A page about retro electronics, from the introduction of electricity until 1970-something. We refit old gadgets with new tech, and wonder at the makers who came before us.
Recently we decided to update our look and feel. Since this is 2025 we first turned to AI. Hey AI is free right? I’m sure there are no ethical concerns with where it sourced it’s data, and as we all…
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Overview If you’re like me you thought of Kenwood as a Ham Radio maker and hi-fi vendor, making radios and tape decks for car and home in the 80s. How odd that they also have an entire kitchen line in…
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It might come as no surprise that I like toasters. One of our more popular article is on the sunbeam toaster that’s automatic beyond belief! I saw some online videos about the To-ST1-T (Toasty!) toaster from Japan and purchased one….
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The last few years haven’t had a lot of new items in this space. The fact that MacLampsX from 2002 was still one of the best programs shows that! This year there is a new entry from Festivitas! It costs…
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UPDATE: This article was updated for Sonoma. Luckily all of the programs that ran previously are still good! It’s been a few years since I’ve done a Christmas desktop post. Most of what was true in my 2019 post about…
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My father gave me his trains before he passed away. These Lionel trains and tracks from the 50’s are a bit of a family heirloom. Last year I got the non-functioning locomotive refurbished by The Motor Doctor who did good work…
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Aloha Retro Future Friends. This is maybe more just future future. We recently installed 10 kilowatts (kW) of photovoltaic solar panels on our house on the island of Oahu, in Hawaii. Hawaii is ideally suited for solar power, being in…
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The Raspberry Pi, Beagle-bone, and the countless other Single Board Computers (SBCs) out there are making their way into everyday life. When you see a digital menu board at a fast food restaurant it’s likely a SBC behind it, when…
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We recently moved to Hawaii from Okinawa, in an pandemic, with a dog. That’s crazy you may say, and you’d be right! Our work was having none of it and we had to move. I drove a regular Prius before…
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Like most of the rest of the world, here at RFE HQ we are spending a little more time at home due to the threat of COVID-19. This has given me some time to take a few photos and videos,…
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It’s the start of new decade by most peoples figuring. What will the 20’s bring? Besides way too many references to 100 years ago and the roaring twenties. Here are my personal predictions for 2030 on a few tech trends….
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Intro UPDATE 1 July 2020: So after about 6 months with this setup I can’t recommend it. There were a lot of little strange errors. I ended up to buy the ifixit imac opening kit, put in a 4TB SSD…
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It’s Christmastime 2019 and I want to decorate up my Mac and Linus machines with a little Christmas cheer. Computer desktops haven’t been around all that long, but back in the 90’s there were a lot of desktop customizations for…
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Introduction The ISS is humankind’s only (current) permanent home in space. Many of the engineers and astronauts that live and work on and with the ISS are into all sort of geeky hobbies, including Amateur (Ham) Radio. As such there…
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Here at retrofuture HQ we’ve been using a trusty 27” iMac for over 5 years. This is the longest I’ve ever used a single computer as my “main” computer, but as desktop advances have slowed it hasn’t made sense to…
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This is a sub article from my main Lionel raspberry pi controller project. The switches I have were originally purchased for my father in the 1950s. They have been carelessly stored in attics, a rain forest, and garages for the…
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About 2 years ago I started running out of ports on my 8 port switch fairly regularly. It has connections for my main desktop computer, a hookup to the downstairs switch, phillips hue hub, ooma VoIP service, and any number…
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Here at RFE central, we live in a 2,000 SqFt (185SqM) house made from steel reinforced concrete. It’s not the friendliest to Wi-Fi, and darn near impossible (especially as a rental) to run Ethernet cables everywhere we’d like. We had…
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Engineers love their tools, in the 60’s an engineer may love a slide-rule, the 70s to 80s a PC or perhaps an LED calculator, to most engineers of my era (college in the early 90’s) the graphing calculator is the…
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I came across this great site recently and it has a spectacular collection of vacation photos from the 1950’s shot on Kodak’s Kodachrome. Not exactly retro future, but maybe just retro. A lot were taken of Florida’s space coast around…
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For a long time I’ve wanted to make a information station for the house. I had a Sony Dash Clock that filled most of these needs, but the servers for it are gone forever as of July 2017. This points…
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Most of us are well versed in SSH, used for general terminal access, port forwarding, inter-computer communication and more. SSH supports compression, but the man page has had this line in it as long as I can recall (at least…
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Buckminster Fuller, the undisputed king of retro-future architecture. We can only imagine what the world would have been like if not for the depression and WW2 stoping his dreams. Probably we would all live in Bucky-balls and long for square…
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Here are RFE, we also like all things Retro, even if they aren’t about the future or electronics. Today this book arrived in the RFE mailbox: The Complete Barbecue Book by John and Marie Roberson. (Available from Amazon for US$4…
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I ordered this cool pine64 case from Amazon for $15, almost the cost of the computer itself! It went together easily, came with all the hardware and spacers needed. And it looks pretty cool. Here are the pics! The last one…
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