Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Technology Connections" channel.

  1. 6:36 Probably good to mention by this point that “I” stood for “in-phase” and “Q” for “quadrature”. That is, these were the 0° and 90° components extracted from the phase-modulated chrominance signal. If you think of this signal as a point moving in two dimensions, the direction of the point from the centre gives you the hue, and the distance from the centre is the saturation of the colour.
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  2. 12:05 It becomes easier to tell once the percussion and rhythm kick in. Full-spectrum sound really brings out the difference.
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  3. 13:10 I’m sure “minus” was a term promoted by the Sony/Philips group just to make the DVD Forum grit their teeth every time they heard it. ;)
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  4. 6:53 Actually you’ve got it upside down; higher signal levels correspond to lower luminance levels (darker), while lower levels are higher (lighter). It was done this way so that transients caused by interference would random dark dots instead of random light dots, and the former were considered to be less noticeable.
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  5. 5:14 Rust (FeO, Fe₂O₃) is not magnetic (much). The iron oxide used in magnetic tape is magnetite, Fe₃O₄. Oh, and it also appears they use the γ-form of Fe₂O₃ (maghemite).
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  6. 7:03 What’s really bad is that the second r in “Corporation” is not capitalized as well. “TelePrompTer CorpoRation” ... now isn’t that better?
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  7. There was the time I lost my grip on reality ... oh wait, that never happened.
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  8. 3:06 You don’t get two dings as the toast is going down? (Sorry, just been watching your elevator-sound video.)
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  9. A “magitain’t”. Or “magnitain’t”.
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  10. 13:15 So when did “amber” enter the language? “Gamboge”?
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  11. 0:51 There is a similar thing in book/magazine printing called “imposition”. This is where you arrange the printing of pages in fours on double-width sheets so that when they are folded in the middle and stacked and bound together, the page numbers end up in the correct sequence.
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  12. 4:45 “Not a questionable astronomical unit” ... so, not less than 12 parsecs, then?
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  13. IBM Selectrics were also often adapted for use as computer output devices. It was basically a matter of replacing the printing electronics that were driven by the keys, with circuits that could be driven by impulses from the computer.
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  14. 14:50 It’s not two “sides”: the tracks are still on the same side of the tape. They are simply positioned in-between the tracks recorded in the other direction. So you have four tracks along the length of the tape — two stereo pairs, recorded in opposite directions.
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  15. “Computers” have been around for centuries. The term used to mean “person who did calculations”, before machines did them.
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  16. There were two different quadraphonic systems. There was SQ, a “matrix” system which didn’t really have four separate channels, and there was JVC’s CD-4, which used subcarriers to encode either the rear channels or front/rear difference signals, not sure which. This gave better channel separation. I remember reading a bunch of Sansui brochures at the time. They took SQ and turned it into “QS”, which some kind of dynamic level-based adjustments of the decoding matrix, to give the effect of better apparent channel separation.
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  17. Particularly since PC hard drives of the period were only on the order of tens of megabytes. This was a particular issue to those trying to create CD-ROMs. Even when DVDs first came out, they held more than the common hard drive capacity, though the ratio was smaller. By about the ’00s, hard drives had overtaken optical media and left them in the dust.
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  18. 0:47 Only a dozen? Kids’ stuff. /me remembers SCSI connectors with 50 wires (OK, 25 signal wires plus 25 ground wires).
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  19. All you need to know is, it dates from the era when Apple were still a technological pioneer.
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  20. 2:14 Is that Spanish for “/dev/null”?
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  21. Such a filter on the output side is called the “reconstruction filter”, while on the input side it is called the “antialiasing filter”. In both cases, their job is to get rid of spurious frequencies above the Nyquist limit. The reconstruction filter is a “usually-good-enough” approximation to the ideal sinc reconstruction function.
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  22. Digital is robust against errors up to a point, then it completely falls apart. Analog suffers from the slightest error, but the degradation is gradual all the way down from there, rather than falling off a cliff. You pays yer money and you takes yer choice.
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  23. 4:52 “1.44” ... Q: is that megabytes or mebibytes? A: Neither.
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  24. Things not to google, #934: “Two girls, one blue jiggly”.
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  25. 5:28 “Precisely” ... now there’s a word you didn’t hear much in connection with consumer-quality analog video formats ...
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  26. 1:24 /me puts a picture representing the Second Law of Thermodynamics up on a dartboard and proceeds to throw darts at it.
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  27. “Pulling out all the stops” is when you want maximum sound from an organ.
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  28.  @tomasbickel58  The light reflects from below towards the presenter, not towards the lens.
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  29. 12:42 That whole “will it play on my VCR?” argument from the VHS-C camp was never really convincing. TVs and living-room VCRs both soon added extra AV inputs on the side, to make it easy to plug in your camcorder. And you had to copy to do editing anyway. I think worldwide Video-8 and Hi-8 outsold VHS-C and S-VHS-C. Also the extra recording time didn’t hurt.
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  30. Are you sure it was FEC? I remember being in my uncle’s place years ago (he was a radio ham) and hearing some digital data communication being monitored on his gear: you could distinctly hear the packet being transmitted, followed by the acknowledgement, then another packet etc. Seemed like a waste of bandwidth. I told them they should do a TCP-style sliding-window protocol, to allow multiple packets to be sent before receiving the acknowledgements, to get around the channel latency.
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  31. 2:01 Some people (lucky tetrachromats) get to see four. They seem to be mostly women.
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  32. 0:24 “Trying my hardest ... low-effort” ... how to succeed at deadpan humour without really trying ...
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  33. History repeats, doesn’t it?
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  34. 2:19 Shape ... kinda like a loaf of bread ...
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  35. ... Adobe sits quietly, twiddling thumbs and making “ka-ching” noises ...
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  36. There were never “CD+R/RW” formats. You’re thinking of DVD+R/RW.
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  37. →C64 C64 There was no “time delay” in PAL. It solved the colour problem in a very simple and elegant way, which is why it became the world’s most popular broadcast colour TV system.
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  38. You are confusing the spec with implementations of the spec. Quoth Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL>: “Early PAL receivers relied on the human eye to do that cancelling; however, this resulted in a comb-like effect known as Hanover bars on larger phase errors. Thus, most receivers now use a chrominance analog delay line, which stores the received colour information on each line of display; an average of the colour information from the previous line and the current line is then used to drive the picture tube. The effect is that phase errors result in saturation changes, which are less objectionable than the equivalent hue changes of NTSC.”
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  39. Teletext: such a hack that, if the signal quality degrades, it will be the first thing to go. You know what really was a marvel in the days of analog TV? NICAM digital stereo sound, that’s what.
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  40. 8:20 Surely there must already be some open-source text-scrolling software for Linux or Android. How hard could it be to write?
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  41. That tune somehow takes me back to being at an audio hi-fi store sometime in the 1970s, listening to a demo of this new thing called “quadraphonic” ...
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  42.  @KaitouKaiju  Their word was “elektron”.
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  43. 8:35 Spoiler alert ... . . . . . Keep an eye on the colour of the Mac’s desktop background.
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  44. 4:27 “Arabicadabra” ... heh-heh.
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  45. That meaning is from pipe-organ technology, from a few centuries before photography. #LanguageGeek #PunSpoilSport
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  46. The ideal reconstruction involves plotting something called a “sinc function” centred at each sample, then adding up all these curves. The trouble with this ideal is that the sinc function has an infinite extent and only slowly fades to zero as you get further from the centre.
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  47. 1:07 It is quite possible to do differential signalling over copper, with isolation at each end to block the ground loops. Venerable old MIDI works this way—optoisolators at each end are a mandatory part of the standard.
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  48. 3:15 12,000 in 1927 units? How many would that be in 2019 numbers? (Well, had to get back at you for that “playing records upside-down” dig ...)
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  49. Here in Mathland, quaternions break into you.
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  50.  @DeviantOllam  I remember Watch Mr Wizard being on t’telly when I were a wee lad back in the old country. I remember very few details about the episodes, except the one where he demonstrated an atomic chain reaction using an aquarium full of ping-pong balls sitting on armed mousetraps. Incidentally, Jim Al-Khalili did the same demo.
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  51. If you understand quantum theory, that means it wasn’t explained properly.
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  52. CD-R brands varied widely in longevity, in my experience; Verbatim, Sony and TDK were good, Imation was crap.
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  53. 0:59 Anybody else tried to burn dual-layer 9.4GB discs? I did try sending a few to friends, but they were never able to read them. And the fact that they cost more than 2 single-layer discs meant they were never very popular.
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  54.  @maxwelsh6121  From the country that has the La Brea Tar Pits? Hint: look up what “La Brea” means ...
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  55. CDs were designed for audio first, and general data files (CD-ROM) later. DVDs were designed to be a computer data format from the beginning, with a proper computer file system (actually two, ISO-9660 and UDF), with all the actual applications (DVD-Video, DVD-Audio etc) being done basically as file formats on top of that.
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  56. 2:58 Kenny Everett once used this to comedic effect, with some UK police Rover cars playing a certain riff from Somewhere Over The Rainbow on their horns. ;)
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  57. One thing to consider is the difference between raw capture quality and final delivery quality. If you are going to mess around with the sound (filter it, apply other effects, mix it down), then you want the final result to make full use of the capacity of human hearing. Since all the processing will involve some kind of degradation, it makes sense to start with raw quality higher than human hearing, to give you room to play around. The same reasoning applies to “lossless” versus “lossy” image encoding, and the use of depths greater than 8 bits per pixel component.
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  58. You say “interesting physical consideration”, I say “analog quality compromise”. Aren’t you glad all that has gone away with digital encoding?
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  59. Next, are you going to talk about FM? ;)
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  60. In the analog realm, you have this thing called “generation loss”, where the quality degrades through repeated copying and processing. A similar thing happens even in the digital world, though to a lesser extent, because while straight copying is effectively 100% perfect, actual processing and filtering involves finite-precision computer arithmetic, which is subject to rounding errors. So yes, it helps to start with a higher-quality set of raw samples, to give yourself more headroom to play around.
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  61. 16:16 I had a DVD-HDD recorder. It could play/record DVDs and also had a hard drive. This way, I could collect a whole set of episodes of a series, go through them, snipping out the ads, then burn the completed collection to a disc (or set of discs). Much tidier than trying to find free space somewhere on a random collection of discs (or tapes, for those who remember VHS).
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  62. True, this is an omission in his video. Quantization artifacts are more prominent for simple tones than for complex mixtures of sound. Dithering helps, because the random-sounding noise is less noticeable than repeating distortion.
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  63. 7:56 Just to point out, the late, great Jacob Bronowski had to speak all his lines without a teleprompter. Yeah, go and watch that classic 1971 doco The Ascent Of Man again. And admire his brilliance and erudition. And ability to explain things simply. And being on first-name terms with several members of the Manhattan Project ... ummm, where was I?
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  64. CDs (and DVDs) use lasers. As did good old “laserdisc” (hence the name).
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  65. That’s an analog definition. And what about higher-order filters?
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  66. 10:39 Also my experience with CD-RW discs is they were highly unreliable. I used them for a while to transport files between my office and a client’s place (in the days before USB sticks), but I never depended on them for backups. CD-R was the way to go for those.
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  67. Beware of somebody mixing up THD, quantization noise and aliasing, and then claiming to be an “actual signal processing engineer”.
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  68. No no no, “orange with context”.
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  69. 0:04 These days I use a microwave. Set the right power and time, works great. For example, 880W for 15 minutes for one 160ml cup, makes about two servings.
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  70. This is fixed by isolation at each end and differential signalling. For example, the MIDI spec (also from the early 1980s) mandated optoisolators for this reason. So even back then people were perfectly aware of how to deal with this.
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  71. Don’t you have home units in the USA? I’ve always had a combination microwave/convection/grill unit. A bit more expensive, but I think a lot more flexible.
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  72. I wrote a Python script to manage it years ago. You give it the text and font, it measures the block and properly centres it both horizontally and vertically on the page.
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  73. With 4K, you might still see nose hairs from across the street.
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  74.  @renakunisaki  Hey, this is YouTube, not broadcast TV. ;)
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  75.  @SilverAura  So many things about biology like that. The electrical action in a nerve happens across the nerve, not along it, and so the signal propagation along the nerve happens at sedate speeds on the order of 300 km/h (I think it might be slower for some nerves, like pain nerves). Another one: the raw light information picked up by your retinas is on the order of gigapixels. But there is no way your optic nerves can handle anything close to that bandwidth. So much of what you see is thrown away before it gets to your brain. And another one: your eyes continually saccade (move rapidly) from one viewpoint to another. This happens about once a second, and takes about a quarter second. But you never consciously see the world spinning around you: instead, one moment you are looking on one direction, next moment you are looking in another direction, with no memory of any viewpoint in-between. In other words, you are spending about a quarter of your waking hours effectively blind.
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  76. 12:37 Surely the bumps would form pits (cavities), not lands.
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  77. 11:20 Yeah, but “quality” and “vinyl” ... what kind of person would put both in the same sentence? I rest my case.
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  78. Biological evolution is dumb, and the organic materials it has to work with are pretty crap, too. Just consider how many raw megapixels you have with the rods and cones in each eye, and then see how it’s just impossible to get all that bandwidth through the optic nerves into the brain, at any realistic frame rate. Most of what you see gets thrown away in the eye before your brain can even process it!
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  79. I would have scanned the form, used a typewriter font to overlay the text, then printed it back out again. How would they know?
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  80. 12:53 At least until digital came along and threw everything else out the window.
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  81. 5:21 You know the old saying: “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to be technologically-historically-astute” ...
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  82. There was an extra spec called CD-TEXT, that added track title/artist information using the “P” and “Q” subcode fields. My car stereo can display this, so my CD-burning script includes the info in the control file for cdrdao.
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  83. The car I’ve been driving lately (newer than my own) has no CD player, but it does have Bluetooth and USB ports.
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  84. 0:53 I used CD/DVD rewritables occasionally to carry data between my office and a client’s location. They were not trustworthy enough for longer-term use, but they were OK for such basic data transfer needs. This was back in the day when USB sticks were only a fraction of the capacity of optical discs.
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  85. The current standard computer character code is Unicode, but the first 128 characters still embed the old ASCII code that was common before then. And of those, the first 32 are still called “control characters”, most of which have lost their function. But they still include control codes for both “horizontal tab” and “vertical tab”.
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  86. 11:40 Funny, he exerted the same level of tight control over his movie-making patents. But since there was no rival technology on offer as an alternative to his, the US movie industry responded by relocating away from where it started -- in New York -- to the other end of the country to get away from him and his lawyers.
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  87. Do you also plan to talk at some point about another use for a BFO, for decoding SSB audio? Who would pass up a chance to sound like the Cybermen? ;)
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  88. You are trying to produce a quality result at the final delivery sample rate and bit depth. You have to leave room for processing degradation so you don’t end up producing a worse result than that. Consider the multiply-add operation that is heavily used in FFT and convolution computations. In modern hardware, it is common to have an instruction that can perform it with one rounding error, instead of separate ones for the multiply and the add. So that cuts the rounding errors in half, but it still does not reduce them to zero. And remember you typically have to perform thousands of these operations for each sample.
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  89. FM is a very inefficient encoding. Consider that it takes up about 10× the bandwidth of an AM signal, but does it really sound 10× better? I don’t think so. DAB is capable of squeezing FM quality into similar bandwidth to an AM signal. And be just as robust to noise.
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  90. 3:06 I thought the term was “stewed”.
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  91. 7:28 The wobble is not about speed, it’s about tracking. In order to ensure the laser is correctly focused on the groove, you can do a comparison of focus error on opposite sides of the sensor; if one is further out, you know which way you have to move the focusing mechanism to bring things back into alignment again. The problem is, the comparison system could develop an offset error over time, from mechanical misalignment, contamination or whatever other cause. To work around this, instead of a steady tracking, you do an oscillating system instead. So now instead of measuring an error signal, you measure the wobble in the readout signal itself, which is more resistant to static offset error. Sony invented a clever system in their MD disc where, instead of the mechanism implementing the wobble, it was built into the shape of the grooves instead. This is the same wobbly-groove idea you are seeing here. (Source: The Art Of Digital Audio , 2nd ed, by John Watkinson, page 577 or thereabouts.)
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  92. Another fun thing about the origins of “television” is the name, along of course with all the predictions that it would mean the end of society as we knew it. I remember a quote about it (which a quick search says came from someone named C P Scott): “The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.”
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  93.  @mattb4721  Yeah, rice must never be allowed to spend much time at room temperature. It must either be hot or chilled.
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  94. 9:09 I think those particular examples would be handled sufficiently by a good frequency response. The extra that’s needed is preservation of the relative phase of the different frequencies: this means accurate reproduction of transients (e.g. percussive sounds, and also the initial “attack” on the notes produced by many musical instruments).
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  95. On Vimeo you can re-upload.
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  96. Yawn How is what you prefer relevant to this video?
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  97. Have you ever met anyone with tetrachromatic vision?
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  98. 11:58 Unfortunately, CD-Text only seems to have very limited character-set support. Unicode? Hahahahaha!!!
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  99. Yes, Fuad. That is very funny.
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  100. CD-RWs worked by a phase-change method. I think this meant that the material changed its refractive index, and that is how it generated the same interference pattern you got with the pits and lands on a pressed CD.
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  101. 0:29 I think those are only DVD-DL discs. I don’t see the two-halves thing on any of the DVD-R discs on this spindle on the shelf.
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  102. A lot of the generation loss copying between consumer VCRs was not so much actual degradation of the video signal, but poor timebase sync. There were gadgets you could buy (I have one) that would clean up the sync and give you much better copies. Would that have made a difference to the comparison?
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  103. I just realized the, ahem, connection with Burke’s “Connections” series. Thanks for pointing it out.
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  104. 7:21 Why jumble up the data? Because there was an expectation that a scratch on the disc, for example, could destroy a whole lot of bits in a row. But because of the shuffling, these destroyed bits end up spread out among a bunch of other good bits, lessening the impact of the run of errors.
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  105. 7:49 OK, you mentioned that point. ;)
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  106. 23:57 It was never going to work with Windows, put it that way.
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  107. I can only see tiny thumbnails, with no option to make them bigger.
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  108. 3:25 A quick ferret around the dub-dub-dubs for “jvc rx-222” suggests late 1980s-vintage. Which would be consistent with my Sony VCR from 1989, which has similarly pretty displays.
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  109. Reed-Solomon has never been improved upon. ;)
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  110. 6:53 That’s mono audio. The hi-fi stereo audio is recorded (I think) by extra heads also on the spinning drum, along the same tracks as the video. How do they keep from interfering? Through a magical feature known as “depth multiplexing”. The audio is recorded first, and because its frequencies are lower, the magnetization penetrates deeper into the tape. Then the video is recorded, which erases the audio close to the surface, but leaves the deeper part alone. During playback, each layer can be picked up by heads attuned to its particular range of frequencies. Yes, it all really is insanely clever...
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  111. 14:59 Conversely, Sony’s Video-8 format for camcorders decisively wiped the floor with its VHS-C competitor. The latter was a kind of hacky adaptation of VHS to a smaller cassette, with consequently shorter recording time, while the former was designed specifically to maintaining a higher time/quality tradeoff in the smaller format. Even the much-hyped ability of VHS-C tapes to be played in a VHS VCR (by putting them in a kind of adapter that mimicked the larger standard VHS case) failed to tip the balance.
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  112. FLAC is good, because it is a) lossless, and b) can include metadata (artist, title etc) that common players like VLC can recognize.
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  113. 2:12 Ayup.
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  114. 1:44 Blame your OS for the misrepresentation. My OS uses the correct units.
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  115. 19:13 Ecru to you, too! I like the maroons. I think purple, green and maroon would be my three favourite colours. Also, I think there should be more words for different shades of green. Every time I look at a forest by the side of the road, I am struck by how many different colours of leaves there are.
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  116. 4:47 As I recall, the BBC were experimenting with video recording onto steel tape in, I don’t know, the 1950s or so. The reels were huge and heavy. And the tape had to move at a very high speed to cope with the video signal bandwidth. The result of all this was moving parts with a lot of kinetic energy in them — dangerously so. And the edges of the tape were sharp ...
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  117. This was a frequently-commented-on drawback of CDs, that they had less room for that lovely album cover art.
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  118. That jumped-up new-fangled vinyl never sounded as good as authentic shellac.
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  119. 20:54 Yes, the light amplifiers have to be active devices. They need external power in order to amplify, after all. The pumping is just how lasers work. Remember what the “A” stands for in “LASER”? That’s right — “amplification”. And the “SE” is “Stimulated Emission”, aka “pumping”.
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  120. 11:58 I have a sudden vision of a time a few decades from now where giving unlicensed advice like this will be deemed illegal ...
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  121. You are a very patient man, all things considered. ;)
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  122. 0:55 People kept mistaking him for one. “I am not a Crookes Radiometer!”
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  123. Hearing is a sense. If you are not “hearing” it, then what “sense” are you using?
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  124. When I was little, back in the old country with the UK-style plugs, I used to be confused by the word “FUSED” embossed into their cases. Because adult relatives only used the word “fused” to mean “the fuse has blown”!
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  125. I love that name “Philo T Farnsworth”. It sounds so ... American. Can you think of another famous American with the initials “P T”? Another fun thing Philo Farnsworth was involved in was nuclear fusion. Imagine a nuclear fusion reactor simple and cheap enough to build in your home (though it won’t produce output power worth a darn). Look up “Farnsworth Fusor” to find out more.
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  126. Anything involving boiling water coming into contact with coffee is a bad idea.
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  127. Digital filters are quite capable of implementing a “brick wall” cutoff.
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  128. To make it more relevant to the younger kids nowadays, how about: Sony → Apple IPhone VHS → Android
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  129. 09:18 Actually, the real reason for EFM encoding is to reduce the frequency bandwidth of the signal that the circuitry has to cope with. Remember that each 1 represents a waveform transition. So two successive 1s in a row represent a frequency of 14 bits per encoded byte × 2352 bytes per sector × 75 sectors per second ÷ 2 transitions per cycle = 1234800Hz. By insisting on at least 3 0s between each pair of 1s, this is reduced to a quarter of that. At the bottom end of the frequency range, the maximum number of 0s you can have in a row is dependent on how stable you can maintain your clock sync.
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  130. Sorry, since it’s a minimum of 2 0s in a row, that’s a third of that frequency, not a quarter. The number of combinations of 14 bits that satisfy these constraints is 267, just slightly more than the 256 needed to encode 8 bits of data. (Which explains why 14 bits are used, and not 13 or 15, say.) Some are used for special marker purposes. There is also a 3-bit “packing period” between each of these 14-bit words, which can contain an extra 1-bit as necessary to even out the total numbers of 1s and 0s to avoid the overall signal having a DC offset. Source: John Watkinson, The Art Of Digital Audio , of which I have the 2nd edition from 1994.
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  131.  @thehoeslaper  Which country was this? I was paying NZD80 for a box of 5 DVD-R discs for use with the “Superdrive” in my 2002-vintage G4 Imac, and never had to “show ID”.
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  132. 18:10 Or, just plug your camcorder into the TV and let it play the tape directly. A Video-8 camcorder is also a VCR, after all.
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  133. 3:32 Pixels are not little squares. You hereby incur the wrath of Alvy Ray Smith.
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  134. 12:20 I think they have to be arranged diagonally, not vertically and horizontally. That way, straight horizontal motion can be interpreted as a mono signal (mix of both channels, rather than just one channel), for compatibility with equipment that can’t handle stereo.
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  135. 12:41 Ah, I see you noticed.
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  136. 4:52 Has anybody ever seen any 16-RPM discs? Are they in fact 16⅔ RPM, being ½ of 33⅓ RPM?
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  137. 10:42 OK, you have. It figures. ;)
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  138. 10:25 Only true for matte displays, which are the best at reproducing colour. Some people prefer glossy ones, for some reason—maybe because they look prettier, even though their colour reproduction is worse.
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  139. 14:28 Bring back the pristine sound of shellac! That new-fangled vinyl never quite sounded right.
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  140. 10:31 A moment of silence for the dear departed Cosmos man, please.
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  141. That description applies to sign-magnitude as well. The difference is, consider 16-bit integers: unsigned they can represent values from 0 to 65535. In twos-complement, you interpret the encodings after 32767 to actually represent that value minus 65536. So the encoding that would be 32768 becomes -32768, 32769 becomes -32767, and so on up to 65535 which now represents -1. The clever thing is, if you add two such numbers as though they were unsigned, you can interpret the result as signed and the answer is correct. Conversely, to subtract two numbers a and b, just add a and -b instead.
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  142. This idea that inaudible frequencies can make an audible difference ... the only rational explanation I can come up with involves some non-linearity of response of the ear. Perhaps not an explanation that audiophiles would like ...
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  143. 9:20 Interesting coincidence that cranking up the gain of a digital sensor increases the noise, which also manifests as a form of grain. Or is it?
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  144. Re the up-and-down versus side-to-side motion: stereo records make use of both: motion along one axis gives you one channel, along the perpendicular axis gives you the other channel. I think they’re actually oriented diagonally, so each channel gets both vertical and horizonal motion.
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  145. 13:03 Apple were quite keen on PhotoCD. They built support for it into QuickTime and MacOS, so that when you inserted a PhotoCD disc into the drive, it would automount and the images would appear as files (in a range of resolutions) that you could just drag and drop to your hard drive. I still have the CDs that came bundled with my 1993-vintage Mac Centris 650, one of which is the Kodak PhotoCD sampler disc. But yes, I remember asking a Kodak guy at the time why they didn’t just adopt JPEG compression (which was the hot new thing back then). Their format allowed for a range of resolutions to be encoded into the same file, but that didn’t seem to be important at the time, and it seems even less important now.
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  146. There was a GIMP addon that provided that capability some years before Adobe figured it out.
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  147. You didn’t mention THD? Yes you did.
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  148. 8:10 Ah, but what about the thin horizontal line running across the screen about two-thirds of the way up? I think that was a wire that was needed to reinforce the aperture grille. Almost unnoticeable -- until someone points it out to you.
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  149. 9:16 Ah, you did mention it.
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  150. Further thought: you put the wire at one third of the way up, whereas I seem to remember with the Apple monitors it was two thirds of the way up. I think Apple felt it would be less noticeable if the tube was flipped upside down.
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  151. 0:32 Actually, both are transducers. And any transducer can work to some degree in either direction -- the two physical systems that are coupled (air versus wood/bone/electricity/whatever) can exchange energy either way.
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  152. 0:30 Blue USB sockets? In 2005?!? ANACHRONISM!! (or at least time paradox)
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  153. Never mind format wars, how about a pronunciation war: “bay-ta” or “bee-ta”?
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  154. 3:09 That’s the opening to Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories -- not that I’ve seen the series, but I recognize it from some of the vintage CG clips here on YouTube.
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  155. 20:16 That would be true of simple resistive heating. Not so true of, say, heat pumps.
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  156. One thing I use the combo function for is, microwave to cook the chicken pieces thoroughly on the inside, simultaneously grilling to crisp the outside.
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  157. 11:02 Regarding the noise ... here in NZ, a couple of hours south of Auckland, I rarely need to run my portable unit at night, so that mitigates the noise issue somewhat. Also I run it most heavily for maybe 3-4 weeks of the year, during the hottest part of summer.
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  158. When I were a wee lad and Get Smart was being shown for the first time on local TV, I used to be taken with the clock-hand-style floor indicators outside the lifts. Do any of those still exist?
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  159. The EU remembers. It’s their anthem.
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  160. 14:58 Analog filters cannot have a sharp cutoff (without introducing phase-shift artifacts), but digital filters can. Oversampling can give you a perfectly good cutoff at a 20kHz × 2 = 40kHz sampling rate, or any other rate you want. The reason for the 44.1kHz audio CD sampling rate has to do with the original use of adapted VCR machines for the audio mastering, and the need to able to adapt both PAL and NTSC machines for the purpose. Source: John Watkinson, The Art Of Digital Audio -- I have an old edition of this and his Art Of Digital Video -- both are still well worth reading.
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  161. 16:03 Ah, you did know at least part of that.
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  162. 1:56 Or could it be “the sai of sapience”?
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  163. 3:28 Fourier is not complicated! (The main trouble I have with it is remembering where the π factors come in.) The wonderful symmetry between time/space-domain and frequency-domain representation of signals is just breathtakingly beautiful to behold. So there.
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  164. 5:15 See, nothing complicated about that, is there? ;)
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  165. That could be just the “ringing” he already alluded to.
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  166. And for CD-ROMs, there’s an extra layer of error correction on top of that.
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  167. 16:07 In fact, it’s the anti-green, the complementary colour to green.
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  168. Just a further thought, it seems to me the way the brain interprets the stimuli from the different cone types is not simply as addition of scalars, but as basis vectors pointing in different directions in a 2D plane. That’s why stimulation of red+blue is not equivalent to just green.
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  169. 20:00 Complex numbers FTW!
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  170. 5:28 Also used in computer monitors, like Apple’s legendary 13" RGB monitor from 1987 -- commonly considered to be the first colour monitor to be good enough to be used in black-and-white!
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  171. 11:06 Ah, you mentioned that too.
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  172. Have you ever seen a Zenith FTM (Flat-Tension Mask) set? That was a CRT with a truly flat screen. I don’t think they were very successful, though.
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  173. I never used one, but I read reviews which said that, after years of staring at convex CRT screens, the Zenith gave one the illusion of actually being concave. One benefit from being at least vertically flat (both the Sony Trinitrons and the Zenith FTM) was less reflection from overhead lights in an office.
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  174.  @bsadewitz  Even the fovea is a compromise: increased detail and colour vision (more cones) means less rods, which means less light sensitivity right in the most important part of our visual field. And then there’s the blind spot ...
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  175.  @bsadewitz  Saccades actually involve turning off your sight in the brain, so you don’t see everything jump around during the eye movement. Each saccade lasts about a quarter of a second, and there is typically one of these per second. You cannot see during a saccade, but you just don’t notice. So for a quarter of your entire waking life, you are blind without realizing it.
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  176.  @bsadewitz  “Not seeing” = “blind”.
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  177. 5:12 Those f-numbers are the denominator in a fraction of the lens focal length (which is what the “f” stands for). So higher denominators means the fraction is actually smaller: e.g. f/2.8 is less than f/1.4.
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  178. Is electricity not “physical”?
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  179. But “semantics” means “meaning”. So if you want to ignore the meaning, then why are you saying anything at all?
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  180. So what does your supposed “audience” classify electricity as, if not “physical”, then? Is it something “spiritual”, perhaps? I’m trying to think non-semantically here, as you suggest.
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  181. Thought: wouldn’t it be neat if you could get the “raw” RGB+infrared data from the scanner? Then you could apply a software-based equivalent of Digital ICE to the image on a PC, that you could interactively tweak by hand (e.g. apply only to certain areas) for the best results, rather than having the scanner do an automatic, not so smart, one-size-fits-all job.
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  182. 23:00 It’s not a Windows phone. Phones did not run Windows, they ran Windows Phone. So it’s a Windows Phone phone.
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  183. 13:03 This is what happens when you have a an OCD presenter catering to an OCD audience. It’s hell in there, I tell you ...
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  184. 15:09 There were some vendors that pushed the envelope even further, with 90-minute discs, at least. But the reliability fell off at that point, so things finally stabilized back at 80 minutes.
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  185. 1:16 Rust isn’t magnetic. This is actually Fe₃O₄, I believe.
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  186. Using something in its entirety can indeed be fair use: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090810/1913245833.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120530/17333319132/myths-realities-about-fair-use.shtml
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  187. This is why we have JPEG2000 now. The wavelet compression degrades more gracefully than DCT in old JPEG: it goes fuzzy instead of blocky/ringing.
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  188. 0:51 Sound is pressure waves. It can be transmitted through any matter, not just air: e.g. underwater, or through rock. Or the taut string of a tin-can intercom.
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  189. But if you let them loose, where do they go?
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  190. You were talking about “loosing” them. If you didn’t mean “let them loose”, what did you mean?
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  191. 13:59 “Economies of scale to rear their ugly head”, boyo!
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  192. 11:19 The aftermarket CD player that I fitted in my previous car would not play discs that had been burned at faster than 8×.
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  193. I just thought of a drinking game, where you take a drink every time he says something snarky. ‌ Nobody would get through a single video. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌‌‌ ‌ Without having to go to the toilet. ‌ (Why, what kind of drink did you think I meant?)
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  194. “Sample rate” ≠ “Bit rate”
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  195. Have you considered trying different voltages through the klaxon, just to see how the sound changes? That would presumably change the motor speed.
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  196. 4:19 Yeah! (Thumbs up for getting that point across.)
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  197. 2:44 The semiconductor crystal on its own doesn’t restrict the conduction of current in one direction, it’s the junction between the crystal and the conducting metal wire.
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  198. 1:48 s/Kotelkinov/Kotelnikov/
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  199. 1:45 Kind of like a radar for light?
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  200. 0:55 Lower tolerances, not higher. They are less tolerant of variations from the spec, not more.
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  201. 4:18 This https://sistemaplastics.com/products/microwave/rice-steamer is what I use now. Nice and simple. Note the anti-splatter lid insert—helps keep the inside of your microwave clean!
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  202. 11:17 That was in the NTSC world. In the PAL world, we just had SP and LP. Tape speeds were slower on PAL VHS tapes, for some reason, so EP wasn’t considered necessary. We had 2- and 3-hour tapes, which could record double that in LP mode.
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  203. 2:52 “A minute”? HAH! Here in NZ, I would regularly set the end time 5 or 10 minutes after the scheduled end of the program. And heaven help you if there was any live sport on ...
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  204. We call it “hum”. What other word should we use?
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  205. 9:00 It’s all in the mind, you know.
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  206. Which MP3 encoder do you use? LAME seems to be the best.
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  207. On top of that, ground is often not at ground voltage. You can have these things called “ground loops”. Audio engineers know all about that. When you hear a hum coming through the speakers, when there’s not supposed to be any sound? That’s a ground loop.
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  208. Sigh He was so careful to keep emphasizing “band-limited”, and yet the ill-informed responses are so predictable ...
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  209. 5:01 100,000 times is also a common figure for sector rewritability on flash storage.
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  210. 21:38 I have a number of electronic appliances, here in my office and in my living room, with no power switches. Some are even plugged into multipoint adapters with no power switches.
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  211. Remember that audio CDs came out soon after the whole quadraphonic fad went bust. So I think they were concentrating primarily on delivering high-quality 2-channel stereo sound, because that’s what the market clearly wanted. CDs were designed for audio first, and general computer data second. Whereas with DVDs it was the other way round. Thus, it was easier to add new audio and video formats on DVDs, just by adding new file format options.
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  212. Surround sound is more realistic. I think the problem was that 4 channels wasn’t enough; that’s why you have 5.1, or even 7.1 or more nowadays.
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  213. What do you use to count them? A comptometer?
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  214. My previous car CD player couldn’t cope with zero pregaps. The current one can, though.
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  215. 2:07 That depends on which country you’re in. When I came here to NZ, I was surprised to discover that the digits 1-9 were arranged the opposite way, so dialling 1 produced 9 pulses, and dialling 9 produced just one. Correspondingly, whereas the emergency number in the Old Country was 999, here it is 111.
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  216. Yes, there is a point. Raising the amplitude of a quiet signal, or resampling a signal to a different sample rate -- digital numeric operations all have rounding errors.
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  217. No, it won’t be OK. You cannot magically recreate information that was never captured in the first place. And you cannot escape rounding errors. This is all basic Computing 101.
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  218. It matters when you do any kind of processing to the audio.
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  219. And what do you fill the extra bits with? Where do you magically create the information from, out of thin air?
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  220. OK, let’s use a simple example. Say you have captured a signal at 16 bits per sample. That gives you a noise floor of -90dB. Supposing the signal actually has a level of -45dB. You want to boost that to something closer to 0dB. But at the same time you end up boosting the noise floor to -45dB. How do you fix that?
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  221. 14:12 Are there any stats to back that up? Maybe ratio of deaths to electric shock events, or something.
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  222. 7:35 Well, the original photons destructively triggered chemical reactions in the film, which gave rise to other destructive reactions during development and duplication, and then a further set of reactions to print the slide. The end result being (you hope) that the final physical manifestation of those reactions will produce a similar effect on illuminating light as that which impinged on the original negative in the first place. Still think digital is so bad?
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  223.  @xNYCMarc  I have listened to lots of AM. I live in a country which had no FM for several years after I first got here. So don’t try to tell me how good or bad AM can be.
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  224.  @xNYCMarc  Maybe because all the AM you listen to is crap.
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  225.  @xNYCMarc  So, has DAB taken off in the US yet?
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  226. Remember he actually said “perfectly reconstruct original band-limited signal”. That’s the key point.
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  227. If the D/A converter is not band-limited, then it cannot be reconstructing the original signal, can it?
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  228. You did notice he was careful to keep emphasizing throughout that the signal was “band-limited”, did you not?
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  229. 14:33 Sony made good VHS machines, by the way. I have an SLV-757NC from about 1989. It does trick play, picture-in-picture, and has an editing jog shuttle. It normally keeps the tape threaded (Beta-style) for fast-wind, for fast switch to play mode, but slower fast-winding. There is an extra-fast-rewind button you can press which is supposed to unthread the tape, but I never measured any noticeable speed increase with it.
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  230. Vinyl fans are snobs. But audiocassettes ... are cool. ;)
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  231. Bravo! Good explanation. But to preempt the inevitable disbelievers, and paraphrase Michael “Brexit” Gove: “I think the audiophile public has had enough of experts”. Tell them to go back to their oxygen-free cabling ... maybe that lack of oxygen has gone to their heads ...
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  232. 13:50 Aaah ... “Enhanced CD” ... would that explain it? Prior to that point, CD-ROMs stored their data in what looked to an audio CD player as track 1. There would be a warning label somewhere telling you not to put the disc in an audio player. Or there might be discs with data in track 1 and regular audio in the remaining tracks, where the warning was just not to play track 1. I tried once, and it sounded like a chainsaw was cutting through my speakers ...
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  233. 13:34 I think that is an inevitable stage in the evolution of every large corporation. For example, I would say Microsoft is entering that stage now.
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  234. I just found out in the last day or two that the Hollywood Screen Actors’ Guild had a policy, at least as of the 1980s, banning the showing of bloopers, because it somehow undermined the dignity of their members.
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  235. It’s easy to do that kind of thing on a computer nowadays. By the way, the imperfections in typewriter output were sufficiently distinctive to particular typewriters to be almost like a fingerprint. This was well-known to people working in forensics back then.
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  236. 6:21 See, those numbers are denominators too, yet everybody understands that the larger denominators actually represent smaller numbers, unlike with f-stops.
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  237. 5:17 I thought the “I” stood for “Incremental” (as in it’s the changes that are important, not the levels).
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  238. 23:45 Just to add to the irony, many of the same populations that use these for illumination will have access to mobile phones by now. So they don’t have access to a reliable electrical grid for home lighting and other appliances, but they can still charge their phones via solar cells or other portable means. And they don’t have a landline phone system, they have jumped straight to wire-free telephony, and will very likely stay that way.
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  239. CIRC can correct a whole lot of errors -- a lot more than Hamming. But you need a lot of redundant bits to do it.
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  240. 6:53 You didn’t mention that, after the original C-60 tapes, there were also C-90 and C-120 cassettes using thinner tape to hold up to 1½ and 2 hours of audio respectively. While the C-90 tapes seemed to work OK, I had a fair bit of trouble with the handful of C-120s that I did buy. They were probably pushing the format a little too far.
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  241. Did anybody else buy those CD-R blanks that were made to look like vinyl records? I think they came initially from Verbatim, then a few other vendors copied the idea. You can’t get them any more.
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  242. 2:39 Hence that incredibly-useful invention known as the “steam engine”. Which James Watt did not invent.
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  243.  @DFX2KX  He didn’t have anything to do with the “steam engine” at all. What he did was improve Newcomen’s “atmospheric engine”. It wasn’t a “steam engine” because it ran off the pressure of the atmosphere, not of steam. It took a later bunch of Cornish mining engineers to figure out how to actually harness the power of steam pressure to create the “steam engine”.
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  244. 12:11 Ah, the good old flashing “12:00” from folks who didn’t know how to set up their VCRs. ;)
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  245. 0:21 And boy, was the Ipod fussy about the type of video it would play. Way back then, I implemented a system for a client for automatically generating videos in various formats (including for inclusion in DVD-Video, and playing on Ipod). Thank goodness for FFmpeg’s ability to convert anything to anything!
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  246. I have come across people insisting it did.
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  247. 10:06 But you would want the twin-fibre cable to be a crossover, where transmit at one end connects to receive at the other end and vice versa. Whereas the actual single-fibre TOSlink connector is the same at both ends (RCA connectors have that property too), and doesn’t prevent you from connecting an output to an output, or an input to an input. So basically there would be no compatibility with such a hypothetical twin-fibre connection anyway, and it would be pointless to try to incorporate any such into the design.
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  248. The effect of that is to lower the amplitude of the higher frequencies close to the Nyquist limit. The same thing happens with scanned digital images, because of the nonzero size of the pixel samples, and the cure for this is the well-known “unsharp mask” filter. The same kind of equalization filtering can be done to sound.
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  249. So what you are saying is that the response of the human ear is not linear, that it is subject to distortion.
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  250. Hearing aids have to do with sensitivity and frequency response.
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  251. Have you thought that it’s not just your ears, but also your mind -- i.e. a psychosomatic phenomenon? Something that you can only rule out by doing blind A-B tests.
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  252. HAH! I LAUGH at your puny notch! Myself, and thousands of heedless toddlers trying to jam sandwiches, biscuits and other squishy, non-notch-bearing treats into their parents’ VHS machines! Your engineering cleverness means NOTHING to them!
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  253. Re cylinders versus disks: history kind of repeated itself about half a century later with magnetic media, though the technological tradeoffs were slightly different. Magnetic drums (cylinders) were considered to be faster, since they tended to have a dedicated read/write head for each track, while disks usually had a single set of heads that had to move back and forth from one track to another. But the latter could pack more data into the same space, were cheaper to make, etc etc.
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  254. Very possibly. Though DAT was effectively sabotaged for consumer use anyway, since the record labels were still terrified over the prospect of a recordable medium which could make perfect copies. I think DAT machines still gave you the option of selecting a 44.1kHz sample rate if you wanted.
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  255. On more modern computer OSes we have the “compose” key. This lets us type multi-key mnemonics for all kinds of Unicode characters. For example, compose-lessthan-quote for an opening curly quote, like I did up there.
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  256.  @Kasiarzynka  I can type all that on a US keyboard (which is what we use in NZ), and more besides, all with the Compose key.
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  257. Iron is one of those elements that forms a range of different oxides. The one that predominantly makes up rust isn’t magnetic.
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  258. Because the binary digits of the number making up each sample are recorded and transmitted as signal pulses. Electrically, these can be voltage or current pulses. On magnetic media, they are pulses in the magnetic field. On optical media, the pattern of “pits” and “lands” induces pulses in the photodetection system. And so on.
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  259. 19:45 Hi to you, too.
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  260. 09:22 More likely 65,535. This is because they are signed twos-complement integers. Since the largest value is +32767, it makes sense to omit the smallest value -32768 and only go down to -32767 for symmetry. Otherwise your signal could end up with a DC component. Which, as far as sound is concerned, is not helpful.
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  261. Actually, broadcast NTSC was 30000/1001 frames per second. Though in SMPTE time code, this is rounded off to 29.97. (Yup, the time code for NTSC is actually inaccurate by about one part in a million.)
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  262. Yeah, the ideal reconstruction involves sinc functions, which have an infinite extent both before and after the peak, and only slowly fade away from that peak. So in order to be causal (not respond to a signal change before it happens!), it would require an infinite amount of buffer lag.
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  263. 3:25 “CDs-ROM” -- touché! Great for storing your multi-medium datum base!
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  264. Once the filter cutoff descends below the noise floor from other sources, that’s as good as zero, because you can never measure the difference.
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  265. 7:09 “Cycle the magnetron” ... there’s a dead giveaway that it’s not an inverter unit. There is one new technological innovation in microwaves since that time.
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  266. 9:54 OK. But I believe it does let you cook eggs without them exploding. (Not that I’ve tried...)
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  267. 09:38 wipes droplets out of eyes
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  268. I was thinking about the CO danger. With all the stink and irritation, that’s one factor you won’t be able to smell, or even notice until it’s too late.
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  269. It seems to happen with just about every audio-visual technology: after it becomes obsolete, some artist rediscovers the artifacts, that were deplored at the time, now seemingly add an endearing “retro” effect which becomes highly desirable.
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  270. Doesn’t that make it sound “digital”?
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  271. I rest my case.
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  272. 6:44 Maybe that’s why some people prefer a different style of colour picker from the Adobe one ...
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  273. 5:06 You are James Burke and I claim my £5.
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  274. Frequency-independent time delay happens with real-life sound all the time. Think of the difference between listening to a concert from the front seats as opposed to the back ones: every change in distance of 3m from the sound source corresponds to a difference in timing of 10ms. So really, digital sound is nothing special in regards to this.
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  275. 8:09 Actually the inverse matrix to that applied at the broadcast end.
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  276. 8:46 Did you just burn the entire maker movement? ;)
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  277. 4:31 Commonly (and unfortunately) abbreviated to just “ISO”. Hence “.iso” as the extension for CD image files using this filesystem format. (Sigh...)
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  278. And the award for most fascinating documentary about a toaster goes to ... (Could be worse. Could be this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec .)
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  279. In an FM stereo broadcast, the baseband signal is mono, and the subcarrier carrying the stereo difference signal is AM-encoded. FM itself is quite resistant to noise, but AM is not. I have an FM stereo tuner which has a button to reduce the noise with weak signals by, I think, reducing the amplitude of the stereo difference signal. So you lose some stereo separation in the process.
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  280. 4:53 The Prdoosrz!
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  281.  @Tugun87  Nice to know the god of Israel was LGBTQ-friendly, at any rate ...
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  282.  @Tugun87  Strange, I don’t recall that being among the Ten Commandments. Which, incidentally, didn’t have anything bad to say about injustices like slavery.
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  283.  @Tugun87  Here’s a hint: the first man and woman in the garden of Eden were both called “Adam” http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/gen/trivia/call.html
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  284. 2:38 I remember looking at the back of a Siemens set around the mid-1970s. I could see about two dozen separate little adjustment knobs, each with its little graphic indicating its effect on the three electron beams. What happened to all those adjustments? By the time I bought a new Sony Trinitron set as a gainfully-employed adult in the late 1980s, the need for all of that had gone away.
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  285. I loved NICAM stereo. Your TV signal could go completely to crap, and the NICAM would be just about the last thing to cut out -- after the TV picture had become just about unwatchable.
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  286. Here in NZ, in the hospital wards, the electrical outlets are of two types. Some of them are bright red--those are the ones with RCD protection, for use with hospital medical equipment only. The ordinary ones can be used by patients for their electronic devices.
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  287. 1:06 It is not a silly word! It just takes practice to say: “Mebibyte! Bemibyte! Mebebibyte!” Oh, bugger ...
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  288. How about destroying unused pages on notepads? Because they can bear impressions of what was written on the sheets over them.
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  289. 15:26 I think the longevity is very highly dependent on the brand. I soon learned to stick to good brands, like Sony, Verbatim and TDK.
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  290. 09:40 You could have any number of 0s in a row. Or any number of 1s in a row.
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  291. Look at the part of the video I’m referring to.
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  292. 0:55 I wrote a Python script to address envelopes years ago. Checking that Git repo, the first version was in 2016, last revision from early 2021. Only takes a minute or two when I need to use it, which is maybe once every month or two.
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  293. 4:30 “Louder” = “amplification’. And here is where “electricity” becomes “electronics”. Because electronics is concerned with maintaining the signal information being transmitted (and operations on it like amplification, filtering etc), and less with maintaining the particular values of voltage, current etc being used to transmit it.
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  294. Which gets the question: why were VCRs not made available that would bypass Macrovision? The reason is, not only did Macrovision patent their copy-protection scheme, but they also tried to think up all the ways to bypass it, and patent those too. So anybody who wanted to make a VCR that was impervious to the copy block could also be sued for patent infringement.
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  295. 8:25 True. Particularly since I never knew that, in spite of being surrounded by these devices since I were a lad back in the Old Country. ;)
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