How to turn your old 8-track player into an iPod speaker dock
Just like my fascination with the bulbous iMac G3 series, I tend to be fascinated by the shapes of gadgets, and in my explorations at the local Berlin flea market, I have a habit of picking up delightfully non-conformist pieces of obscure and obsolete retro technology, never quite knowing what I’m going to do with them.
That’s why I love this guide over at Unplggd explaining how to convert a vintage 8-track player into an iPod speaker dock.
It’s not really very hard: all you do is take an 8-track cassette adapter, plug a regular cassette adapter into it, and plug in your iPod.
It’s intuitive, but not particularly ingenious or elegant. The real reason I’m delighted with this DIY, though, is because I just picked up almost that exact same 8-track player a couple of weeks ago, and now I can turn it into something more useful than an overly precious conversation piece. If you’re over 30 or 35, you’ve probably still got an 8-track player just like this in your garage: do some digging, and you’ll probably find that you can do the same.
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John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him ![Read "Why You’ll Probably Never Own A Mac With An ARM Processor [Feature]"](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/macbookairarm-300x250.jpg "Read \"Why You’ll Probably Never Own A Mac With An ARM Processor [Feature]\"")
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