Youtube hearted comments of Michael Wright (@michaelwright2986).

  1. It constantly surprises me how recent the adoption of the wheel for transport is: less than 5,000 years ago, I think. And I had an epiphany in the Maritime Museum in Auckland. There are lots of boats from the Pacific collected together, and they range in size from ocean crossing boats to little one-seater outriggers to go from one side of the lagoon to the other, just like a bicycle. A whole ecosystem of transport, without a wheel in sight.
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  2. Realistic enthusiasm and moderated optimism. How refreshing.
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  3. Now I come to think of it, most desks would sell for more than the Pi. Oh, I've just though of a desk with a Pi 5 built in, for more graceful cable management.
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  4. I really like the look of that UI. Takes you back to the days when consulting the OPAC of a library on the other side of the world was so exciting that you didn't need themable desktops and animations for windows closing to gussy things up.
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  5. I doubt if there is any OS that doesn't require troubleshooting (I trouble shoot Windows for my friends over the phone -- not without stress), but I have found Mint to be the easiest for me. There's a different version of Mint called Linux Mint LMDE, which is not based on Ubuntu, which might get round your problems. Or if you have a very new computer, it's possible that you need the latest and greatest to work with your hardware, so you could try Linux Mint Edge. It might well be that another distro would be better for you, but I haven't found anything that is easier to get going and keep going than Mint. It's also the case that, with normal luck, getting stuff going properly is a one time thing. Try entering a search with the name of your hardware, your distro, and a description of the problem, and see what Duck Duck Go or Google brings you.
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  6. Getting things that clear takes a special talent and a lot of work.
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  7.  @BrodieRobertson  I'm no tech person, but I am as old as dirt, and when I see x86 I do still think of 8086 (and 8088) and 80286, and I still remember the improvement in performance with my first 80286 computer. I guess it's all like the legal concept of "since time immemorial" (1189 CE).
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  8. Thank you once more for guidance through the thicket of complex choices.
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  9. Thank you for another clear and coherent video that makes choosing an option much easier.
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  10. How about a kind of out-takes video: The Deleted Rants of D J Ware.
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  11. The problem for me is that the choice is not an SSD (with a SATA connection, I suppose you're thinking of), but an SD card. I like ancient laptops, so I get a chance to compare SATA 2.5" SSDs with NVMe drives, and there is a perceptible difference. Doesn't affect productivity, but since they're pretty much the same price these days, why not have the smoother experience?
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  12. Wonderful. I've kind of picked up a lot of that by reading around over the years, but it is so good to have it all laid out clearly, with good guidance on what matters for which uses. Mostly, for my low intensity uses, it evidently doesn't matter much at all, except that this is one area where bigger really is better.
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  13. Thank you very much. It's natural you concentrate on the Orthodox, but one group whose name is a bit confusing to at least this gentile is "Conservative" Jews. Any chance of an explainer on that side of the tree?
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  14. Thanks!
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  15. Best of luck with the product line.
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  16. Thank you very much. This was mostly revision for me, and extremely valuable too. One thing struck me: the different ways of counting from 1 upwards. For some categories, the first item is "0" (zero); for others, it's "1"; and for still others, it's "a". I have a kind of clue about why: I think if something is a physical object, counting starts at 0. But I wonder if there is a principle that would help to keep this clear in the mind, in so far as it matters?
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  17. As always, you make me feel I can do things I'm a bit dubious about.
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  18. I'm always grateful for Explaining Computers episodes that take a tangled nest of standards and, well, explain them.
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  19. I really like Cinnamon, but when you talked about turning it up to 11 I was surprised; nay, surprised unto boggling. I mean, the whole point of Cinnamon is to avoid all this vulgar nonsense about turning it up. A nice moderate level, say the level at which you could hear all the details in a Bach keyboard concerto, but not disturb anyone else in the house. Thank you for the reference to Lubuntu: looks prospective for enjoying older machines.
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  20. Briliant. Thanks to this video, I have got a long way with running a virtual machine, which I have previously regarded as an Arcane Mystery, not for the likes of me. My version of VirtualBox is 7.0.4 and I'm running it on the Thinkpad T420 I use for Adventures in Computing. One difference I see with 7.x is in installing Guest Additions. Your version offers a choice of physical drive or ISO. 7.0.4 doesn't offer that, only having an option for CD, but there is another command (something like "Load Guest Additions CD") which slightly counterintuitively means "tell the machine to look for the ISO in the D: drive." That doesn't work, but I looked in Explorer for something that looked like the right file, and clicky-wickied, and it worked. I got a slight hiccup with USB. My venerable machine only has USB 2, so I clicked the radio button for USB 2 controller, and that didn't work: it does work if I tell it to enable the USB 3.0 controller which, as a matter of fact, I don't have. idk, but I can see a USB drive now. My only problem left is getting iTunes to see the WiFi network rather than the virtualised connection, so I can hook it up to Airplay. This is a pretty niche requirement, and thanks to you I feel confident in trying to solve it. I spent a career in tertiary level teaching, some of it fluffy stuff, some of it with its own technicalities. I know absolutely first-rate exposition of difficult material when I see it, and you're a master. Just the right amount of PowerPoint and graphics--in this, I was actually grateful for having the main points all on one slide. Brilliant.
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  21. 6:00 (ish) "To raise the excitement level." I say, old chap, steady on. Naked connectors and all.
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  22. Thank you very much: I found that very clarifying. Just a couple of comments. 1. At 9:59, is "Lecia" a typo for "Leica"? 2. A problem with RAW is that the format can change with individual models within a single manufacturer's range. DNG is useful because it's stable: it's an Adobe format, but freely available, and they have a free converter that keeps up to date with camera RAW formats and converts to DNG, so you don't have to keep updating your image editing software. I think Leica, and one or two other cameras, do or used to use DNG as their RAW format. 3. I was surprised to find a newish iPhone I bought putting out by default something called HEIC. I think it's kind of JPEG with better compression (my software doesn't read it, so I reverted to JPEG). I would really appreciate a clear explanation of it--the sort of thing you're so good at.
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  23. On Mac pricing: the list prices were appalling, but there were very deep discounts offered to educational institutions. They were still expensive (especially as the very first model didn't have enough RAM and disk to run its own OS properly), but the interface was a big attraction, as the competition was MS-DOS 3.31 or thereabouts. Presumably the plan was to get people hooked on Mac when they were at university, and then they'd demand the same when they got jobs. Mac users could be very demanding.
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  24. At 6:00 you redefine Plug 'n' Play. I snorted out loud.😏🎊 And a Happy New Year from New Zealand, where 2024 is well under way.
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  25. I've set up a computer for a writing project with Mint/Cinnamon. Like you say, it's calm--I first thought "quiet" but calm is better. OTOH, I have had no luck so far with Warpinator, and I gather I'm not the only person who has a problem getting two machines to see each other--I was hoping to see magic tricks, but alas it just seems they have minds of their own. Still, there's always USB sticks.
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  26. Minimum sound level (2:10): I was wondering how low the NIOSH sound level meter on the iPhone goes, and discover it also only goes down to 30dB. I discover there is a reason, which is that this is about the sound level of a quiet room, so unless you're going to compute in an anechoic chamber there's not much point in measuring lower. Always glad to see content on keeping computers quiet.
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  27. Mazel tov.
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  28. Interesting, and also a cinematic triumph. Many famous film auteurs have tried to get there, but have never quite achieved a fully motivated black screen. I see quite a lot of comments saying that gen 3 and 4 Intel i7 chips will "easily" outperform these little modern CPUs, but without any details about the workloads on which they are so superior. My most modern chip is an i5-9500, and in your tests, which represent most of what I'd be doing, responsiveness looks pretty similar--and most of my machines have much earlier chips (the HP Mini that I just got for $10 with a single core Atom is, alas, too sluggish for pleasant use). Is there likely to be any kind of work with which the golden oldies are going to be much better (excluding, of course, the use of external video cards)?
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  29. The idea of a heavy patrolling bomber interceptor had some legs, though. Lots of night fighters would fit in there, and maybe the Tornado ADV? BTW: 3:00 "The Supermarine Nighthawk being a great example": a set of words I never expected to hear.
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  30. Thank you very much. I wish I'd seen this when it first came out. Strengthens my resolve to convert my main machine to Linux.
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  31. I guess one reason for draconian hardware requirements would be because at present Windows is said to be held back by a lot of cruft for obsolete systems. Do you have any reason to believe that is happening? Does Windows 11 feel amazingly snappy? Or do we have to wait for Windows #! for that?
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  32. Thank you very much for another year of old skool intelligent, informative content, clearly delivered. You will NOT be replaced by any conceivable AI. On Windows 12 and the hardware upgrade treadmill: I'm trying to remember when I decided I didn't need a new computer for anything I wanted to do--probably about 2015. So different from the early days, when everything was obsolete after two years. I do not want local generative AI (except for very specific cases), and I've finally switched to DuckDuckGo for default search, since it still seems to act like a search engine. Mini PCs are intriguing. Long ago most non-gamers/non-creators decided that a laptop or AIO was enough computing for their needs, in a convenient package: the teeny-weeny boxlet seems to be going back to discrete components. Makes sense, I suppose, since monitors last forever, and keyboards and mice can be cheap to replace (for non-gamers). But there is still the problem of cables, which can be an important consideration for what used to be called the Spouse Approval Factor. Will we go back to some kind of dedicated computer desk, for external cable management?
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  33. On the performance of the m2 SSD (14:45). I don't think that is particularly disappointing for an m2 SATA SSD--about half the theoretical, isn't it? I assume nVME (I may have got the letters wrong) would be too expensive, but IO is perhaps the only real weakish link in the likely use of a cheap little duck like this.
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  34. Nobody ever regretted buying too much storage. When I bought my first HDD, I thought about it for quite a while before deciding that I would spend the extra and get the 20MB. Mind you, in those days, before consumer level digital images and music, that was a lot of capacity, as even text files had less overhead than these days. Long may your disks spin.
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  35. I was playing with the idea of buying this as a toy to run Android (my phone has a different OS). But already there is question 1: Why have a single-board computer with a noisy fan? I assume because they have to have it, but does this mean that the form factor and the needs of heat dispersal are in fundamental collision? (I'm assuming that many use-case for SBC want silence.) And then question 2: Why offer Android not-Android? Is it cost of the licence? But this is a premium product, evidently, so that would be a lame reason--adding a bit more on the price for the Play Store wouldn't reduce demand much, surely? Or is there an embargo by the US government because they fear the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China is going to spy on SBC users? Ah well, nice packaging and cool logo.
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  36. 1. Websites where a business has had a site made for it, and it includes a "Contact Us" page, and no one monitors it, so you never get a reply (these people mostly only use the phone, because they can't write). 2. Commercial websites that have been made by Web Professionals, and include all sorts of self-gratifying Design Elements and Fluid Transitions, but No Sodding Information (sometimes, if you fossick around enough, you can find a link to really ugly tech spec text pages, but often not even that). 3 Micro-USB connector, which is near enough to symmetrical that you can't tell the right way up. This is the worst ergonomics of the whole USB system, and that, as everyone knows, is a high bar to cross. USB B is good, and I find Type C a relief, but Type C hasn't replaced anything, just another standard to add to the mix (the last time I bought an external DVD drive, it still had a Mini-B connector). Standards are wonderful--there are so many of them.
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  37. Vanilla OS looks very promising, and thank you for this clear demo. But, is the choice of Vanilla GuhNome immutable? I'm too old to be told how I ought to work by a DE.
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  38. Two urban myths could have been dispelled better. MS never said that Windows 10 is the last version ever, certainly. But that official rebuttal is so full of obscurity vetted by the legal department that the tech journalists might have genuinely misunderstood it. And if at first you don't succeed, give up--that's not the attitude we expect from a predatory monopolist. If they'd just said "Look, we never said W10 was Windows' final form. <Legal cya material follows.>" they would at least have tried. Linux and the terminal. Shortly after Windows 11 appeared, and before I'd worked out how to turn off a lot of the obnoxious stuff, I was trying gently to propagate the virtues of Linux for some users, and someone fairly cluey about computing in a corporate environment said, "Oh, Linux, you have to do everything in the terminal." He was obviously thinking of the server people at work. But this myth persists because, if you go online looking for help, you'll see lots of how-tos using the CLI, even when GUI alternatives are available. I don't think this is flexing, mostly; if you spend all your working day in the CLI, it will be quicker to do simple jobs in the mode you're familiar with, and here are some things that you can only do in the terminal, and others that are easier (to go back to my beginnings, PIP B: = A:*.DOC is quicker and easier than copying all the originals, but leaving the back-ups, in a GUI file manager). Don't know what to do about this, but at least the forums for desktop oriented users might adopt a policy, or at least a guideline, or maybe a nudge, about using GUI methods unless absolutely necessary (as some do). One last thing: do I believe in an urban myth? When RAID first appeared, I understood it was an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, as opposed to the expensive (Enterprise, we would say nowadays) disks used for high availability. But so many acronyms have varying expansions, especially under the needs of social change. Was it always Independent disks?
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  39. Extra appreciation for the World's Biggest Spudger.
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  40. The Toshiba 1100 and 1200 (if I remember the model designations correctly) had beautiful keyboards, and two 3 1/2" floppies (720K, I think). They were styled rather like a portable typewriter, and if you did any serious writing, they already changed the world. Something like that Satellite seems a bit betwixt and between: a bit heavy and clunky and Windowsy, but not with enough resources to be a modern device that handles all your information needs.
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  41. My recent experiences with Windows makes me think of Microsoft as a corporate predator, seeking to ambush its users to get more access to their information, or maybe old-fashioned money. It has great difficulty just shutting up and letting me get on with what I'm doing. It's the barefaced impudence with which it does it that is especially annoying. The lack of customisability in the interface is, perhaps, more understandable. The big bucks are in mass orders for corporations, and there are good reasons for big organisations to want all their desk-top computers to look and work the same, especially as hot-desking becomes another way of cutting people costs. Since there are also good reasons for an individual not to get too dependent on their own special way of setting up a computer, but just getting the most out of what the manufacturer gives you, probably the best we can hope for is something intelligently designed, and not changing just to give the designers a stunning innovation to put on their CV. As your were talking about Microsoft losing its monopoly, I thought at first this was wishful thinking (MacOS is annoying, too, and Linux won't get the mass acceptance): but then I realised that ChromeOS will do most of what most people want to do on desktop, and although Google are quite as nefarious as Microsoft, they tend to be a bit more subtle about the way they grab all the details of your on-line life. Microsoft, Google, Zuckerberg, Musk--it is all a bit dystopian, isn't it? Your fury is understandable.
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  42. Why do I find a test of USB drives gripping? I hear faint echoes of Stanley Unwin. If you ever do this again, could I ask for a heat test, please? In some climates the interior of a car, especially on the dashboard or parcel shelf, can get very hot, and an hour or two in the oven at 50 or 60C would be reassuring. Or maybe even higher--some places now can get up to 50C in the open air.
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  43. I greatly admire your ability to present content clearly, and I learned from this, but I'd suggest the first section does not start from the right place, and misses a chance to free people from some bugbears about sound quality. I think there are two things that need making clear right at the start: the limitations of human hearing, and the fact that audio digitisation is a process of sine-wave reconstruction, not the smoothing out of little isolated steps (like the columns of a histogram). Both these apply as much to uncompressed formats: when the consortium introduced the CD format, this was based on a huge amount of study of the limits of human hearing, done by record companies as well as tech companies, and the record people would not want anything that would make their stuff sound bad (DGG was big into this). This established the parameters for the CD, and these are the outer limits. So people who pay extra for "high definition" audio at high sampling rates and bit depths for listening (as opposed to editing) are not getting anything tangible for their money (though doubtless it makes them feel special, and that is always worth spending money on--I do mean that). People who were brought up on the analogue world, where there was always a small (though diminishing) gain to be had from getting a better cartridge or a more exactly controlled turntable often have difficulty in accepting that good enough is truly good enough, and that though you can get something that measures better, it is a physiological impossibility for it to sound better--just as you could build a computer monitor that emitted in the deep infra-red, but it wouldn't look any different. Also, it seems that the most discriminating hearing is to be found in young females , who are not strongly represented among the people who think a lot about audio techniques and equipment. The other thing that needs explaining -- and even a mathematical dunce like me can kind of grasp it -- is that the digitisation and reconstruction of a sound wave is a precise reconstruction of sine waves up to a certain frequency, and not a smoothing out of lumpiness (which implies approximation). A misapprehension here leads to a misunderstanding of what is an easy sound to compress, and what is hard. The step-smoothing notion leads to the idea that an instrument whose sound is very close to a pure sine wave is hard -- so, solo flute is difficult, people sometimes think. Doubtless they think of the sound of a flute as pure, and digitisation is a pollution of analogue purity. Whereas in fact a flute is very easy for digitisation, and hence for lossy compression. Whereas what is difficult is a Nordic death metal drummer at the end of a session hitting everything as hard as possible as often as possible, with diminished precision. These two things are hard for lots of us to grasp, at first, but getting them straight can end up with a lot less disk space (not that that matters now) and a lot less anxiety about quality, more money to spend on speakers where it makes a difference, and more mental energy to spend on listening to music, which is the main point of the exercise. All this from the point of view of the listener: for editing, of course, you want to stay well clear of the minima to make life easy: and maybe that's another clarification that could be made: there are significant differences in the requirements for the editor and the end listener, and your attention is perhaps more addressed to the needs of people who edit? Love your work.
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  44. I can see why the default would be friendly to developers who spend a lot of time in the CLI, but does it therefore have to be hostile to users? Kind of part of the notion that Linux isn't something you use to do your work, but something you learn for its own sake.
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  45. I was thinking, maybe time to try a Pi. You turned it over and showed the M.2 slot, and I was getting ready to operate the credit card. But it was Only A Dream. Or do I mean the slot was a lie? So dumb. I go into shops and offices and they have an all-in-one on the counter or the desk (if it's an iMac, I think it's probably too stylish a place for me), and a Proper Pi and a monitor could be so good for that sort of use. And I suppose it could work as an access point for a server. But so limiting.
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  46. I feel I may be going back to the command line, thanks to this sort of thing. Also, at 1:30 I liked the undertaking to treat comments with all the patience of a substitute 8th grad maths teacher. That should be an ANSI standard.
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  47. This format is very appropriate for desktop distros, thank you. I can understand (or imagine) that fine differences in performance make a real difference on servers, but it's all Linux, and at the desktop I wonder just how much difference in performance there is? MX Linux is often described as lightweight and performance oriented--can you point me, please, to comparisons in performance of desktop tasks--like reformatting a long word processor document, or processing a RAW image file--between lean distros and the friendly ones? Perhaps also the audience of this channel is not about to switch from Windows, but is likely to be advising friends/relatives on the switch. In which case, it is necessary but not easy to drop one's own preferences and think about a user who actually doesn't WANT to understand their computer, but just wants to do stuff with it (like most folk use a phone). Don't put your cousins and your aunts onto Arch, btw.
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  48. Happy 500th, and I'm glad to see the co-stars got a nod in the final scene. A constant source of delight and instruction.
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  49. I tried Clonezilla: thanks for making me feel I could. It bears its history proudly. When it had finished and was doing a power off, I was delighted to see a message that it had found no drives that needed parking. I mean, when was the last time you had to manually park the heads on a hard drive? I rather think that all HDDs had self-parking heads before you were walking, so you've probably never done it.
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