Sometimes I imagine that if Apple wasn't around and the PC market was calling all the shots, the latest and greatest Microsoft Surface Pro would be made from creaky beige plastic and have a 25-pin printer port on the back.
Well if you buy a brand new Optiplex 7070 from Dell it does still come with a serial port on the back and for some reason they re-introduced PS/2 ports. Those are standards we don't use much any more, USB-A is everywhere from every non-Bluetooth peripheral to charging any device you should have with you. It didn't need fixing, not yet anyway.
Anyway, old school plugs and sockets leads me neatly on to the problem I've just been facing. See, on (in?) this huge pile of technology I call a desk I have two VCRs and a CRT TV. I've shown them before. Well while watching a new livestream from LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER we got joking in the chat about watching it on a CRT. So I pulled out the old Roku 2 XS and hooked it up to the VCR, surprisingly after not using it for years it just worked straight away and didn't even need a software update.
However, it turns out that the Roku 2 XS only supports NTSC on its AV output, something I never knew before but that pisses me off now. My VCR happily passes the NTSC through itself, down the SCART lead to the HDMI upscaler that detects the NTSC signal and converts it... but the TV is black and white only. That's not the absolute end of the world but I tried to record it to VHS for shits and giggles and that just didn't work. It couldn't record the NTSC signal so just had a fit when I tried to play it back. Neither VCR can handle it.
So because my hunger for assorted black boxes on the desk and more cable spaghetti can never be satisfied, I bought a mini HDMI to AV converter from Amazon. Along with some 4K Blu-rays. They must've thought I was mad.
The little converter is so generic I can't be bothered to find a picture of it, but needless to say it didn't work. Still B&W on the CRT. I tried it with my ~8 year old Samsung LCD and of course that works fine, lots of people online are saying the same thing and suggesting an alternative. It's annoying because I didn't think for a second that this thing would have an issue and it technically works so I can't send it back. Oh well, might be useful someday. For a cheap giggle this is adding up.
I still need to re-do the wiring diagram for this desk one day, it got somewhat out of hand a long time ago and I now have a 4K display splitter, HDMI recorder, AV switch and mini 4 channel audio mixer added to it...