More Seattle Thrifting (+ RE-PC)

So I just picked up a new camera to use for walk-around shots, a Panasonic GH5. I'm loving it so far, but I needed a lens for it, so I popped over to the camera store to look at one I'd read about online. Ended up walking out with one that cost about twice as much, but has incredible capabilities, so I needed to put it through its paces. So let's go to the thrift store. So this is the South Lake Union Goodwill in Seattle, and I actually don't go here very often. It's been years, frankly, because they never used to have much in the way of electronics, but they seem to have expanded quite a bit. Some sound bars there, some speakers, some monitors, like good commodity stuff that people need. I'm not sure if these AV receivers were recent or otherwise. You know, I did forget to take a look at this VCR when I was there. It kind of looks... Actually, no, it doesn't look all that decent. It kind of looks like a cheap piece of crap. I spent like three minutes unburying this thing because it looked interesting, and then I realized it was just a DVD burner. And it's an external one, which means it's probably missing the multi-voltage power supply that you will never be able to replace. Same deal for the Mad Dog down there. It's a bummer. Those things are useful, but they almost never include the power cord. CD wallets are always empty when you find them, and I always wonder if the staff are instructed to empty them, or if these just never get used. Did you know the entire smart speaker market is currently collapsing because nobody can figure out how to monetize it? Yeah, couldn't have guessed that was going to happen. I was staring at this thing for a good 10 seconds, uncomprehending, before it clicked, no pun intended, that it's one of those weird bendy Microsoft mice. And I'd seen those in stores, but I'd never managed to handle one. They were always just on ads and whatnot. This thing's terrible. I don't know what they were trying to achieve, but this doesn't do it. It just feels awful in the hand. It's like an Amazon Basics. And the weirdest thing about it is there's nowhere to put the USB receiver. And not all wireless mice have a cavity for that, but I would have expected the Microsoft one to, because their peripheral department used to have quite a bit of pride, and they made decent products. But it seems like they don't do that anymore. Naturally, the rubber sheath is just coming right off this thing. So this belongs in the trash. Nobody wants this. Speaking of things nobody wants, and I don't mean the lightning part. People will be using last-gen iPhones for a long, long time. It's just that I haven't seen anybody use a dock since 2011. I mean, I'm sure you do, but it seems like very, very, very few people do. It's kind of weird. It just died. Wow. I had no idea that Acer branded VR gear? I mean, this is probably made by one company and rebranded by a whole bunch of different OEMs, but it's still very weird to see the Acer brand on a VR controller. I don't know. Maybe that's normal to you. Here, bro, here's your controller. Here, bro, here's your controller. Here, bro, here's your controller. Here, bro, here's your... Actually, is this one okay? Hyperkin? It doesn't look very okay. Here, bro, here's... Well, actually, is this official? I mean, it looks like it's busted, but it might be official. Oh, yeah, here we go. Here, bro, here's your controller. U-body? I-body? Here, bro, here's your keyboard? I mean, it does not feel very good, let me tell you. I really wasn't sure what to expect when I opened this box. It looks like a pair of hair clippers or something, but it turns out to be a mic that doesn't really deserve the regal packaging. This is like a $20 Guitar Center special. Notice the on-off switch? I've observed that pretty much means a mic is a cheap piece of crap, probably because no serious professional wants the risk of turning themselves off mid-performance. Okay, now, I'd be very curious to know if this is as common outside of large cities, but at least around here, we see so much discarded streamer detritus. And this thing, I opened it up, it hasn't even been used, so somebody must have gotten this as a gift. It has quite the feature list. Fill light and beauty face. Make face and eye in beauty. Nightcore extreme. And multiple color temperatures. The post-AliExpress electronics market is kind of wild because you find yourself saying dumb stuff like, oh, Foscam, yeah, that's a real brand. Oh, iMillit, uh-uh, nah, that one's fake. Here, bro, here's your mouse. So like I said, the Southlake Union Goodwill has expanded its electronics selection considerably, but there's a sliding scale of Goodwill quality, and at the bottom, they're keeping UV phone sanitizers and 30-pin iPod docks that literally nobody wants. Yeah, baby, I'll bet these are as good as any other Crosley product. And of course, we've got like punched cone speakers and partial surround sound sets and whatnot, so it doesn't seem like they're being very discretionary with what they keep, which is a bad sign. I do love this little amplifier I found, though. This was my favorite thing I found that whole day. I mean, technically speaking, it's probably really poor quality, two transistors and a prayer, but I'll bet it sounds just fine. And more importantly, it's extremely adorable. So that's about it for this store. We'll get moseying to the next place, and I decided to run across town to the Dearborn Goodwill, which is the huge like anchor store that's 10 times bigger than any of the others, although that doesn't mean that it actually has better stock, if I'm honest. I would like to point out that it was January 11th. Irony of ironies, this is the exact same super cheap Samsung Ultra Wide that I found in the last Goodwill video like a few weeks ago, except this one actually does have the power supply. Unfortunately, it also has a completely destroyed screen. Oh, well. Hello. Now, that right there is a 32-inch Dell monitor, which is already pretty nice, but I didn't find out till I got home. This is a 4K display. I mean, it's only 60 hertz, but I mean, this is a ridiculously nice monitor for $20. What is going on with the used market up here? C++ for kids? It shouldn't even be for adults. God, I cannot describe how vomit-inducing the phrase a code baby's book is. It's never too early. It's never too late to program. I don't think I've been into a Goodwill in the last 10 years and not seen one of those horrible fake wood radios. Whatever that brand used to be, I'll bet it was really funny. You know, these Dell Harman Kardon's probably don't sound half bad. Someone's going to love those for $7. There's another Crosley suitcase turntable, of course, just lurking over there, ready to strike an unsuspecting buyer. Those things are so thick on the ground, it's completely ridiculous. I wonder if anybody ever even uses them or if 100% of them get gifted and then immediately thrown away. I mean, there's literally like four of them at this particular Goodwill. I don't think I've ever seen less than two. I thought this was our token karaoke machine, but it turns out I think this is just a general-purpose PA system. It's just really cheap and crappy and I have no idea why it has a video input. A couple more PA speakers. Holy crap, those are also thick on the ground up here. Tons of subwoofers. I really wonder if anybody ever buys them. Lots and lots of DVD players. Like I said in the last video, there's just so many and it's weird because for every one, there's a Blu-ray player and there's literally no reason to buy one instead of the other. They're just objectively superior and they're not more expensive. I don't even know why Goodwill keeps these. It's really strange. Oh, there we go. That's our token karaoke machine, I think. It's got mic inputs. That's gotta be what it is. All right, I'll bite. Someone tell me what's the significance of colored speaker cabinets. I've never seen it before. Like, these are just incredibly striking and that's not a paint job. Like, it came that way, clearly. When the hell did these get made and what special market segment are they? I mean, they don't look very good, but they're just incredibly blue. God, there are so many speakers. Look at this. They're keeping speakers with literally no roll foam. Like, wow, there's just no decision making being made at this particular Goodwill. This is amazing. I have seen in the last 10 years, one Xbox 360 controller in the wild that had the USB adapter and I bought it like two weeks ago. The Dearborn Goodwill is enormous and it looks very impressive, but the fact is that's only because they're at the keeping UV phone sanitizers end of the spectrum. Like, there's a few cool things in here, but the overwhelming majority of this is literal garbage that belongs in a dumpster. Nobody actually wants it, no matter how broke they are. Hey, there it is. There's the actual UV phone sanitizer. It never fails. We got the Thrustmaster pedals, but no Thrustmaster wheel to go with them. And then, yeah, like six Wii Fit boards. That's pretty much how you can know a Goodwill is not throwing anything out when you see the Wii Fit boards. We'll be tripping over those goddamn things 30 years from now. If you need an alarm clock, Dearborn Goodwill has you covered. Here, bro, here's your controller. Here, bro, here's your controller. Here, bro, here's your controller. Hey, a perfectly good cable for only a dollar. The King's Game, the beautiful game. Not really sure what this is. It appears to be like a car battery, except for like a tool system. 36 volts, weighs like 30 pounds. And as far as I can tell, you get the juice out through these two massive contacts over here. What the hell plugs into this thing? Okay, I just checked online. This is literally a lead acid battery for a lawnmower. For the Linus Tech Tips competitor on a budget, it's the backseat entertainment system that's only compatible with those retro game systems you've been trying to get your kids to take an interest in for the last five years. And hey, it supports DVD, compact disc, MP3, all these other things. They have nothing to do with the device itself because it's just a monitor. It's not even a pair of speakers. Here, bro, here's your tripod. But seriously, every single thrift store, I think everywhere actually, has this gargantuan mountain of unusably bad tripods. This one's branded Nikon, but it's either an OEM or a counterfeit because, yeah, it's just all plastic. And no matter what you think these might be just barely adequate for, they aren't. Like, these are not a deal. You just go to Amazon and buy a Chinese no-name one for $20. These are literally useless. They have no function. There's just something about the vibes of the Ryobi table saw hanging out with, like, the Barbie houses and kids' bicycles and whatnot. There's just something about the energy. Several years ago, all the Seattle Goodwills ripped out their collectible counters for some reason. But then, like, eight months after that, this Goodwill brought it back, but over in this corner and, like, not labeled in any way. So you had to just know it was there. But then the collectibles disappeared again, and now it's just one-third of a drum kit. And I'm not joking. I've been coming here for a year, and it's just a different one-third of a drum kit every time, which suggests that somebody's buying these bits and pieces and building, like, these horrifying, like, zombie Frankenstein drum kits. I want to hear them. We need to get Dankpods on this. It's starting to get real cold up here this winter, and when I got outside, it just started hailing, and I decided I didn't want to be out for that much longer. So I decided to make just one more stop, and that's over at The Other RePC. That's right, we have two of them. The first one that I went to in my last video, that's down in South Center, but this one is up in Seattle proper. And, you know, I find more interesting things at this one, relatively speaking, but they're both very interesting stores. I don't have the faintest idea what makes this TV significant, but it is $200 and extremely large. I love that they keep having to update this sign that says which version of macOS you need to run in order to download GarageBand. It says a lot about the used Mac market. I think a lot of these servers have been here for, like, four years, but I don't blame them. I wouldn't throw them out either. Now, lately, RePC has been getting a lot of really cool retro systems, and I don't mean just the PC itself. Like, I think this is an authentic bundle of monitor, speakers, keyboard, and system. It's only missing the mouse, and it looks really good. It probably came in, you know, all as one unit, but, like, they didn't just split it up and put it in different parts of the store. They kept it together, and I love that. I think some collector is going to pick this up and adore it. It's a pretty nice machine, honestly. 1.1 gigahertz Athlon, half gig of RAM, GeForce2 MX. It's got Windows Me, but what can you do? That's authentic. Now, this next bit is an interesting production detail, but it's going to be very flickery, so I'll let you know when that's over, but I woke up the monitor and realized it was flickering from the LCD on my camera, so I went in to change the refresh rate because I figured it wasn't on 60 hertz, and sure enough, it wasn't. It's actually on 100, but watch this. Hey, my camera actually adjusted to it just fine, but I didn't notice this, so I finished changing the refresh rate, and I looked at the back of the camera, and I'm like, what the hell? It's rolling really bad. Took me a couple minutes to realize that I never set my camera to 160th of a second since I just bought it. Well, I adjust it, and we still have a rolling artifact, and I'm just like, okay, I guess that's life, but if I hadn't done anything, it actually would have looked better. Anyway, we're going to move on, so you can safely look back at your screen now. I was really surprised they didn't kit this G4 out with the right mouse and keyboard. I mean, the Apple ProMouse, I think, was out at this point, and that was a really nice mouse. Now, the G4 keyboard, that was a piece of crap, and I hate it, and this one is better, but they still could have at least set it out there for the look, you know? Now, I missed this when I was there. I only noticed it looking back at the footage, but that is a brown 80B mouse. So, Apple never made anything like this, of course, and at first glance, it looked too good to be a paint job. In retrospect, I think it probably is, and I talked to a friend who's familiar with the Mac mods from this era, and he thinks so too, but first, he told me that it was possible that it wasn't painted, but rather dyed. There was apparently a trend in the early 2000s of people using this stuff called vinyl dye that sort of soaks into the plastic and actually alters the color, but he showed me some examples, and yeah, his do look a lot better than this. You can see this is kind of shiny, so I think that's just kind of a crappy paint job, but one wonders, why? What was this supposed to match? To their credit, rePC always maintains this huge shelf of radio and test equipment, and I don't know how often anybody buys any of it, but it doesn't take up much floor space, and I think that's probably why they don't throw it out, because it really is just fun to come in and see all this funky stuff. There's old radio scanners and stuff like that, and you know, I swear this is literally the exact same radio receiver that I glossed over in the previous video that a bunch of people got mad at me about, like, what are you doing just walking by that thing? I don't know, man. Maybe because I never got into radio. I don't know a damn thing about this, but it does look impressive. If you don't have a sense of the scale of this place, here you go. Like, it's gigantic, and the fact there's two of them is really just astonishing, because most places that even have a computer store at all, it's a tenth this size, if that. I mean, it's so big that you could just sort of forget entire sections of it exist. Like, for instance, let me just, let me just shove this obstacle out of the way, because this is their retro computers section. That's right, we've got one of those, you know. You end up with so much stuff that genuinely interesting stuff gets buried, and there is some really neat stuff here. I think we've got, I think it's a Pentium 1 system here on the left. I think it goes onto a Pentium 2, another Pentium 1, I think. There's some P3s here, all in, like, pretty good condition. No broken plastic, nothing like that. I know these all work. It ranges up into, like, the P4 era. Those little slimline Dells are garbage, and that VAIO probably has blown caps, but, you know, it's worth the repair effort if you want, like, a good Windows XP machine. Dingy-looking G3, for some reason those things just did not age well. They just look terrible whenever you find them used. And, of course, the Dell XPS, it's missing the door. That's a shame, but it's a good system if you don't care about aesthetics. Oh, now this thing here is kind of a tragedy. This is a Gateway Destination, which is a really early media convergence system from, like, 1996 that came with, like, a 36-inch television with a VGA input, which just didn't exist back then. So, really cool machine, total flop, but the tube didn't come in with it. So, you know, hopefully this will just sit here safely waiting for the day when it's reunited with its partner. We got an Apple IIe. Yeah, I know, 500 bucks, it's a little spicy, but it's obviously, like, almost new-in-box looking. Nothing wrong with it other than a missing rubber foot. It's kitted out. It's got the hard drives. Oh, and it comes with the CRT, and it's that one with the tilting tube. Again, these aren't nearly as common as they used to be, so it's probably a good deal for somebody who just wants to snap their fingers and have a complete Apple II setup. I'm a real sucker for the Performa 5200. I've been thinking about buying this thing for, like, five years, and every time I'm like, where would I put it? And the answer is nowhere. I have nowhere to put it. Now, I have two iMac DVs that are contemporary with this one, so I can tell you it's absolutely dog slow. However, there's still a lot you could do with it if you're patient. The problem is, A, this one is the milky white plastic, so just like all the others, it looks like it has smoker's lung, and B, it's dead. There's a small museum attached to the store. They don't update it all that often. Unfortunately, none of this stuff is interactive or anything like that, but it's still pretty cool, especially since the Living Computer Museum closed. One of these days, I'll come in here, and I'll just give, like, a complete walking tour. There's usually some interesting audio gear here. This thing I've never seen before. This, I'm just guessing here, but it appears that you put this next to your couch. You can plug in two pairs of headphones, and then you can remotely turn your stereo speakers off. So it's sort of a pre-remote control, remote control. It's probably why there's this huge bundle of cables that are in a flat pack, so you can run them under the rug, and that allows you to intercept the speaker signal remotely. Just guessing at all of that. There's almost always a couple of nice-looking reel-to-reel decks here. It's got the caps for the spindles, but the rubber is perished, so they're not going to do very much good. It's actually really frustrating if you don't have working spindle caps. This is a fairly early Umatic VCR. Umatic is a very interesting format. It's the first successful commercial cartridge video format. There's a lot of Umatic media out there. The problem is, I almost guarantee this deck doesn't work, and that it'll be virtually impossible to find someone who can fix it, and that's really a shame because these things just look incredible. The aesthetics and the feel are just second to none. Next up, we've got a Betacam SP deck. We've got a much newer Umatic deck. Then we have a slightly older Umatic deck, and then some professional SVHS decks down below. Probably none of these work, to be frank. Most VCRs, especially pro VCRs at this point, are dead or dying, and no one can repair them anymore, especially since replacement parts are just pretty much unobtainium at this point. Now, this is weird. There's usually like 50 VCRs down here, ranging from really cheap consumer crap with only two heads to like really nice later stuff, sometimes with upscaled HDMI outputs and whatnot, so this has really been purged. I wonder if they found a bunch of them didn't work, or maybe somebody came down from Vancouver and just bought the whole lot to use as props in a movie because that happens not infrequently. This thing's kind of interesting. It's a Shure Vocal Master, apparently just like a six-input mic mixer with a built-in amplifier that's exclusively for vocal reinforcement applications, so you don't put instruments into this, but this was introduced in 1968 and apparently was a pretty big deal back then, though I'd guess anybody who needs to do what it does nowadays would probably not want something that's that old. There's always a huge selection of AV gear here, but as you can see, there's like a whole ton of like 5-disc changers up there and like older AV receivers, and sadly, just there's less and less demand for that, no matter who you are these days. I was not kidding when I said that both stores always have a pair of ADAT decks, just chilling. These have been here for so long, like someday they're going to have to throw them away. They're completely useless, but I still want somebody to come in and buy them and save them from the dumpster. Please help. Please save these ADATs. CoolKeith will thank you. Hello, Maxwell. RePC is one of the only places left that you can rely on to have CRTs in stock. This one on the left apparently has old-style DB-15 Mac video input. That ViewSonic's sadly missing a stand. We've got a crappy Acer, and we've got the Apple Studio Display. This is the first flat panel version, and that $350 price tag might seem unreasonably high, but the fact is these are just not terribly common. People will pay that much for them, and nobody's really being deprived anyway because they're just completely unremarkable 15-inch monitors, and it's not like the Atomic Purple plastic matches anything other than an iMac anyway, so you're never really going to plug it in anything that it looks good with. So this used to be a much larger section called As Is. You can see the sign up there still. This went back into the back end of the store, and you would find all sorts of weird stuff back here, like barcode scanners and ancient 70s terminals, but nobody was buying any of it, and I think people were going back there where no one could see them and being weird, so they closed it up, and this just sort of became the rack equipment area. A lot of this is weird AV installer integration stuff. Sometimes they'll have RF modulators will show up back here. These are waveform monitors for NTSC video that I just can't get excited about. They've got Crestron AV routers, Cisco routers, network switches. This Extron thing here, this is another example. I wanted to get excited about this. It's a multi-input, multi-format video switcher and converter, but again, it's just really intended for AV integrators. This is supposed to go in a college conference room and hook up to a projector, so yeah, it's just really hard for anybody to make any of this stuff useful. It's even worse on the lower two shelves. This is all really weird stuff, like power supplies for security systems. Just utterly useless unless you're a very specific kind of person. They always have a good selection of computer cases. They're just sort of all across the board, so there's a lot of mid-late 2000s stuff, just some fractal design cases in there. I got the Leonle aluminum one. It's sadly missing the extra bezels, but just put three CD-ROMs in there. Then we got the crappy beige ATX case, and we can't forget the Silverstone HTPC case because everybody's got to make that mistake sooner or later. Here, bro. Here's your controller. Here, bro. Here, bro. Here's your controller. Here, bro. Another reason I love this place is they pull out a lot of just rando commodity crap cards and throw them in these bins, so if you need a FireWire card or a USB2 card or a 3C905 Ethernet card, you'll find one here any day for $3. Now, speaking of networking, I actually came in here today for a reason. I've got some early 2000s consumer network hardware that just does not want to play ball with my home network. It seems to work for the most part, but these two devices just won't talk to each other, and I kind of suspect that I've got a gigabit network with a managed switch and a whole bunch of weird protocols broadcasting around on it, and I think it might just be confusing these devices, so I figured it would probably help if I got a period-correct network, so I wanted to pick up just a really crappy consumer router like a Linksys WRT54G that's 10100, has its own DHCP server and whatnot, and absolutely nothing exotic, and normally I would have found one here, but I was shocked that I couldn't find anything of the sort in the bins. Fortunately, however, the employees here are all pretty good-natured. This is how men solve their problems in 2024. Normal world. And they told me that everything like that had sort of recently disappeared off the floor and were willing to go dig one up out of a bin in the back room. They also handed me a Bluetooth speaker that was too dumb to recognize when its own batteries were running low, so the amplifier just gets more and more clipped until the thing just shuts off completely. Somebody also handed me this gadget that you connect to via Bluetooth, and then you stick it on a surface and it turns it into a speaker. I'd heard of these before, I'd never played with one. I had a lot of fun with it, got a lot of really interesting effects, none of which you'll get to hear, because, yeah, it turns out that Crab Rave is copyrighted. I'd assumed that it was released to the public domain, the way that people use it, but no, no, you can't use that in a video, you'll get a claim, and even though they don't take your video down, it's just, it's not worth it. It's just not worth it. So yeah, you won't get to hear any of that, which is a shame, because it was fun. So sometimes I come in here and I don't find a single thing that I want, but this time around I found a few. This here is a broadcast-style lens for the Canon XL-H1 camcorder, and normally that uses fully automatic everything, you know, autofocus, auto-zoom, but this one is a fully manual lens. You can see that the ring here doesn't have any gearing behind it. Now, you can engage a servo with that one, that's the zoom ring, so you can power zoom with it, but the focus is fully manual, and the purpose of that is you're supposed to attach a gadget to this that engages with those geared rings, that allows a AC or focus puller to remotely control the focus, while the person actually holding the camera just focuses on where to point it. That's the way that, you know, Hollywood does it. So that's a pretty cool thing. I didn't even know they made that. I have absolutely nothing insightful to say about this keyboard. Is that the whole keyboard? Yeah. This isn't an add-on for anything? Next up, we have a Dell Latitude X1, which I just learned during editing is actually a rebadged Samsung. I never had any idea. This machine's not terribly special, it just has like a Centrino in it, but it also has a working battery, and having old tiny laptops with working batteries is very convenient, so I figured it was worth it for a couple of bucks. I do have sort of a mystical touch with these things. I'll pick up machines that are 20, 25 years old, absolutely shouldn't still work, hit the power button, and they just light right up. Everybody's always dumbfounded because they've never seen this before. It's sort of a curse, actually. As mentioned, I did secure a WRT-54G. It's a 5th gen, but that should be fine. Then I just found a whole bunch of camera parts. They just had this box somebody dropped off, and they wanted to get rid of it. These are called cheese plates, I believe. They're basically just aluminum plates with a bunch of quarter-twenty holes in them. They're useful for sticking together camera accessories, monitors, and things like that, so I figured I'd take them off their hands. So that's all I found for today, but hey, you know, it beats nothing, and I couldn't have gotten it somewhere else. And while normally a video like this would be like 45 minutes to an hour, because I'd go to like four or five other places, I'd only actually gone out to test my camera to begin with, and didn't even intend on shooting a video, so I decided to call it for the day. But I think I got what I wanted. Oh man, my hair looks terrible. Wow. That was a kind of a pretty good haul for a rePC on a random day. Like, sometimes I come by on a Saturday because somebody, uh, somebody came by here and, you know, they messaged me like, hey man, you got to go over here and check out what they got at the rePC. But this time around, I just sort of wandered in. Usually there's just nothing, but wow, those are some, those were some neat things. But I think I've successfully proven that this camera has the quality for the sort of stuff that I want to do with it. Seems like it held up to walking around and being in places and whatnot. The autofocus isn't what I wish it was, but from what I understand in like the mirrorless video world, that's just the way it is. Like, nobody has functioning autofocus. You really should be, you know, having somebody trail behind you with a wireless remote and just pull focus for you. But given that I don't have, you know, $120,000 a year to pay somebody to do that for my stupid vlogs, I think this is as good as it's going to get. And from the previous screen, it looked like it did okay. So I think I'm happy. And now I'm going to roll over to the Uwajimaya, a local Asian grocery store, and pick up some hot pot mix. Gonna have hot pot tonight. Probably watch Moneyball. Thank you all for watching.