In what has got to be the most amusing use of technology that I've seen so far this year, an article on Wired describes a piece of software that allows you to play old phonograph records on a high-resolution flat-bed scanner.

The process involves scanning the "discs" (which usually requires 4 scans due to the large sizes of LPs), stitching them together, and letting the software read the grooves virtually.

On a more serious note, if this were refined, it would provide a unique "analog" format for storage of the original content of records without having to encode them using a phonograph, which can hurt the records.