Have you tried to buy a VCR lately? You’d think I was hunting up some dinosaur matter to create my own Jurassic Park. Wally World, Sam’s, Target, Best Buy…. no dice. Amazon has a few — a few — but it seems like most of them are through third parties, and I’m more than a little leary about buying something like that from some guy selling out of his garage through Amazon.

What’s the deal? There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of home video tapes out there that needs to be converted to digital media of some kind. Without a source player, those old VHS tapes might as well be fodder for skeet shooters… or 160KB 5¼” diskettes. With the recent demise of both of my VHS monsters, I’m left with about 40-odd tapes that I’d like to convert to digital media, and preserve off to something a bit more future proof and less prone to magnetic manglement.

I’ll get there, but I thought I should future-proof my plight, lest some wary reader sometime next week see this, and wonder how us cavemen got along.