Hearted Youtube comments on Technology Connections (@TechnologyConnections) channel.

  1. For some strange reason the USA seems to lag Europe in Xmas lights. So the future looks like this. Many sets of LED lights are based entirely on blue chips with a layer of phosphor to create soft pastel reds, yellows and greens. This year, new sets have appeared with pink, purple, tangerine and turquoise LEDs. The white colour options are cold white, warm white or extra warm white (also called gold). The strings of flickering tungsten lights have been imitated as konstsmide firefly lights, where the golden white LEDs are alternately a static LED and a candle style flickering LED so the whole set shimmers randomly. Another version appeared this year (Premier fire-brights) which have a custom flickering LED that is much faster than the candle ones. I prefer the slower candle flicker. Bubble lamps never really took off in the UK. It's a bit more complicated than just boiling the liquid. The lamps have a slight vacuum pulled on them to make them boil at a lower temperature. If you scavenge one of the bubble tubes from a light you'll be able to make it boil at finger temperature by holding the base of the tube and flicking the other end downwards to aid starting.
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  2. Hey, I just want to say that I was also someone who thought our dishwasher just wasn’t very good and felt the need to hand wash my dishes because I couldn’t trust it to get everything off the way I like. That pre wash information was life saving for me. I can’t stand hand washing and now I only have to do it with special rarely used items instead of everything I use daily. Thanks!
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  3. Dangerous?! Edison told me DC was the safe one and it's Westinghouse's AC I should worry about. So I will stick with the Nixie tubes thank you very much.
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  4. 2:32 - did you have a bit of a tumble? ;)
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  5. I wish I could shove this comment in the face of anyone who ever said "Why do we need to learn this math in school, we'll never use it in the real world." THERE IS TONS OF MATH TO DO IN THE REAL WORLD.
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  6. If there are two outlets, why not just make the top one “upside-down” (ground pin at the top) and keep the other one “frowning face”? That way, you can get the benefits of the ground-pin-at-the-top outlet for one plug, and be able to use right-angle plugs in the other outlet. This might not be ideal for when you have two devices of the same type next to each other, but it’s still a plus. All the dual outlets in my flat (in Poland, so using the French standard with the ground pin sticking out of the outlet) do it this way, even though I’m pretty sure that having the ground pin at the top is the standard (all the single outlets have it there). This arrangement with inverted ground pins also lets me use two right-angle-plug devices in one outlet for more flexibility.
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  7. Thank you. This is spot on. I think your bit at the end about computing being a solved problem and the tech industry making “AI” because it needs to justify its own existence is spot on. Silicon Valley really hasn’t had a good idea in over a decade. We’ve had more flops than actual new developments: the Internet of Things, blockchain technology, NFTs, and the metaverse were all supposed to be revolutionary, and none of them were. The crypto collapse of 2022 and the utter lack of impact it had on the rest of the economy proved that despite all of the sky-high coin values, cryptocurrencies still haven’t really found a use case that actually matters to the economy. I think the tech industry is starting to worry that if they don’t get something new soon, the bubble will pop and their stock portfolios will lose most of their value. AI is basically their last chance to find another revolutionary tech breakthrough before they have to face the music.
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  8. Would putting your IR camera behind the Fresnel lens array produce anything interesting? Thanks for the video!
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  9. All those edge cases are all perfect examples of the “But Sometimes!” effect as demonstrated on this very channel! TC, I really can’t thank you enough for the “But sometimes!”, it’s a wonderful thing to keep in mind.
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  10. "...thor spot" kinda forced my lute.
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  11. This is a frustrating thing with special buttons on ovens and microwaves. Does that button do something special or is it just a preset for something you could do with the normal mode(s)? If the button does something that's impossible with the normal mode of operation, it might be quite handy. And in some cases, maybe useful for things other than it's intended purpose. (If you know what it *actually does*, and what else might benefit from that.) If it's just a basic preset... if it ends up working well, that's less things to set, but not important and not really a selling point for the device like they want me to think it is.
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  12. You complain a lot
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  13. 5:11 The nature of the camera's Lonely Rolling Shutter
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  14. In Germany foreign agents who think they have perfect accents are exposed by having them say “Schärfesteigernder Filmentwickler” three times fast
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  15. This was an amazing video! Your channel was one of the reasons I decided pursue an EMech Technician degree. I'm 1\2 way through my first semester, my 47th birthday is Sunday, and I was able to read the schematics you showed in the video. Best decision I've made in years. Looking forward to part 2!
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  16. Its like a sombrero, for your house
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  17. I love a good switch snap, it's intoxicating
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  18. This is why I install multi-zone mini split heat pumps. They have their problems but so many configuration options and potential for greater precision and efficiency. Thanks for putting the fun back in the fundamentals.
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  19. I'm moving to a new apartment in a new building next month. We will have a heat pump for heating. My current building is from 2010. We have remote heat from the local power plant. I almost never turn it on because the building insulation is good enough that even in winter the waste heat from humans and appliances is sufficient to replace the heat bleeding off the building. So yes, heating systems for modern homes are often vastly oversized. The days of uninsulated walls, windows and roofs are long gone.
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  20. Great content, as always. You made clear many of the points I've struggled to make when talking to EV skeptics. I recently found a way to explain how long charge duration is generally not an issue. When people cite that as a reason for not driving an EV, I ask them "if you had a gas pump in your garage, how often would you stop at a gas station?" You can just see the wheels spinning as they think about that. For the hard-core skeptics, I follow up with things like "my 'tank' is full every morning", "energy comes to me, I don't go to it", and "I don't stand at a pump when it's 20°F below zero". I don't bother with "electricity costs a fraction of the equivalent amount of gas" because math is hard.
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  21. Not owning or ever using one of these, I always wondered how inefficient these would be with the entire unit in one "box"... Thanks for proving it!!
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  22. Remember when they taught "Internet research" in schools? I don't remember what class this would've been under, but i remember in 9th or 10th grade we dedicated a part of the quarter to learn how to research topics on the Internet. This was probably 2003... Broadband internet was very much still a new thing.
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  23. Thanks for the shoutout
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  24. lol i appreciate that the bulk of this video is confirming that a single number is correct in three increasingly loony ways; the christmas lights were a great touch. but also great info about HVAC stuff, 10/10
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  25. "once the science was settled" AAAAAHHHHH! Boo! Science is never settled!
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  26. Thanks for posting this Alec. It's a bit of a wake-up call for me as I've been increasingly relying on chatbots to "Complete this sentence in a professional manner" or "Rewrite this so it's not as rambly". I've been offloading what I've learned in school to a rock we taught to think for us. I think I'll switch things up from now on. Thanks again for this, and you know it's serious when there's no patrons or bloopers. Respect.
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  27. I just wanted to say that your original dishwasher videos completely changed how i did dishes and i am now a cleaner person because of it! I never thought the dishwashers got them clean enough and id be too tired after a big dinner to do dishes so they would sit. Now that i know how to run a dishwasher, my dishes get cleaned every evening and put away every night. Thank you for these types of videos! They mean more than you know.
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  28. For the last couple years, we've been setup with Ameren Electric's Peak Time Savings on our Nest. They anticipate a hot day, declare a Rush Hour will happen that day using the Nest app, then they pre-cool the house in the morning and shut off the AC in the afternoon. I think we get a $25rebate every year. Its barely noticible when it happens, and you can override it.
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  29. Thanks a lot ! This was enlightening !!!
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  30. Excellent video! I love seeing more and more videos like this which remind me to keep thinking for myself.
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  31. Waiter: What can I get for you, sir? Me: I'll have the Buttery Cheese Plate, to start, and then a serving of Beef and Broccoli, with the Gross and Sticky Sauce.
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  32. As soon as you said your heating needs were just under six kW my first thought was "huh, you could probably do that with four space heaters and a few control circuits." To see that exact thing happen later was extremely satisfying.
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  33. https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2017/62960/62960.pdf This might be the optical truck tracking you're thinking about.
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  34. IEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeee
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  35. I think one way to elaborate on "You can tell its video because it looks like video." Dynamic range is a good test - and its something you still have to have an eye for, but video productions usually aren't as vibrant as stuff shot on film because the dynamic range they can capture is smaller. Instead of having perfectly saturated blue sky, it might look more overcast even when it wasn't. Especially true when we're sticking to the "up to the late 90s" era mentioned in the video. It certainly gets murkier with super high end large format digital cinema cameras from Arri/Red since their relatively huge pixels have increased dynamic range too, but for generic betacam SP video cameras vs actual 35 or even 16mm film, the dynamic range is a big tell.
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  36. I’ve got that timer with the lose-able blades! I found that since having multiple on or off blades in a row doesn’t affect anything, I’d store all of the off next to each other, and all of the on next to each other. Only an issue if you wanted the on/off cycle to be 15 mins. But this explains the hum from it! I figured it was related to the grid hz, but didn’t really register that there’s an entire motor in there!!!
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  37. i am literally ordering powder as we speak. i'm also in australia, so i can give you extra feedback on how stuff works downunder. as you would expect, our dishwashers drain the other way around for starters
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  38. I have never bought a brand new high end speaker. My last score was Klipsch KL-650's for R1500, About $100 at the time. And they're amazing! to take note they were about $1500 brand new. Before that was a pair of Boston VR-20's for about $50 I scored. And my amps are pre 1980's picked them up for next to nothing. JVC JA-S55 and a Akai cant remeber the model
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  39. Incidentally The Breadguides In Our Sunbeam is my favorite John Green novel.
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  40. Fun fact. Sears/silvertone never actually made any of their own stuff. That radio was most likely made by someone else 😀
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  41. Betamax didn't unlace the tape from the heads when fast-forward/rewind, meaning extra wear on the tape.
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  42. There's an important factor missing from the section about insulation: embodied carbon! If the goal of reducing energy consumption is to slow/reverse climate change, you need to be careful about what materials you use. There's a lot of closed cell spray foam B-roll and that's one of the worst offenders wrt embodied carbon. Most closed cell foams use blowing agents with extremely high GWP, creating a situation where it can take >20 years to hit the GWP break-even point, assuming that your electricity supply continues emitting CO2. The cleaner your grid is, the longer the payback period. If you're on a 100% clean grid, you'll never break even! All that to say: it's important to choose carbon-sequestering insulation products like packed cellulose and fiberboard instead of carbon-emitting insulation products like foams and mineral wool!
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  43. 27:29 Niche, except for all planes flying around on it, afaik.
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  44. Another potential benefit of DTS's audio-on-disc system: same film stock for any region with the CDs being localized to whatever language necessary.
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  45. The spinny things on top of a helicopter are not really "fans". They don't work by "pushing" air down, like these ceiling fans do. In fact, you can stand under a spinning helicopter rotor and you won't really feel any downdraft. (You will only start to see strong air currents farther away from the end of the rotor blades). Rotor blades are what's called an airfoil. Their shape is formed so that the air has to travel a farther distance over the top of the airfoil than at the bottom of the airfoil. When you look at an airfoil crosssection, you'll see a kind of 'bulge'. The fact that the air flowing over the top of the airfoil has to travel farther than the air at the bottom of the airfoil leeds to a drop in air pressure on the top of the airfoil (thanks, Bernoulli!), which then created an upwards force, which we call lift. On an airplane, lift is simply generated by the airplane having forward momentum. But on a helicopter, you essentially just spin the airfoils real fast. Boom, lift! And yes, airplane propellers also work with airfoils.
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  46. Since watching the first video, I've been buying the cheapest gel detergent that I can find. I fill the pre-wash and the main wash cups. I always use the normal cycle and my dishes are coming out perfectly clean and virtually spotless. I rarely soak anything (I have to soak milk glasses and smoothie glasses) and I definitely do not hand wash before putting them in the dishwasher.
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  47. The ductwork rant 😂 priceless
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  48. I hated my dishwasher for a long time. I was convinced that they just don't work, then I watched your previous videos, and all of the sudden my dishwasher worked perfectly. I even got to to clean oil up stuck on pizza dough containers perfectly, it was like magic. So thank you so much for your psa.
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  49. That rant about ducting warmed my Midwestern heart
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  50. Yes, Sony did indeed use an M-load (albeit a very wonky M) on some of their later Betamax systems. The ones I am aware of were the C20, C30 and C40 models. Remarkably slimline, and the C40 boasted linear stereo tracks, so clearly from the later end of Beta. The mechanism they used was much more compact than the standard Beta, and it loaded a lot quicker too. Worth checking out if you can find one as they are a real oddball.
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