Comments by "Michael Wright" (@michaelwright2986) on "Technology Connections" channel.

@steviebboy69 I went from the UK to Armidale (1000m altitude, 250km from the coast) in the 1960s, when Australian houses had NO insulation of any kind. That first winter was the coldest I've ever spent.
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@seigeengine Well, if you have enough physical books, you are likely to have a very fixed home location, because moving them becomes a major issue. And then having enough bookshelves becomes a problem, and they say that too many books is a turn-off if you come to sell a house. Physical books can be objects of great beauty, or of great emotional significance; but if you just want to read the text, e-books have great advantages, however peripatetic you might be, or not.
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Me too, and it's great; but that's kinda industrial, and we don't need FITH (Fibre Inside The Home, though perhaps that acronym won't catch on as I understand it's also used in some social welfare settings: last three words are In The Head.)
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Love tech evangelism: preach it, brother. When I was first offered detergent tablets by a demonstrator in the supermarket, I did some quick mental arithmetic and said "Expensive way to buy detergent," and she couldn't refrain from nodding. BUT, Bosch's detergent dispenser has forced me to use the damn things. After about 18 months of ownership, the dispenser sometimes sticks, and doesn't dispense. A quick internet search, and it's not just me. Message to Bosch NZ gets an admirably quick and polite response, but they tell me it's to do with the way I load the machine (NOT blocking the door mechanically, mind). That has to be corporate bull-shit, surely? So now I throw tablets onto the floor, and the dishes come up clean. But I should NOT have to do that. Thank you for trying to introduce me to the Full Potential of my dishwasher--I know it's there, but somehow, always just beyond my aspiring grasp.
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A nice quiet screen for reading text is a true desideratum. We ancients remember character based displays; the green phosphors were too slow in decay, and caused sea-sickness when you scrolled, but the amber ones were really good for reading and writing. But I think, on a desktop (or laptop) the viewing angles are going to be pretty constrained, so maybe for indoor use with a modern LCD screen you could manage something reasonably functionally equivalent in software? Outdoors is entirely different, indeed.
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@steviebboy69 Coldest night I experienced was -10 C. Canberra can be pretty icy, too. Lower minima than the south-east of England, which is what I knew. Days were a lot nicer, though.
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@Okurkaarrgghh With only two resistive heaters in an uninsulated flat, it's cool enough. Equally, 35 C is not that hot, but in some parts of the world they wilt.
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So, 15 to 20 minutes is the minimum for a full charge at a fast charger. The owner of a reasonably new car is going to be hanging around for that long. Sounds like there should be a retail opportunity or two in there. It's a pity business finds it so hard to make markets work.
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MOAR Typewriters.'.'.' (no backspace on this computer--I'd forgotten full stop-backspace-apostrophe.) First adventures in technology in our house: saving up to buy my wife a (very) used Selectric: cost as much as a tolerable used car. Then we got her an Icelandic golf ball, for thorn and eth. Happy Days. I'm old.
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So it was big in car audio, because that's where you want a bunch of music as background. But the CD is an album: it is a materially constrained format that shapes the artistic creation (consider the change from the 78 rpm single, collected in physical albums of records, to the 33 1/3 rpm "album"), so if you're listening seriously, you want to listen to a whole album. So there's no big advantage in having MP3 CDs for a stationary player. The stationary player, one CD at a time, fills the same place as the vinyl turntables which, surprisingly, are now so popular. I loved MP3 CD in the car, until memory chips got so cheap you could get more than 256MB on a little player. Also, whilst Apple is an exceedingly annoying company, so certain that they know better than their customers, not everything they do is malicious. AAC, as I think you know, apart from being more efficient than MP3, also had the ability to do DRM. When Apple was setting up iTunes, and fighting with the anal retentive misanthropes who run the labels, they had to agree to implement DRM (it was not their wish: iTunes Plus shows that all along they didn't want DRM.) Same for ALAC, which is a lossless compression codec, but with DRM capability. I know you know all this, but I think we should distinguish between the things Apple does that are really obnoxious, and the things that are reasonable at the time.
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No Fox Talbot? I know you can't do everything, but he was ready to publish at almost exactly the same time as Daguerre (Darwin/Wallace, much?), and he invented the negative-positive process (which, as you know of course, is the mechanism used in modern reversal films, and a quite different way of getting positives out of the camera). Which is the true line of the future, because you can make many prints of the same picture. Also, he lived and did his work at Lacock Abbey, offering many possibilities for misreadings in the blooper reel. BTW, with B+W negatives, if you hold them right, you can sometimes see a positive image by reflection off the silver. IIRC, works best with underexposed images.
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That safelight! I spent a lot of time in darkrooms, and got good equipment over time, but I never dreamed there could be a safelight like that.
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Fun fact: one of the papers published by A. Einstein in 1905 explained the photo-electric effect, which powers this Olympus and similar automatic exposure cameras. Doing this really gave a boost to quantum theory, and he got his Nobel for it (relativity? Yeah, he did that too). So this gloriously mechanical and logical camera is founded on the weirdness of the universe.
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My child, I was 42 when all this stuff started to happen. The years up to 70 are pretty good, especially after you retire.
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The numbering of sides for a changer is like the imposition of pages on a sheet for printing, only not as complicated. Still, a nice puzzle.
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So, we build our houses on a raft floating on our own private lakes. This provides seismic isolation. During low power price times, we heat or cool the lake as a thermal battery. Probably there's a heat pump in there, too. The only limitation is that there probably aren't any fish that would survive the temperature range, so a glass-walled basement as aquarium might not be viable.
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That slow power zoom might be deliberate: zooms were fairly new, and it would inhibit people from doing snap zooms and upsetting the audience (always assuming home videos HAD an audience). But what is really bad is that you can hear the power zoom working, even on that crappy audio.
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I guess there was one rational use case for this thing. Suppose a family wants to watch together a totally wholesome movie that happens to have a few words that fall foul of the purity monitors. The kids know the words: the parents know the kids know the words; but it could be embarrassing to have the words said aloud in a family gathering. When I was like 18 my parents took me to a great stage show, called "Fings Ain't What They Used to Be." Great show, very funny, set in a brothel, and I and they were inhibited about laughing at some of the jokes. So, unlike some aspects of US respectability, not totally prudish. Perhaps.
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Slow, sure. So were computers in the 1980s (though not as slow as this). But something like this really beat a typewriter, a manual, a portable, or even a mighty IBM Selectric, if you had to produce really accurate text. Sure, the screen redrawing is glacial, but it beats having to re-type a whole page. They weren't a thing for long (I had a simpler self-correcting typewriter that could kind of store text), but for the few years before everyone could afford a Kaypro, they ruled. BTW, daisy wheels were slow, but produced grown-up output, as compared to dot matrix printers (which were loud and nasty), and the wheels lasted pretty well. I once set my computer to type out a lecture on my Brother daisy wheel, and went out of my office. As I closed the door on the tap-tap-tap, a colleague looked at me all "WTF?!" I explained. "Oh, I thought you had a typist in there," as though suspecting me of great nefariousness. Look at the keys on that machine. I bet the touch is superb. Nostalge over.
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