As each year brings thinner, shinier toys, it’s easy to forget that not too long ago typewriters were the professional alternative to freehand, Walkman ruled the portable-music market and extra-long phone cords would let you speak to friends while standing 10 feet away from the wall-mounted base.

Each of those marvels was a wonder of its time. Now each is obsolete, a once-outstanding advancement made laughable when compared to the contact-lens camera or Japan’s soon-to-be feasible moon-walking robot.

We don’t even realize somethings obsolete until we realize we haven’t seen it in a while, a floppy disk stashed in the back of a desk drawer, or an unused video cassette propping up a table.

“These technologies are dying out because a more flexible way of doing things now exists to replace them, Bulky CDs are replaced by MP3s and streaming files, newspapers can be read online, you need to carry film for cameras, and a house phone is another thing to worry about. People want to be mobile and flexible.”

In no particular order, here are 10 technological dinosaurs that recently went extinct, or will be before you know it.

1. Landline phones:

With mobile technology continually evolving, it seems that these days only a handful of people are still moving into a new house and having the landline turned on.

2. Floppy disks:

Storing something on an external device? C’est possible? Considering the state of computer technology at the end of the 1970s, it’s no wonder people were astounded by the usefulness of the 5 1/4-inch wide, 360-KB floppy disk. A decade later, the disks had shrunk to 3 1/2 inches and their capacity multiplied to a whopping 1.44 MB enough for a minute and a half of an MP3-file song. If you still have a few lying around, they make great coasters.

3. Wristwatches:

Throwing on a fancy watch may make you look professional, but let’s be honest. Cell phones and iPods tell you the time when you’re out and about, and virtually every appliance in your home from your refrigerator to your coffeemaker to your television and your DVD player ” has a clock. No one wears a wristwatch anymore, unless he or she grew up with one.

4. VHS tape and VCRs:

The Vertical Helical Scan or Video Home System, depending on whom you ask met a sad death in 2006 when retailers decided there was no room left on their shelves for the big, bulky cassettes. Digital video recorders gave you perfect-looking “time-shifted” TV shows, and DVDs let you skip the previews on rented movies.

Many people still keep VCRs around for when grandparents ask to see that old tape of little Bobby who’s now 22 and fresh out of college shoving cake into his mouth on his first birthday. And you could always turn your VCR into a toaster.

5. Beepers:

Annoying devices designed to beep any and every time anyone felt like reaching you, it wasn’t sad at all to see these disappear when cell-phone plans dropped below $50 a month around the year 2000.

6. Film Cameras:

When Polaroid announced in February 2008 that it would stop selling its famous instant-developing film, people ran out to buy up the remaining stock in order to preserve this unique form of photography. Kodak and Fuji still make film, but they, like Polaroid, are counting on their digital-camera lines to keep them afloat.

7. Typewriters:

Once one of the most powerful means of mass communication, the typewriter claimed a spot near the top of the technological food chain for more than 100 years. Initially entirely manual, electric typewriters caught on after World War II, and the distinctive clickety-clack-whirr of dozens of IBM Selectrics going at once defined corporate life in the 1960s and ’70s.

Typewriters did have drawbacks smudged fingers, only two or three copies at a time and gallons of whiteout to correct mistakes. But today, all that remains is the illogical QWERTY keyboard, which was created to force the typist to go more slowly so the keys wouldn’t jam up.

8. The Walkman:

Discman and mini disc player: The multi tasker’s dream, the Sony Walkman portable cassette player changed the way the world listened to music in 1979, quickly becoming the hottest accessory of the early 1980s. In 1984, Sony trumped itself with the introduction of the Discman, the CD version, which allowed for individual tracks instead of one never-ending, albeit varied, song.

Eight years later, a new format, the MiniDisc, essentially a tiny CD in a cartridge, caught on in Europe and Asia. But it fizzled in the U.S., where oblivious Yanks kept on listening to their Discman until they were killed off by iPods in the early years of this decade.

9. Dial-up Internet access:

It’s hard to see why anyone would use a phone line to connect to the Internet when there are so many feasible alternatives.
But 9 percent of Internet users in a 2008 Pew Internet and American Life survey still get online that way, and 35 percent of those cite subscription costs about $10/month compared to an average broadband monthly fee of $35 as their primary reason for not switching.America Online tried to nudge its holdouts into the fast lane in 2006 by jacking up dial-up rates, but in early 2009 Earthlink actually lowered its phone-modem fees to $8/month. Dial-up may seem to belong with smoke signals and carrier pigeons on the communications scrap heap, but if all you’re doing is checking your e-mail, it may make sense.

10. DVDs:

What’s that, you say? How can DVDs be obsolete? Facts don’t lie DVD sales fell off the proverbial cliff in the first three months of 2009, with some retailers reporting a 40 percent drop from the same period a year earlier.

Some of that could be attributed to the recession, but sales of video games, which cost two or three times as much, actually went up about 10 percent. The fact is that with broadband Internet, you don’t need a disc to watch a movie any more. Netflix and Blockbuster have recognized that by rapidly ramping up their online-download services.

(well ok maybe not cutting edge, but its NOT far from it) the original xbox console was a superb console of its day (after the open community got its hands on it) opening up doors to all sorts of scripting and user-interface design, the xbox console its self, if you dont have one, can be bought form the likes of GAME, GAMESTATION etc for about £20, which is a mega bargin, even with its stock 8GB hard drive (same size as the Apple iPhone) this space will be more than enough for this to get of the ground…

XBMC – Xbox Media Center is the Best (by my Count) Media Player for any platform.

For this Tutorial you will need:

1. Original Xbox Console – controller etc.
2. Original copy of splinter cell.
3. Xbox Memory card.
4. Xbox USB Memory card reader.
5. PC/Laptop
6. Router/switch
7. Network cables
8. Ftp client software
9. All software from this post
10. Some time
11. PATIENCE

STAGE 1: Network
First of were going to get this Xbox 1 console wired up to your home network, if you have a router which your pc/laptop is connected to either wired or wi-fi, then go a-head and plug in a cable going from the router to your xbox 1 console, turn on your xbox and your ready for stage 2.

STAGE 2: Search & Gather
Software needed and were to get them.

PC SOFTWARE

1. flashfxp – download
2. Xbox Memory Card read/write

XBOX SOFTWARE

1. XBMC
2. xTV – download
3. Splinter Cell Linux Hack – download
4. Xbox Boot DIsk- Link

Once you get your self all those bits and pieces, install Flashfxp, load the memory card read/writer software, grab local copy of the latest XBMC build extracted to “c:\xbmc\” latest xTV Skin for XBMC extracted to “c:\skin\xTv\”then we can begin…

STAGE 3: Getting it Copied

grab the splinter cell hack from the Softmoder deluxe folder, read the read me file which is there, make sure you grab the right folders, these will be copied to the memory card after its been formatted.
once the files are on there, stick it into your controller and load up the splinter cell game, go to the loading menu and select the Linux saved game this should start the installer and copy files to your xbox hard drive.

Congratulations you have just Soft modded your Xbox Console for homebrew and backup games.

STAGE 4: Grab Your Boot Disk
With your new Boot Disk Created, insert that to your xbox, power off, then power up, the boot disk should kick in and load to a menu system see image below (if this dosnt happen – turn off and try again, or else back to creating a Boot disk) once the menu system has been loaded you should have a System Utils, options menu or settings depending on what version you have, inside the System Utils menu select the network settings and change them to match your home network ie: IP: 192.168.0.5 | Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0 | Gateway: 192.168.0.1 this will be your routers IP address, save the settings and exit (way down the bottom).

This is the way the dashboard should load up.

STAGE 5: FTP to Your Box
Start up Flashfxp, on one side(left) your local pc on the other side(right) you have a blank area, above this section click on the lightning bolt for it to say Quick connection, add the xbox IP address and the username and password will be “xbox” (unless you changed this – NOT recommended) click connect and hopefully you should be presented with the Drive structure of the xbox ie: C, D, E, X, Y, Z, this is were all the fun starts,
make a new folder on your pc system were you can store a back of the system files from the xbox just in case things DO go wrong..

DID I MENTION GRAB A BACKUP!!

An outline of the Drive structure for the xbox:

1. C: just like windows this is were the operating system for the xbox is
2. D: this is the DVD player (any disks in here can be flashfxp’d to your local system)
3. E: this is a usable place for data to be stored Memory Saves, temp files- Movies, Music
4. X, Y, Z: much like windows swap files, used when the machine is running and emptied when of

STAGE 6: Xbox Media Center
The XBMC dashboard for the xbox has to be the best bit of media software around across any platform.

With your local copy located and extracted to “C:\xbmc\” open flash fxp and navigate to the C: drive on the xbox, highlight all the files and folders in the xbmc folder on your side and transfer them across, when there finished, on the xbox side you can right click the xboxdash.xbe and rename it to msdash.xbe, with this done right click on the xbmc.xbe file and rename it to xboxdash.xbe (see whats happening there) the xbmc.xbe file will load up instead of the original dashboard, when this is done navigate to the skins folder on the xbox and transfer over the local copy you have of xTV,

STAGE 7: The Restart
At this point in the tutorial, things can go wrong “VERY” wrong, now if you have copied over the
backup your half way there to protecting your self against boot errors, if you misspelled the xbe file wrongly or forgot to copy over certain xbmc folders, this will result in a failed booting of the xbox software cause it to crash, this will most prob give you a Service warning and indicate an Error message in big numbers on the screen, if this dose happen, your not all lost, just find a friend with a modchip enabled xbox and ask him to restore your drive with your backup and you’ll have to start over..

This is what you don’t want!…

Once you do re-start and all is good you should be presented with the default dashboard for XBMC, to get the xTV skin loaded you will have to go to options/settings -> appearence -> and change default skin to xTV, the console will pause and then change skin, once this happens you can just press (B) on the controller and head back to the main dashboard, once youre happy the skins all loaded, just spent a few minutes looking through all the options of your NEW xTV (AppleTV) media center,

This is the default Dashboard for XBMC.
This is what you want to see when it starts up..

once your happy with all your settings you may want to think about adding the xTV intro video, which when you turn on the xbox a little script is run and tells it to play a video, in this case its the intro much the same as the one found on the AppleTV box.

Click here to download the Intro video

This is the intro movie which starts up just
before the xbox dashboard kicks in..

STAGE 8: What now?

With all your settings set up the way you want what can you do now? well for a start you can gain access to all youre Divx movie content stored on your PC system, DVD Data Disks, or streamed from the internet.
theirs built in You Tube support for browsing and searching all the videos on there…

You can get access to your massive Music library, set up play lists listen to podcasts, play radio stations around the world, open your TV up to Music Visualizations, Karaoke & Dynamic lyric writing to the screen over your own music…

WIth the xbox community has written thousands of scripts for the xbox, which can extend you media center further by grabbing rss feeds, video podcasts, Full length Movies not to mentions massive ammounts of ProN from streaming media to slideshow galleries meaning you never get board (most probably tired) but certainly enjoying every minute of it,

Cant forget the Massive array of Skins out there as well, i have to say the most common skin i use as my main dashboard has got to be the X360 skin by the guys over at blackbolt there amazing job of creating a skin based on the xbox 360 interface, and i must say the guys have got it down to a fine art, it looks and works just out of this world… (thanks guys)