Comments by "kd1s" (@kd1s) on "Technology Connections" channel.

  1. Where I live all the HPS street lights have been converted to LED. I like them - plus they use a LOT less energy. And they've even swapped out HPS for LED on I-95 through the state. In fact they're flat fixtures so the light is cast into the streets where it belongs. Plus they changed the fixture instead of using a drop-in. And the biggest uplit building in the city - the State House.
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  2. And those colorburst crystals found wide use in the amateur radio community. And NTSC also means Never The Same Color.
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  3. Oh hypermiling - it's my least favorite thing to encounter on the highways around here. When you're doing 38MPH in a zone of 55MPH where every else is bombing along at 70MPH you deserve a special place in hell. And where I live it'd be near impossible to setup home charging so the Volt would probably be better for me. And I'm the one who when I have video of bone headed driving - like non-use of signals, etc. I'll just package it up and send it to the cops. And yeah - there are rest stops on highways. No services or anything. But when you get out of CT and into NY they start about every 25 to 30 miles.
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  4. Interestingly when I lived in a place that was 120 years old outlets were never convenient. So I searched out the beefiest extension cord I could to get power to air conditioners or even space heaters. Want to know what really got toasted, the connection itself. That was solved by replacing said connectors with beefier outlets. Then it worked like a trick. And regards air conditioners they have GFCI's on the plug side Ever have to replace one of those when the GFCI fails - I have. And also kept a fire extinguisher within easy reach. Never know.
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  5. Oh man vidicons - great big tubes. Another topic you may find interesting is Williams Tubes. They were early attempts at temporary data storage. Mostly used by Bell Labs.
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  6. Oh hell I had a CD player in the mid 1980's. And right now sitting in the house is a 101 disc cd changer. It put the discs vertically on a carousel and slides the discs into a player. It's a fascinating machine. But not used anymore as it's all been digitized and is on our computers. It was hooked up to this: https://www.radiomuseum.org/images/radio/sony_tokyo/str_av260l_623526.jpg
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  7. And I'm sure you know the other meaning of NTSC - Never The Same Color. But the thing that makes color TV these days is called Chroma.
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  8. And let us discuss what drove adoption of video cassettes. Sure there were movies etc, but porn was the biggest drive of adoption of VCR's.
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  9. What's more interesting is the life of Claude Shannon. He was awesome.
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  10. Interesting about flying spot. Ma Bell used it when she was developing electronic switching systems. It was used for call store. Of course it proved cumbersome and ineffective so then she went to magnetic memory. And I gotta admit the demo for the detector was awesome.
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  11. Around here HPS is being phased out for LED.
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  12. Yup - older vcr's you could change the AGC.
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  13. I see the different, the color is a little bit more washed out in VHS than it is in Beta.
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  14. I wonder if a notch filter would have been more effective.
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  15. I'm curious about the tones used on commercial aviation.
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  16. I see you still have that annoying search box on your Windows machine. You can get rid of that. I shut mine off because on a laptop it's annoying.
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  17. I use French press. Plus I roast my own green coffee beans.. My technique is to use a West bend sturv crazy popcorn machine. Takes 25 to 30 minutes.
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  18. I have a Nest thermostat. I understand it's trying to be nice when it drops the temp inside to Eco mode or 60F. And pretty easy to just launch the app on my phone and tell it we're home. It's all got to do with the placement of the thermostat. It's right by the front door. Even in older places I've lived it's buried into the interior. The net result the warmest/coolest area of the place is the bathroom.
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  19. And more interesting to me is Peltier junctions. They work on temperature differential. But they generate electric current when the differential is right. And the upshot - there are a number of spacecraft that are on Mars for example that use Peltier junctions to take the heat energy from decaying radioactive material to power them. And if you think Infrared is cool I suggest UV. Shine it on objects and watch what happens. For instance your state ID, or paper money.
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  20. Go lookup "The Toaster Story" It tells you everything you need to know.
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  21. Oh man - I spent $260 - that got me a Ring doorbell, and two IP Cameras - all they needed was power. Captured all sorts of interesting stuff with those. The IP cameras were $30 each. Right now they're at a friends house watching a living room and a bedroom. Any snaps get uploaded to an FTP server.
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  22. I'd prefer instant hot water heaters
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  23. Hell there's the seat sensor, proximity sensors etc. in cars that could be used as dead man switches. And since most cars already have ABS - you could mod the code in the ABS system to say if nobody's in the seat, lock the brakes up. However one thing annoys me - newer cars with traction control etc. They don't do well in snow. They limit the throttle to the point where you cannot apply power to get out of a snow issue.
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  24. Or you could be in RI where the infrastructure for EV's sucks. And if you really wanted to build it quickly you could just add charging stations at gas stations. And where I live, in the City of Providence proper the homes here were all built between 1850 and 1900. Times when no provision for cars was made so it's mostly on-street parking. I suppose I could hang a separate meter on the pole outside the house and install the charger there but then will I always be able to park near it?
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  25. Speaking of relays. When I was younger I rigged a relay to buzz and then fed that through a transformer. In essence I'd created a spark gap transmitter but it would give one hell of a shock. Also come to thing of it I created an AC signal switch mode power unit.
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  26. There are Tesla chargers all around me. They do need to get on the CCS bandwagon. I mean after all all cars use the same gas nozzle that means electric vehicles should standardize too.
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  27. I'm an I.T. god that once worked in a place. We were on the 8th floor of a building. We had an engagement team on the 22nd floor. Had to figure out how to get them on our netowrk. It was then I discovered in the networking cabinet a piece of fiber that went from the 8th floor to the 22nd Imagine. Just had to use Fiber to 100-Base-T adapters to get it working.
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  28. And of course now we have Bluetooth. How I'm listening right now.
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  29. I'm a coffee fanatic. Why? First I buy green dried coffee beans. Then I roast them - in a $20 Stir Crazy popcorn maker. Time matters here - 30 minutes or so is good roasted coffee. Then I use a french press and don't use boiling water. Oh no, I go for 190F to 195F 87.78C to 90C. Not burnt, just delicious coffee.
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  30. I often wondered how effective the packs/pods were in dishwashers. One other thing is knowing how to properly load the machine. If you block the jets of course it's gonna be garbage out. And I'm just crazy enough to monitor the dishwasher sometimes. I know mine does two detrgent free cycles of rinse before releasing the compartment. And yeah I put the pods in the compartment. But I wonder maybe throw a pod in the tub and one in the compartment. But then you use twice the pods.
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  31. No I'm not.
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  32. Part of the problem is that the bean counters at the auto manufacturers would be loathe to spend roughly $10 per car to put the sensor in the drivers seat. In their calculus it's less expensive to settle wrongful death lawsuits than to roll the feature onto every car produced.
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  33. As a kid I learned how to develop and print black and white film. Used a 110 camera. Now color that was different, time and temp mattered. However years later I worked in a genomics lab and they were explaining the process to me. I said "Sounds a lot like developing color film." And yup that same thing works in genomics.
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  34. Yeah nail polish has been used in the electronics world for quite some time. Model paint too.
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  35. Oh yeah and 195f is the optimal temp for coffee.
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  36. I have a pair of Advent Prodigy Towers. I have to do the surrounds on them. Then I have two Radio Shack Minimus-7's that sounds pretty damned good too.
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  37. l live in a place where winter temps rarely go below freezing. A heat pump would be ideal. And yeah where we are they switched us all to Nest thermostats. Problem is the Nest is just vaguely stupid. It does things like drop the temp to 62F.
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  38. Hell no would I allow an electricity provider control my AC or dryer. Why you ask? Power goes out for what I term stupid reasons all the time. And regards the AC I have NEST thermostat that constantly countermands my desire for 73F and sets it to 77F. Grrrr.But I do like that the fact that even using the AC, dryer and dishwasher my last bill was $71.
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  39. Great video. I too am a color freak. Except I know about RGB LED's. Much more interesting. And you can get several meters of the strings of RGB LED's for cheap money.
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  40. What's interesting 1980's Ford Escorts and 1990's Tempo's had tricolor rear lights. And regards headlights yeah most people don't have the sense that god gave a door knob to know the little green lamp that lights up on the dashboard when the lights are on. And I used to drive a Chevy Trax and it had tricolor too.
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  41. I got full out here. If it's a really greasy load I'll throw a pod into the dishwasher and one in the compartment. And here's a fun tip - if you suddenly find yourself without pods you can put a little dish washing liquid and bleach in the compartment. Put what annoys me most is dishwashers haven't caught up. They should have n+1 compartments for the damned pods. And my dishwasher does two rinses and then wash and then rinse. And I recall using liquid laundry detergent. Now they're little pods. You're telling me it's so much better?
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  42. And now we watch LCD's and the like with resolutions of 1280p Big difference.
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  43. The best thing to do is make your headlights flash, but in patterns. You see they're now controlled by a computer. And if you know how to watch the CAN bus and GM-Lan on a Chevy you can monitor and do replays through software.
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  44. Best laser light show I ever saw was the Rhode Island 350 year celebration It was awesome!..
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  45. Ive got a fairly new Panasonic Inverter microwave oven. It's not so much radiation but radio frequency. That said it has sensor cook and reheat modes. I do like that aspect. But on turbo defrost it asks the item weight.
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  46. I would want a DC fast charger at home to be honest. Because you can take 240VAC, run it through what is called a bridge rectifier and through a few capacitors and you get 240VDC at however many amps you need.
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  47. all of communicaton is signal to conquer the noise in all manner of comm systems from tape to radio
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  48. I lived in one place where they put a detector right above the stove. The solution was a plastic bag.
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  49. Oh flashlights - I have a few. One is my phone with flashlight function. The other is a unit that has a radio that covers AM/FM/Weather and has various lights on it like a flashlight with 3 levels, and a reading light with 6 LED's. The other is my USB rechargeable flashlight. And when all else fails there's my 200mW green LASER.
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  50. That phone on the wall that's ringing - the ring is definitely wrong. They had P-Type ringers - one big bell with the solenoid inside the bell.
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