My flashlight-turned-microphone from high school! ...There's a long story to this one.

Ask yourself: WWDQD?

Adminisk8or

01/16/2024

Have you ever wondered, what would be the best way to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr day? Would it be to do service for someone, or maybe learn more about history and cultures? Or maybe get a root canal, or perhaps take time to visit a local- wait, what was that last one?

Yeah, I had a root canal yesterday, hence my day-late posting. You know, surprisingly, despite the hype it gets, it was a relatively painless process. The worst part of it was the numbing, and then a weird pinch I felt on my gums- otherwise, I just closed my eyes, laid back, and listened to them drill my tooth through like they were hollowing out a wood sculpture... and that's what I went with. But yeah, one hour later, I was numb as all get-out, from my tongue to my left nostril- but the worst pain I felt was a very slight headache later that night. So, there's something to cross off my bucket list.

The list of entertaining things I did this last week includes turning a phone into a doorbell. Yes, you've heard that IT engineers is just a synonym for wizard- and that is correct. Joking aside, yeah, I feel like I haven't written out an accomplishment that weird since I turned a flashlight into a microphone in high school.... oh yeah, here it comes, story time!

It was thirteen years minus one month ago. I was in my sophomore year in high school, and touch phones were just starting to become a big hit with kids. I think I had graduated from my first phone, a Sony Ericcson TM506 to a Sony Ericsson T707 (and I still hold that it was a flip phone that felt cool, high tech and smooth!), and was going to classes one fine day. The school-wide policy for phones was that, if a teacher caught you using it during class, they were allowed to confiscate it for a day. The only exception to this was the one teacher- the ONE that everybody disliked immensely. And normally, looking back, I would start sympathizing and feeling bad, because in retrospect they were actually really nice... but not this time.

Because I have respect and decency, I'll replace their actual last name with a pseudnym, Ms. Ford. No one liked Ms. Ford, and honestly, the only good thing I can still recall to have come from her class was that I almost perfectly aced my final test on Geography (naming countries and their capitals; I only got two mixed up, so I got like a 98/100!). But that aside, she was very, very stern, remorseless, and made us write out hundreds of overly detailed flash cards (no seriously, I had a stack of them I made still bound in bailing wire up until a few years ago- it was THICK!). Each card had a facet of history, and we had to write out who, what, where, when and why for each one... plus a basic drawing or something, I think... it was absurd. Oh and on top of it all, she had this ridiculously creepy baby mannequin head hiding in plain sight in her classroom, just so all the kids would feel that much more uneasy. She felt like she belonged in a Roald Dahl novel!

Okay, so now that you have a background about who she is, you'll understand the misery that ensued when I was caught with my phone in her class. Now, think back to when I said the school policy was that you had to go without your phone for a day... well, for whatever ungodly reason, she was the one teacher who somehow had an exception to that rule, and for her, it was TWO days. Why? I will refer you to the answer of "how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?". And just when you thought it couldn't get worse for a poor little high school nerd, the topping on the cake? It was Friday... meaning I was going to have to wait until tuesday to get my phone back. Imagine living without your cellphone for almost FIVE DAYS. Now add to it and imagine you have the attention span of a sophomore in high school. Okay, NOW you can understand where I'm about to come from.

So here I am on a weekend in high school without my phone. I have few friends to hang out with anyways, and I'm just bored now. So what do I do? Well, back at the time, my cousin and I used to use... oh let's see, at first it was MSN chat, when that was a thing, then it was Skype, and who knows what else. Anyway, some sort of instant messenger. Back then I had my little, dinky Intel CS630 digital camera, which miraculously doubled as a webcam, but was also about as blurry as you could imagine a typical webcam from the early 2000's would be... but for my purposes, it checked out. But it only seemed capable of video, not audio... so I wanted to come up with a clever way to mic myself. That answer came in the form only my odd and unfortunate circumstances would've allowed.

Materials:
1x MacDonalds Superman Returns Happy Meal toy flashlight
1x late 80's early 90's era broken tape recorder
1x VoxBox III (I still actually have this, I think, but I'm too lazy to dig for it)
Some speaker wire
(As a sidenote, the VoxBox III was a weird little black metal box, the size of about four sticks of butter, which probably came out of the late 60's or early 70's and somehow ended up in my possession, which is basically just a miniature amp and/or switchboard for a couple of audio inputs and a few outputs.)

So what I did was take the flashlight, totally pull out all of its innards, take my broken tape recorder, tear out its microphone, jam that into where the flashlight switch used to be, wire it up to the VoxBox III, plug in the VoxBox to power, and then output the VoxBox to my Windows XP tower's Mic Input... and then AMP THE HECK up on the mic input, and add the volume enhancement maximum. Even with all that it still didn't work... until something I tried, which I am still trying to figure out to this day how it worked. Call it a history mystery or a technology test of wits if you will, but I took a single speaker wire, connected to a totally different node on my VoxBox III, and hold the other end of the bare wire with my bare hands. That suddenly made it all work. As far as I could tell, I had wired up the mic correctly, but then who knows- I didn't have a multi-meter back then.

But yeah, all of that backstory amounted to what you see in the photo on this post, in all of its blurry gloriousness. It was just about the worst microphone I think anyone could make... at the best, it would be on par with the cheapest mic you'd find in one of those old bootleg knockoff iPod MP3 players that were so common in the 2000's to 2010's. It was just awful in terms of voice quality- when you could get it to work- but it's still one of my favorite accomplishments to rattle off when someone says, "name something weird you've accomplished or done".

And I'm now just realizing this was all a tie-in to me talking about the phone-to-doorbell conversion. In short, I took a Yealink touchscreen deskphone, whose touchscreen was broken, and tore off everything but the basic innards, and then wired up a basic mic and speaker to the handset port, essentially. I got it to work, but the less-than-warm temperatures of winters here made the speaker and mic not work so well. Well, hopefully I'll figure out that part, soon. In the meantime, it's another weird accomplishment to add to my list.

And at the end of the day, I'm proud enough of my weird accomplishments. It adds a bit of fun and variety to my everyday life, even if it's a big waste of time, by most people's standards. So, find something weird to do. Who knows, perhaps one day you'll be the maker of those Easter Island heads, or Guernica, or Trinity Te Deum by Ēriks Ešenvalds. When in doubt, think- what would Don Quixote do?

I suppose that's a fair enough thought for the week. Until next time, see ya!