Thought it might be handy to have a thread to post thift store finds (be they neat or just odd) in.

I found one of these today:

http://ferristoys.com/marx-fairykins-gift-set/

The pictures don't do it justice - it is really quaint in presentation as toys from that era (this was made in 1962) often are.

found this beauty a month or so back at my local GOODWILL for a whole $10.00USD. works perfectly;

Cool CD player. What are its outputs?

yeah, did kind of forget a rear panel shot there, didn't i. silly me;

I was in a charity shop a couple of weeks ago and found an odd-looking Viewmaster 3D viewer, with a few reels, for £25. I had no idea what it was but tried it and found that it had a music box built in (the wind-up type) and played a short tune if you held the slide-change lever down for a second or so. I had no idea what it was worth (except for thinking it was too expensive) but when I got hime I looked on line and eventually found it - one of the "Model C Musical Viewers" shown on this page, and evidently pretty rare.

So I went back the next day only to find...

wait for it...

wait for it...

...that the shop still had it, and was reducing all prices for a sale! I ended up getting it for £20.

Went on line and couldn't find anyone selling the thing anywhere, so eventually contacted the guy who ran the Viewmaster web page and asked the best way to sell it. An hour later he offered me £50 + postage, and since I really didn't want to gamble on selling it on eBay I accepted. I could have probably got more, but he knows the market and I don't, and I think 150% profit isn't too bad for a relatively small amount of effort.

Another weird but profitable item - found a Macbook charger on a stall in Portobello Road street market, bought it for £5, about $7.50. Got home and tried it, it wasn't working. So I put it up for sale on ebay as a non-working item, and someone paid me £10 plus postage. The bizarre thing about this is that you can get working (but not Apple-made) chargers for less!

I think Apple had/has a replacement program for chargers, I bet they were gambling on winding up with a new/refurbed one from the Apple Store.

My Macbook Pro is old enough that the charger etc. must be long out of warranty - I think I'm the third owner. If the buyer can get that to work I'm happy for him, I don't think of it as a missed opportunity.

Forgot to say that at a car boot sale (similar to a US swap meet) a couple of weeks ago I got a 17" iMac G4 for £25 - I'm pimping it up with more memory, a big hard drive, etc. and hoping to sell it on for around £100.

20 years ago almost to the day I walked into a bargain basement music store that had just opened in Belfast and saw they were selling lots of CD singles and brand new vinyl from the 80's /early 90s. They had boxloads of the same titles all sealed still. They were priced ultra cheap to get them shifted fast - some as low as £0.10 - £0.25. I found a few genuinely rare CD single titles and asked the shop owner what was his best price if I purchased the entire box (50 copies). He said £10....deal! The same day I then rang a reputable music company in the UK that buys music collectibles and negotiated a sale for 49 (I kept one for my personal collection!!) copies x £2 each = £98. The deal went ahead as planned with me shipping them a box of CD singles and them sending me a cheque upon receipt of goods!

There are genuinely bargains out there if you know the decent stuff from the junk.

Today's find (in Portobello Road market again) was a Creative Zen 16gb media player for £8 - seems to be in perfect working order. I don't often feel the need to watch videos etc. on a 2" screen on the move, but it's nice to have the option.

On Friday I found a complete set of "the Ascent of Man" on dvd at one of the thrift stores. If you have never seen it it is pretty amazing.

Great find on the Ascent of Man DVD set (it's pretty expensive)! Ascent of Man was a landmark show in the history of science and Bronowski's presentation was an intellectual tour de force. Current science programs on TV are often dumbed down for the short attention span generation, but not so with Ascent: Bronowski presents his thoughts at a high, magisterial level for the thoughtful viewer.

Bronowski was a real polymath who passed the hardest math exams in the world (Cambridge Tripos) at first place (Senior Wrangler), was an expert on the writings of William Blake, constructed a new geometric proof for the Pythagorean theorem, and God knows what else. What a great show, and one of my favorites which really influenced my academic interests in the history and philosophy of science.

It has never ceased to amaze me how brilliant the final episode was - and how it packed so much meaning and depth in such a short time.

Another high point (as you pointed out) was the proof presented for the pythagorean theorem - why that isn't used in schools is beyond me. Simplicity is usually elegance.

I found some more dvd sets today:

Jazz (Ken Burns)
The first two volumes of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection

Today the same vendor had an Apple USB keyboard - for £2, about $3. In the past he's sold me a pocket digital radio, photographic filters, and other technojunk, all surprisingly cheap.

Remember the colourful clamshell macs? I know to take this machine apart and replace the hard drive. I have had 2 of these and replaced the drive and sold them on ebay. They aren't much good today though, too slow even when maxed up but collectors do buy them. They work with Mac os 10 upto 10.4, requires os 9.1 installed to update the firmware first and if you can find the right video cable the screen can be swopped out for a 1024x768 screen.

They're pretty but a bit too slow to appeal to anyone other than collectors - the faster G4 and G5 machines still have people using them for serious work such as word processing; I was using an iBook G4 several hours a day up to September or so last year, when I finally bit the bullet and bought a MacBook Pro. Having said that, I would love to get my hands on a Power Mac G4 cube, even though it's slow and not very useful or upgradeable, simply because it's a lovely piece of design.

Just made a nice score about 40 minutes ago - the X-Files Complete Collector's Edition on DVD. Life is good.

I have an Indigo 366MHz model, I can't imagine pulling it apart to replace the hard drive. It's like 45 screws.

1024x768 is too low for my workflow anyway, the iBook is actually just an OS 9 computer I've been using to sync Newtons and act as a quasi bridge Mac.

I actually saw a nice looking Sharp DVD player with the nice red DTS sticker on it yesterday($3!). I was going to buy it when I realized I already have three devices that can play DVD's, one of which is DTS capable(PS3), and I don't have a DTS capable receiver.

Red sticker was nice though.

I think my best finds were a G3 Indigo iMac for $15 and a G4 Quicksilver 733MHz for $15. I keep hoping to find a nice vintage Pioneer receiver one day, I came semi close but the SX-1100 wasn't really powerful enough for me to bring it home (I think it was $10).

It is a right pain to take apart. You have to literally take the whole machine apart. If the hard drive is failing you got to replace it. A 80 or 120gb ide drive is cheap enough.

Thankfully I got a stack of them recently, both 2.5" and 3.5".

Actually, I forgot, I saw a Pioneer SX-1100 at this thrift store for $10 Thursday. Regretting I didn't get it now, but at the time I was thinking "but it's only 25w a channel".