Lengthened Days
What It's Like in Real Time
Mark Rushton’s Curator Mindset is a place where I talk in 2026 about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist, tech things, and provide music recommendations. This is being released on Saturday, January 17, 2026.
Topics:
Old Tech Has More Fun
The Microslop Mockery Has Increased
TimePiece Soundtrack Progress
Damien Jurado - “A Place Reserved for Reverse”
Old Tech Has More Fun
I got the portable TV to work again.
It’s a Sony FD-510. Mega Watchman. About the size of a half gallon of milk.
This was my dad’s, but I’m not sure he never used it. He bought it from his next door neighbor, Wayne Townsend, who died in 2006. Wayne was moving away at some point and had a garage sale.
Because of the digital switchover in 2009 this required a digital converter box for the TV to pick up signals, and I found one at a thrift store for $3. I already had the universal remote. Got a cheap flat “antenna”, a coax cable, and eventually figured out I needed a doohickey that was both a female RG6 and a 3.5mm male (also cheap, thanks Copilot for figuring this out…) - the Sony FD-510 will accept an external antenna, but it must have a 3.5mm input, which is unusual.
I paired the remote with the digital box (again, thanks Copilot for instructions…). Had to get next to a window to get any TV signals and refresh. The towers for Des Moines network affiliates are way north of town, so I was stuck with about 12 to 15 religious, home shopping, and “old game show” channels.
On a 5” B&W CRT.
It has a “vert hold” knob on the back. I had to adjust it!
In the photo is the first thing I saw. A sign from… the broadcast tower about 8 miles away! I changed the channel and the late Jimmy Swaggert was singing with closed captioning. Further along, I saw Alex Trebek hosting some game show that was not Jeopardy.
TV may not be dead, but it sure has a lot of dead people on it.
I also discovered the trap door on the bottom, which would hold 8 “D” batteries.
The AM/FM radio sounds very good, but that’s typical of Sony products.
I’m not keeping it. I just wanted to see if it could be a TV again. I’ll put it on eBay. They sell for around $30 plus shipping. I’ll include the digital converter, the coax cable, the antenna, and the doohickey.
I use my Sony Digital Walkman a lot more lately. These were my go-to devices 15 to 20 years ago and I bought one last summer for around $50 on eBay. I’m using the same earbuds, too, which are getting difficult to find, but they were mass-produced and there’s lot of New Old Stock. Even loaded with MP3 files, this setup sounds better than anything streamed off my spy phone.
This Walkman is a Japanese-only model, so it has some fun quirks. It has Bluetooth, kinda rare and only on later models, but I prefer wired headphones.
It has OPP, yeah, you know me. OPP was an early file transfer thing that uses Bluetooth - meant to transfer files like photos and MP3s to other devices that accept OPP, mainly flip phones. It is mostly obsolete today. I only discovered this because of some Japanese characters on the menu, so I got out my spy phone and Google Translate read it as “File Transfer”.
I then asked the PG-rated word robot if the Walkman’s OPP had anything to do with the Naughty By Nature song, but the robot turned into a prude and said it couldn’t discuss that topic.
The Microslop Mockery Has Increased
I love that Copilot answered it this way.
Copilot, a Microslop product.
Soon, I’m going to convert a desktop from Win 10 to Linux Mint. It’s nothing new for me. I had an Ubuntu computer about 20 years ago. In the late 90s, when I worked for MCI, I used Unix all the time.
I still have a bit of a fondness for OS/2, which I used all the time at the mutual fund company in the early to mid 1990s, especially the “Minibase” program.
A few weeks ago, I canceled some $80 a year MS email thing through a domain host and switched it to some Google Workspace thing I was grandfathered in on a while back. And in a few weeks my annual O365 family subscription won’t be renewed.
LibreOffice works just fine and is free.
Microslop’s products have become insufferable. Ads on Win 11. Copilot integrated into everything, even MS Paint! Nag hints everywhere. Increased prices.
That said, Copilot, as a stand-alone product, is perfectly fine. Totally OK as a “search engine thing”. Good enough as a research assistant. Fun as a chatbot. Rather excellent at figuring out what doohickey I need to buy to get that old Sony TV working again. This is going to take away our jobs?
Tech really hasn’t been innovative in over a decade, and they know it. All the obvious hype since 2022 about “AI” is pathetic. Just a bunch of scammers talking. You never fooled me. I read Frederick Brooks Jr’s “No Silver Bullet” a long time ago. Fred Brooks was kinda smart. He was awarded a Turing.
Jon and I discuss the robots. He’s handy and creative with Alexa Plus. I’m impressed. I said he should create a new band: Jon Harnish and His Side Chicks. I said, “You and your new band should look like this…”
TimePiece Soundtrack Progress
22 of the 24 tracks for the TimePiece soundtrack have been completed, titled, and sequenced.
The soundtrack album will start at 5am. Might as well begin it just before dawn. That seems appropriate.
It’s most of my styles. Each track is three minutes. There’s a lot of variety. It flows nicely. And I’m still planning to broadcast it via FM.
Damien Jurado - “A Place Reserved for Reverse”
I noticed recently that Bandcamp dropped the hammer on “AI music” on their site. It’s not allowed (good!) and there’s a way to report it (I hope nobody is falsely accused…).
Damien Jurado keeps dropping new singles and EPs on Bandcamp. He’s playing the Reverb Lounge in Omaha in late February. Weather permitting, I plan to go.
Another instantly beautiful song with Lacey Brown (the NW Lacey Brown). I featured them last year with “Heaven’s a Drag”.
I’m not anxious about AI taking my job. I’m anxious about the decision makers who think it can replace me.
When I bought my current home, I was delighted to find an ancient portable b&w tv/radio combo. It powers on but I’ve never acquired any of the adapters I’d need to make it work. I may, after reading your experience it sounds fun.