TAYBLES tap into our nostalgia for cassette tapes, a love of handcrafted wood furniture and a functional desire to have mood lighting close at hand.

The Los Angeles company creates wooden tables, each shaped like a tape and sealed with clear epoxy. LED lights tucked into the pair of central holes add light and color to the room.

The ‘tape’ part of the cassette turns out to conceal a secret, too: storage space for books, gadgets or, well, tapes, situated in the center of the empty table.

The biggest difference between models (besides the great variety of woods and their associated hues) is, of course, the label, which can be customized to feature your favorite tunes, a hand-written list of songs or whatever you desire.

Minimalist metal supports provide a likewise-vintage and non-distracting structural system to keep your tape table floating on air.

The post Mixtape Coffee Tables Remix Retro Nostalgia & Vintage Furniture first appeared on Gajitz.

Cosmological myths, legends and superstitions of of our ancient ancestors were often tied to astronomical phenomena, and now researchers have found a truly stunning tool they used to make observations of these celestial happenings.

In the absence of modern magnifying glasses and reflective mirrors, the structure discovered in Portugal employed a lower-tech approach: a narrow passage filtered out extraneous light, helping people see stars at times when they would be hard to spot in the open sky.

Part of a prehistoric tomb complex called the Seven-Stone Antas, the astronomical observation device is thought to have been used to view Aldebaran, a red giant in the constellation of Taurus. This star becomes visible in the early morning s of spring, just before sunrise, but would be hard to see outside of a narrow window without a device to block out unwanted night. In turn, its passage was presumably used to mark a change of seasons from spring to summer.

More from the scientists behind the discovery and their next steps: “The team’s idea is to investigate how a simple aperture, for example an opening or doorway, affects the observation of slightly fainter stars. They focus this study on passage graves, which are a type of megalithic tomb composed of a chamber of large interlocking stones and a long narrow entrance. These spaces are thought to have been sacred, and the sites may have been used for rites of passage, where the initiate would spend the night inside the tomb, with no natural light apart from that shining down the narrow entrance lined with the remains of the tribe’s ancestors.”

The post 6,000-Year-Old Prehistoric Telescope Unearthed in Portugal first appeared on Gajitz.

The world has a long-standing love affair with bicycles. Most of us grew up riding them around the neighborhood, and plenty of us still use them today for fun or exercise. But have you ever thought about how that fancy mountain bike you’re riding came by its current shape and function?

The very first bicycle precursor was the “dandy horse” above, invented in the early 19th century by a German baron. It was the first human-propelled two-wheeled vehicle and faced a number of complications in its short life, not the least of which being that pedestrians really didn’t want to share the streets with it.

Fast-forward a few years and the velocipede (“fast foot”) became the newest thing on two wheels. It had pedals attached directly to the front wheel and, because its hard metal or wooden wheels made it uncomfortable to ride outdoors, it became an indoor novelty with dedicated riding facilities much like modern skating rinks.

This simple animated history of the bicycle from Danish media firm Visual Artwork shows all of the wonderful (and baffling) iterations of the bicycle from its inception to today. There is, of course, a moment dedicated to the pennyfarthing (pictured at top), arguably the most ridiculous mode of two-wheeled transportation ever conceived.

The post Sweet Ride: A Visual Evolution of the Humble Bicycle first appeared on Gajitz.

It’s hard to avoid feeling some sort of nostalgia for the toys and tools we became used to as children. In the 80s and 90s, technology experienced a huge boom – and as it quickly progressed, technology waste likewise increased exponentially. The planet is overrun with obsolete objects like floppy disks, outdated cell phones, cassettes and untold amounts of other e-waste.

Photographer Jim Golden was inspired to document these disappearing relics when he saw an ancient brick-style cellular phone in a thrift shop. After that find, he began collecting other old “junk” from friends, thrift stores and eBay. He was fascinated by the objects both because of their nostalgia value and the curiosity he felt about what may have happened to all of the wasted objects.

Golden made some of his photos into GIFs that further illustrate the former usefulness of these now-outdated pieces of technology. If you are young enough to never have lived when these things were the standard, these GIFs might be the closest you’ll ever get to using a projector, reel-to-reel tape recorder, or rotary phone.

The photographer put the obsolete technology against plain institutional-type colors. While they were minimally retouched (most of them were in unused condition), Golden did use editing software to create some of the stacked patterns. Golden says of the Relics of Technology project: “These photos are reminders that progress has a price and our efforts have an expiration date.”

The post Our Technological History: Photos of Obsolete Technology first appeared on Gajitz.

Audio preservation has evolved to the point where centuries-old recordings become computer files. From Edison’s phonograph that recorded onto wax cylinders, to vinyl (possibly the most debated form of recording), to the compact disc, these shifts focused primarily on audio quality. But there have been recordings for just that purpose: to preserve the audio. So when a possible recording showed up in the pages of a book, media preservationists took notice.

A few years ago, a survey was done of the different time-based media objects in the stacks of Indiana University’s Bloomington campus. An amazing 569,148 different forms were identified. What the report didn’t mention, however, was a hidden ‘record’. A member of the Media Preservation Initiative (MPI) at IU Bloomington discovered a circular picture buried in a volume of German reference books. While not the first ever audio recording, it revealed much more upon further inspection.

The disc-shaped image was titled “Der Handschuh,” which is a poem by Friedrich Schiller. The MPI investigator proceeded to apply some slick audio recording tricks to the image. After a high-resolution scan was done of the image, the spiral was converted into parallel lines by a process called polar-to-rectangular-coordinates transformation. The lines were then ‘pasted’ together used audio editing software.

If it hadn’t gotten tricky yet, it certainly did on the next step. According to the MPI’s website, the engineer “[ran] these images through ImageToSound, a program that converts them into WAV files as though they were variable-area optical film sound tracks.” A stereo track was made into a WAV, and the seemingly mundane picture in the book came audibly alive.

The image turned out to be a demonstration on how the lines theoretically contained enough information to produce sound. The technology was first created by Emile Berliner, the creator of the gramophone. But the picture found in the depths of Wells Hall at IU Bloomington turned out to be “the oldest known recording of a complete literary work in the German language.” It’s eons behind that FLAC rip you did of a CD in terms of audio quality, but the fact that it was digitized from a book is one amazing feat. The WAV file can be heard at MPI’s website.

The post Ripping Pages: Book Image Becomes a Digital Audio File first appeared on Gajitz.