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

  1. 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.
    1
  2. 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!
    1
  3. 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.
    1
  4. 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.
    1
  5. 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.
    1
  6.  @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.
    1
  7. Iron is one of those elements that forms a range of different oxides. The one that predominantly makes up rust isn’t magnetic.
    1
  8. 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.
    1
  9. 19:45 Hi to you, too.
    1
  10. 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.
    1
  11. 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.)
    1
  12. 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.
    1
  13. 3:25 “CDs-ROM” -- touché! Great for storing your multi-medium datum base!
    1
  14. 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.
    1
  15. 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.
    1
  16. 9:54 OK. But I believe it does let you cook eggs without them exploding. (Not that I’ve tried...)
    1
  17. 09:38 wipes droplets out of eyes
    1
  18. 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.
    1
  19. 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.
    1
  20. Doesn’t that make it sound “digital”?
    1
  21. I rest my case.
    1
  22. 6:44 Maybe that’s why some people prefer a different style of colour picker from the Adobe one ...
    1
  23. 5:06 You are James Burke and I claim my £5.
    1
  24. 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.
    1
  25. 8:09 Actually the inverse matrix to that applied at the broadcast end.
    1
  26. 8:46 Did you just burn the entire maker movement? ;)
    1
  27. 4:31 Commonly (and unfortunately) abbreviated to just “ISO”. Hence “.iso” as the extension for CD image files using this filesystem format. (Sigh...)
    1
  28. 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 .)
    1
  29. 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.
    1
  30. 4:53 The Prdoosrz!
    1
  31.  @Tugun87  Nice to know the god of Israel was LGBTQ-friendly, at any rate ...
    1
  32.  @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.
    1
  33.  @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
    1
  34. 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.
    1
  35. 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.
    1
  36. 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.
    1
  37. 1:06 It is not a silly word! It just takes practice to say: “Mebibyte! Bemibyte! Mebebibyte!” Oh, bugger ...
    1
  38. How about destroying unused pages on notepads? Because they can bear impressions of what was written on the sheets over them.
    1
  39. 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.
    1
  40. 09:40 You could have any number of 0s in a row. Or any number of 1s in a row.
    1
  41. Look at the part of the video I’m referring to.
    1
  42. 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.
    1
  43. 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.
    1
  44. 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.
    1
  45. 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. ;)
    1