An obsession with Flash..

For a while now I have been obsessed with collecting Flash media. These simple looking devices are really quite interesting, and I find myself wondering what is hiding under the plastic every time I see one.

A while back I started buying every device I could find.  It wasn’t long before I had most of the affordable ones from every department store, deli, computer store, and any place that sold memory.  I sent out a call on my work IT Techs email list and offered to swap their old devices for new ones with an incentive of offering much larger capacity drives.  That was very well supported by my great colleagues and another 40 or so was added to my collection. I bought some from EBay, and was able to keep some that I had fixed and\or recovered data from.

Collection

I had no real plan for them until one day deciding to list out all the details, and while I was at it, I started taking photos.  The data was not very well recorded and the photos were crappy, and as the collection grew, I realised that I should either forget it, or do it properly.  The collection has grown to a size that the details and pictures may actually be of benefit to someone else.

I also bought a couple of data recovery solutions for Flash and I had the idea to write some data to each, and try each DR solution to see how well they perform, and also to boost my skill in recovery, and possibly make some money back to pay for this surprisingly large total of equipment and Flash devices

collection

The next challenge was how to list the data on a website that was easily navigated, set out well and features like filterable and sortable.  having no real web design experience, it hasn’t been easy.  I started with a HTML Table, but that was really clunky to work with. Currently I am working on saving the DATA in a .xml file and populating HTML by JavaScript and AJAX.  It looks like it does what I want.  JSON is another possibility as, according to w3schools, easier and faster than XML.

As I acquire new devices I will document that, and try to get the full list up soon.

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