines that remain in Monroe County. So far, Kunsman has captured about 900 of them on film. Perhaps 35% of them, he says, still work.



Genesee Brewery, St. Paul Street.



Campi’s Restaurant, Scottsville Road.


It’s an endeavor born of Kunsman’s fascination with obsolete technology—and with a city that has become associated with it. Rochester was famously the home of George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Co.; at its 1970s peak the photography giant employed about 50,000 people and fueled a quarter of the city’s economic activity. But the rise of digital photography and the collapse of the film business brought mass layoffs and a 2012 bankruptcy that hollowed out the city’s middle class. Once insulated from the hard times that had befallen nearby Rust Belt cities such as Buffalo, Rochester plunged into a sharp economic decline. Its current poverty rate, 31%, trails only Detroit and Cleveland as the worst among the 75 largest U.S. metros.

This history haunts Kunsman, who moved to Rochester from his hometown of Bethlehem, Pa., in 1996. “I got to see its heyday,” he says of the city, “and then I got to see it fall apart.”



East Main Street, 2018 (left) and 2020 (right).


Rochester’s pay phones caught his eye around 2017, when Kunsman moved his photography studio from the Neighborhood of the Arts, a revitalized district in the city’s southeast, to a lower-income community inside the “crescent of poverty”—a complex of low-income neighborhoods north and west of downtown that had earned a reputation for crime and abandonment. Friends warned him that the area was a “war zone,” but once Kunsman set up his studio in an old bumper warehouse he found a tight-knit neighborhood of families amid the vacant lots and other signs of economic distress. Among those signs, he soon noticed one: a surprising surfeit of pay phones.



Grape and Orange Mini Mart, Orange Street.



Busy Bee Restaurant, West Main Street.


To Kunsman, the persistence of these devices in low-income neighborhoods spoke to the patterns of investment and attention these spaces command; once a widely used public amenity, pay phones had become markers of poverty and neglect, enduring only because property owners or telecommunications operators couldn’t be troubled to remove them. Still, even in an age of near-universal cellphone access, people used them—the unhoused people who camped near a restaurant, for example. Kunsman began taking photos of the pay phones, first the ones he’d spotted around the neighborhood, then farther afield. He shoots black-and-white images on Kodak film, because, he says, “their demise is what caused this issue.”

The shots are unpeopled, though occasionally there are figures in the background. Kunsman says people who use pay phones can face stigma, and he didn’t want the project to provide easy answers about those who might rely on them. “You have to think about who might be using that phone,” he says.



490 Motel, Mount Read Boulevard.



Convenient Food Mart, Norton Street.


Sometimes, he shoots bare Frontier kiosks whose phones have been removed or the unpainted spaces on a wall where the devices once hung. The scenes usually highlight Rochester’s less-celebrated spaces: strip malls, parking lots, storefronts caked in heaps of snow. But some local landmarks make appearances. Frontier Field, the minor league baseball stadium named for the telecommunications company, has a few pay phones. So does Kodak Park, the enormous research and manufacturing complex that Eastman Kodak built across 1,300 acres of the city’s northern outskirts during its heyday. A city-within-a-city that boasted its own power plant and private railroad, the campus was partially demolished in the 2000s. The remaining buildings have been renamed the Eastman Business Park and opened up to local businesses, in the hopes of transforming the area into a tech and innovation hub. The ashes of George Eastman still reside there, under a marble memorial. For a photographer, getting a tour inside the film-making facility was “like going inside ***** Wonka’s factory,” Kunsman says.

Contemplating the economics of the disappearing pay phone industry and where he was still finding working phones—sometimes with new or repaired equipment—Kunsman theorized that Frontier was keeping some phones in low-income neighborhoods as a kind of altruistic gesture to the community, because the quarters they were taking in likely didn’t recoup the expense of maintaining the devices. He saw it as an example of “felicific calculus,” a method of determining the rightness of an action from its pleasurable payoff, which is attributed to the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. (Felicific Calculus is also the title of Kunsman’s photo project.)



Whitney Street.

The company, which filed for bankruptcy in March 2020, has never exactly confirmed that premise. (Frontier didn’t respond to requests for comment.) “It’s a declining business, and decisions made about it are pretty black and white,” a Frontier spokesperson told Rochester’s City newspaper reporter David Andreatta in 2019. “As long as the remaining units are used enough to support the maintenance and operation costs, Frontier will be able to keep them in service.”

But regardless of whether they represent an intentional act of corporate goodwill or just classic “stranded assets”—infrastructure whose value and purpose have been swamped by the tides of progress—the pay phones in Rochester stand as compelling subjects for Kunsman’s lens. “We forget that technology moves so fast,” he says. “We don’t think about the people left behind.”

It’s easy to forget that pay telephones were once omnipresent in the American cities of the 20th century, and how swiftly these iconic features of the streetscape vanished in the 21st. The first coin-operated public telephone appeared on the outside of a downtown building in Hartford, Conn., in 1889; by 1999 more than 2 million pay phones blanketed U.S. sidewalks, hotel lobbies, airports, and hospitals. The last time the Federal Communications Commission issued a pay phone count, in 2016, fewer than 100,000 remained. Thanks in part to federal government programs such as Lifeline, which partially subsidizes mobile phone service for low-income Americans, cellphone access in the U.S. has now reached 97% of adults, according to the Pew Research Center.



Coach’s Sports Bar, West Main Street, Webster, N.Y.



Stoney’s Plaza, West Henrietta Road, Henrietta, N.Y.


As handheld devices swept the population, pay phones—and those who still used them—acquired an unsavory reputation. In the 1990s some city leaders passed legislation limiting their placement in a bid to fend off the drug dealing that they were widely seen as abetting. Cities junked pay phones by the tens of thousands.

The relative handful that remain in major cities such as New York and Los Angeles have since become objects of nostalgic fascination, as Kunsman discovered when he took his pursuit of Rochester’s pay phones to social media. There he found fellow enthusiasts including filmmaker Ryan Steven Green, who runs the account Payphones of Los Angeles on Instagram, and the artist Pentabo Clortino, who turns dead pay phone kiosks into art installations.

But Kunsman is not only interested in the aesthetics of these abandoned pieces of street furniture: He uses his project to plumb the city’s social and economic circumstances. He collaborated with two RIT colleagues, digital librarian Rebekah Walker and Janelle Duda-Banwar, a researcher at the Center for Public Safety Initiatives, to map pay phone locations across the Rochester region and overlay them with poverty rates, median income, housing values, and demographic information. “Where there are higher levels of poverty, there are higher levels of pay phones,” says Duda-Banwar, who also talked to community residents about what the phones were being used for. “They had this negative connotation: ‘Oh, drug dealers use that,’ or ‘homeless people use that.’ No one really talked about phones as a resource.”



Elmwood Avenue.



Pittsford Place Mall, Monroe Avenue.

When Kunsman comes across people who are making calls from pay phones—something that, in the Covid-19 era, has become rare—he finds that they’re almost always calling family members or doctors. And they are acutely aware of the connotations that accompany talking on a public pay phone in 2021. “One thing that’s a common thread is that they don’t like people looking at them,” he says.

For those who still rely on these devices, the options are becoming more limited. Since his project began, Kunsman has tracked the disappearance or destruction of scores of once-operational pay phones. On Lyell Avenue, he spots another recent victim on the brick side wall of a corner store, which used to sport a working pay phone. (Kunsman’s photo highlights some visual irony: The store sells cellphones.) Now only the severed wires are visible. He stops to photograph it, carefully duplicating the angle of his earlier shot. Again, the store owner comes out to chat—suspicious at first, then bemused. The pay phone was removed a few months ago, the owner explains, when he had the building painted.



Lyell Avenue, Freebird Cycles (left) and Aladdin’s Communications (right).



East Ave. Auto, East Avenue.


Not far away, we pull into a Sunoco station said to have a working pay phone. But upon closer inspection, the headset appears damaged, and no dial tone emerges. “I can’t remember the last time I saw someone use it,” says Michael Maccio, who works at the garage. “But I like it here. It’s a piece of history, man.”

We press on, visiting shopping centers of various vintages, where phones often hide on interior columns, and nail salons and dollar stores. In an affluent suburb, a lone phone is stationed on the edge of a vast parking lot. A beat-up convenience store bristles with a quartet of them. None work; one gives up a quarter. Kunsman pockets it. “That’s a first.”

On the way back into the city, we pass construction work on Main Street and spot one of the green-roofed public phone kiosks that were installed during a wave of 1990s downtown renovation. The structure is listing to one side now, marooned in a sea of gravel as the sidewalk is jackhammered around it. Kunsman makes a note to turn around and capture the scene: “That one will be gone by morning.”


East Main Street.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...-s-last-phones

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Wholly unrelated to the post above (except by the bigdata machine-learning algorithms which decide what media is suggested to me,) a rather interesting film:

olderguy

iTrader: (19)

When I was a teenager, our phone was controlled by a live operator. My number (Califon 291) had three other families connected to our line(party line) and each had a separate ring determined by the operator for us to pick up an incoming call.

z31maniac

Both of those are wild, I can't even remember the last time I saw a pay phone.

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

https://cryptomuseum.com/covert/rec/nagra/ccr/index.htm

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Darth Vader Statue

Odessa, Ukraine

A monument to Lenin has been transformed into a statue of everyone's favorite black-helmeted, fool-choking Sith Lord.

HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BRING balance to the socioeconomic forces of industrialized society, not leave them in darkness! But — just like the prequels, before we even saw them — we all know how that turned out.

The USSR eventually collapsed from outside intervention as well as internal opportunists and revisionists wanting to destroy the socialist model through “free Markets” and “Liberalization” and in the two-and-a-half decades since countless Soviet-era monuments have been scrubbed from cities and towns across the former Eastern Bloc. In April 2015, Ukraine formally passed a controversial package of “decommunization” laws requiring, among other things, the removal of communist monuments. However, for one particular Lenin statue in Odessa, a Ukrainian artist had other ideas.

Located in an old factory courtyard on the outskirts of the port city, the statue was scheduled for demolition until Alexander Milov — a local artist whose work was featured at Burning Man in 2015 — proposed a different solution: encasing the existing Lenin statue within a new titanium facade, creating the world’s first monument to Darth Vader.

The pose of the old statue has proven to be strikingly appropriate for the new subject; Lenin’s long coat has become Darth Vader’s flowing cape, and the former Soviet leader’s clenched fist now holds a lightsaber. This is not Lord Vader’s first foray into Ukrainian politics, as the Sith master put forward by the Internet Party of Ukraine as a candidate for prime minister in 2014 (the statue is not a project of the Internet Party, despite Milov’s past involvement with them).

If you are in the vicinity of the statue and sense a powerful presence in the Force on your phone or other wireless device, that’s because a WiFi access point in concealed in the statue’s helmet, providing free internet to followers of the dark side (or whoever).

Know Before You Go

Odessa’s Darth Vader statue stands in a private courtyard surrounded by office buildings and factories at 28 Stovpova Street, on the outskirts of town. The entrance to the courtyard may be locked, so it’s best to check in with the security guard to the right of the main gate when entering. The guard on duty will likely speak little or no English, but he will definitely understand the name “Darth Vader.”You can also enter the courtyard through the office building to left of the supermarket. Again, mention "Darth Vader" to the guard on the reception desk and he will buzz you through. Trolleybus number 3 runs from downtown Odessa, and stops in front of the factory gates.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/darth-vader-statue

HarryB

Looks like ancient Egyptians had figured out egg incubators waaaaay before the rest of the world

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/egypt-egg-ovens

poormxdad

The left front turn signal bulb on my '99 **** the bed. The metal base reads "KOITO 12V27/8W K JAPAN 3972 7-X-N". I did a search for "3972 Bulb Equivalent" and came up with nothing--Zero. Zip. Nada--even though when I typed in "3972 bulb", the "3972 bulb equivalent" popped up as the most popular choice. I also searched M.net and MT.net and come up with nothing. I've never had that happen before.

I put in an 1157 I had hanging on the fridge, Seems fine...

HarryB

The most interesting "tour" video I have seen, ever.


What is equally interesting, is the CV of Mr. Dan Gelbart

Current activity: Development of technology for metal 3D printing, founder of Rapidia. A co-founder of Kardium (2007), and Ikomed (2011), both in the medical field.
Last venture: Dan is the co-founder (1984), and served as President and Chief Technology Officer of Creo, a company based in British Columbia, Canada, developing laser-based products for the printing industry. In July 2005, Creo was sold to Kodak for 1 billion US$. At the time of the sale Creo had over 4000 employees and was the largest player in its field. A significant portion of Creo’s award-winning technology was developed by Dan.
Previous ventures: Dan also developed patented technology that served as the basis for two local companies: Cymbolic Sciences, in imaging, and MDI, in telecom. Both companies experienced rapid growth and were acquired by large corporations (Schlumberger and Motorola).
Patents: Dan Gelbart has 125 US patents. Cumulative revenues from the products based on these patents are in the billions of dollars to date.
Awards: Awards received by Dan include British Columbia Science Council Gold Medal (twice), Institute of Printing(UK) Gold Medal, Honorary Doctorates (from Simon Fraser University and University of BC), multiple GATF awards, multiple IR100 awards, Reed Technology Medal (for printing), the RIT award, IPEX “Titans of Print” award plus awards from crowdsourcing scientific competitions such as Innocentive (twice).

Check out his other videos as well, they are all pretty fascinating. TBH would love it if my uni professors have been half as interesting as his videos are.

MetalMuffins

iTrader: (1)

0Well I know what I'm doing after work today, impressive CV indeed.

z31maniac

I randomly came across this, I thought it was pretty damn interesting.

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/...-bell/4354705/

HarryB

That was a nice geeky statement that had escaped my attention

Gee Emm

Nice one Harry!

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

The Evolution of Spacecraft Control Panels

Vostok, 1960-1963



Mercury, 1961



Gemini, 1965



Soyuz, 1967 –



Apollo Command Module, 1968-1973



Buran, 1984-1988



Space Shuttle Endeavour, 2011



SpaceX Dragon V2, 2014 –

z31maniac

I don't have anything, but cool photos!

Erat

iTrader: (5)

SpaceX is visited the plant last week and they are literally the COOLEST guys on the planet. They remind me of members of this forum. People you could so easily drink a beer with and discuss anything and everything for hours. They ran through some of my documents for the last few months. Did a 30 minute audit of the department and spent 3 hours shooting the **** about hydroplanes with me.

Few weeks ago Brembo was in... Talk about a complete difference. If you didn't tell me the company each representative worked for, i would have gotten them mixed up.