Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Technology Connections" channel.

  1. Great video! I think the brake lights should activate based on g-forces nowadays. For example, always lit brakelight when deceleration is 0.1 g or more, or the speed is less than 3 km/h. Measuring deceleration is better than monitoring pedal input because it will lit the brake lights correctly in case of failures, too. Say the wheel bearing goes bad and the car rapidly slows down: brake light automatically lits if the deceleration is rapid enough. And I truly meant that the limit should be 0.1 g. It's better to lit the brake light a bit too soon than too late and 0.1 g is already far enough from stable movement that it shouldn't happen accidentally. 20:00 I really cannot understand the need for "operator to intentionally slow down". The brake lights is to signal other people about the fact of slowing down not to advertise intentions.
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  2. The important things about the encoding used to press stereo LPs is that the sideways movement has the highest bandwidth so it makes perfect sense to use that for the average signal between the channels. The same idea is used in digital audio compression, for example MP3 files support "joint stereo" encoding where one of the channels is encoded as delta to the main channel. Because real world stereo music typically has very similar audio on both channels, encoding one channel as difference to the another saves a lot of bandwidth.
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  3. I was actually a bit disappointed that you didn't include any reference to general relativity and impossibity to perfectly sync anything in different locations. Other than that, great video.
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  4. Pro tip: wrap a beach towel around the output hose. It will help getting the warm outside the apartment. Another tip: try to avoid getting any direct sunshine in through the windows; even a narrow slice of direct sunshine will include lots of infrared radiation which means more heat.
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  5. Cardboard for masking and tinted translucent car paint sounds like a pretty good solution. Anything meant for car painting is sure to be UV tolerant.
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  6. I live in Finland and we purchased the highest performance induction stove we could find and it still has only 3.5 kW emitters. (It has max power consumption of 10.9 kW so if you try to run all 4 emitters at the same time, each gets only about 2.7 kW per emitter. It has 3x400V 16A connection to the grid so the grid connection would allow higher power if the stove supported it.) That's good enough that we didn't get a new electric kettle when the heating element failed in the last one (that was running at 3.2 kW if I remember correctly). I often boil just 2 dl of water in a small pot which obviously boils pretty fast with 3.5 kW. Pro tip: if you have electric kettle, you can use it to boil about half the water you need for cooking. That way you can use your stove to boil some of the water and the kettle to boil the rest and you can then pour the water from the kettle to your cooking.
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  7.  @SirBlastalot  Modern cars are supposed to flash the brake lights if heavy deceleration is applied. I think it would make sense to flash the lights according to ABS activation because that would clearly communicate how close to the maximal friction the vehicle in front of you is breaking.
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  8. The biggest source of planned obsolescence is closed source software in the device that cannot be upgraded and is no longer safe to use when everything is now smart/vulnerable and connected to internet.
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  9. Get one, you'll be much happier with. The only reason to not get a dishwasher is that you don't own/have an access to a laundry washing machine and you cannot affort both - then by all means get a laundry washing machine first. And when you have both dishwasher and washing machines, next thing you should try to acquire is high power induction stove. Those are life-changing for cooking. (However, I've been told that the grid is poor enough in the USA that you cannot get high power induction stoves there. Our induction stove max input power is 10.9 kW.)
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  10. The interesting thing is how different heat pumps work below -15 °C. Some higher quality pumps using R32 refridgerant have COP around 2.0 even at -30 °C which makes them only a bit less effective than burning gas locally but how many days per year do you have at -30 °C? If it's warmer, the heat pump wins every time. We live in Finland and have latest gen split unit heat pump pumping heat into the house and we also have exhaust air heat pump that improves efficiency of the air ventilation (the efficiency of air ventilation gets above 100% when outside temperature is above 3-5 °C because extra heat is transferred to hot water). If you want heat pumps that work in cold climate, look for models intended for Nordic Countries. And check the local legislation for installation – here in Finland it's illegal to install these things by yourself unless you are a certified installer.
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  11.  @richjhart  Type C plug (CEE 7/17) is missing the grounding which makes it illegal to use for many purposes. The other type C plug (CEE 7/16) is more commonly known as Europlug and it, too, is missing the grounding. In addition, CEE 7/17 has max rating of 2.5 A which prevents its use for any high power applications. (Yes, there are two Type C plugs which have totally different designs but both are missing grounding. You should use Type E or Type F plugs only for safety but those do not fit all outlets in Europe.)
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  12. Yet another case of patents benefiting the society, right?
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  13. I remember seeing some research done that suggests that human eye considers more reddish light as "white" when the lux level goes down. And the same works for higher light levels. That's why 6500K daylight doesn't feel blueish but if you had 6500K 3W white led bulb, it would look light blue instead of white. As such, it makes perfect sense to have the color temperature go towards 2000K when the light is dimmed. That said, it appears to me tht most people cannot even notice the difference between 2700K and 4000K lights, nevermind the horrible CRI 80 Ra color reproduction. Unfortunately, I have good color vision and I cannot stand low quality lights. As a result, I still keep using actual halogen lights and hoping for good enough led lights in the future. I would want each and every bulb box to contain accurate spectral distribution graph so that I could easily avoid wasting my money on poor quality lighting. The closest to acceptable LED lights for my eyes have been those filament LED bulbs with very heavy phosphor coating which I guess generates smoother spectral distribution. For the same reason, I cannot stand those LED lights with fullyadjustable color because the spectral distribution is typically so spikey resulting in so poor color reproduction that even the skin of my own hands look weird.
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  14. 27:30 Europeans watching this diagram are just wondering why didn't you use a single 3x400V connector (IEC 60309-2 Red 3P+N+E, 6h) for all high current needs? That allows minimum of 3 separate 400V 16A phases allowing for minimum of 19.2 kW power transfer using a connector that has been widely in use here in Europe for multiple decades already. And many of those connectors already have IP67 or IP69 ratings so there wouldn't need much restrictions for the operating environment.
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  15. 8:00 Kelvin "degrees". I'm sure you did that just for extra comments. Here's one more.
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  16. 46:20 If you get one of these machines, at least get some high quality soldering iron and good flux, not something shown a couple seconds later in this video. Minimum acceptable hardware is TS-100.
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  17.  @smilerjerg  I drive manual, too, and I sometimes blink the brake lights manually even when the actual braking is engine braking only.
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  18. How much air do you exchange for your house/apartment? Here in Finland, the minimum required air exhange is 100% of the volume of the the house/apartment per 2 hours. As a result, when it gets very hot outside, you have to pump that hot air inside the house/apartment.
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  19. I think some older Epson printer+scanner combinations had similar feature.
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  20. Great video! I'd like to see a future video about different fully mechanical typewriter mechanisms.
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  21. I have to say that I was a bit disappointed that you used only 100% efficient heater. Surely there would have been a way to use a heat pump, right?
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  22. Even with all the wires and relays visible, imagine how hard it would be to figure this all out without schematics. Now imagine how hard it's to reverse engineer schematics for modern electronics – the information you need to repair modern electronics when they fail and manufacturer witholds the information because your country doesn't have right to repair legislation to force disclosure of schematics.
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  23. Big humidifiers can be found at stores that sell musical instruments. Many wooden instruments are very sensitive to too low humidity and humidifiers are used to fix the problem. I would guess that the hardware store has cheaper prices for the same stuff if the same product is available in both sources.
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  24. 21:24 Thanks for mentioning the perfume thing! Some people are nearly allergic to heavy perfume and that would be absolutely nope for them.
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  25. About that public service announcement: in addition, in case you live in a cold country that has actual winters, the incandescent light bulbs can also melt the snow from your lights unlike any LED lights. The situation where you want to have the best visibility is in the middle of night during snow storm and you definitely don't want any led lights in the rear for those cases.
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  26. Linus Tech Tips channel made a video in 2023 about an actual monitor with e-ink tech. Just search for the video titled as follows: This is the WORST Monitor Ever...ON PURPOSE! - Dasung PaperlikeU E-Ink Monitor
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  27. They could just call it "incorrect colors mode" so that people wouldn't expect too much from it.
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  28. Interesting device which I have totally missed even though I've been interested in various display technologies for a long time.
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  29. If you swapped the factory included fan to high quality one, you could get a small nearly silent minifridge. Granted the total heat transfer performance is really low and energy consumption is high. If you only need to keep stuff cool instead of cooling down hot stuff, and the peltier minifridge actually had proper insulation (spoiler alert, the cheap stuff doesn't) it could be an acceptable solution, especially with a thermostat. If somebody could create a peltier element with higher efficiency (e.g. 50% efficient meaning it would need 20W to cool down 10W) then using a peltier element based systems would make a lot more sense.
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  30. 7:00 Volkswagen solved the calibration problem even more clear: require first swipe after turning on the ignition to be initiated by the driver. This avoids ever accidentally turning on the wipers automatically and avoids swiping the windscreen if the owner knows the wipers are bad or there's sand dust on the windscreen.
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  31. I somewhat understand why modern manufacturers do not copy this automatic lowering and raising technology but they should at least copy the radiation based thermostat. That makes a lot of sense and allows toasting frozen leafs of bread, too, without any adjustments by the user. And to make the radioation based control with modern stuff, all you need is a hole for the radiation to hit the silicon based heat sensor. Add a small display to select the user requested surface temperature (with C, F or K scale) and you're done. (Though I'd prefer the system totally losing power when the power is off, though.) I'd personally prefer the manual lever activation with the magnet but add a dampener element to get rid of the noise.
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  32. Combination of superb collab and a piece of interesting technology.
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  33. A scandinavian manufacturer (Nibe) which manufactures water heaters, exhaust air heat pumps and similar stuff has computer controlled water heaters which run logic to heat the water only once per 2 weeks above 55 degrees celcius. (Of course, the cycle time is adjustable but that's the default if I remember correctly.) That's enough to kill any bacteria as long as your incoming water source is pure enough. At all other times, keeping the water a bit cooler will reduce energy usage. The hot water storage in our unit has 4 temperature sensors which monitor the amount of hot water.
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  34. Superb video! I'm already looking forward for second part. Though, I'm already hoping that this will turn into 5 episode trilogy.
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  35. 12:31 I guess the time " 420 69 " wasn't by accident here.
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  36. 24:20 I find it surprising that the button on the handle doesn't break the 12V control wire which would result in wall charger to cut the power no matter what the car/heater does with the load. Update: Oh... you explained this later in the video. The cause is that the contactor in the wall "charger" is low enough quality that it cannot be used to cut the power under load without damage. It this configuration is used to allow even cheaper wall "chargers".
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  37. Pro tip: YouTube video goes frame-by-frame with comma and period keys with some keyboard layouts when the video is paused. For some other layouts, the correct keys are "<" and ">".
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  38. 8:30 To be accurate, half of the drivers are worse than a median driver, not an average driver.
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  39.  @whuzzzup  Can you name some well known manufacturers that have 3.7 kW induction emitters (/burners)? Our stove is from year 2015 and at that time 3.5 kW was the best market had available for non-industrial design.
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  40. Great project! I think you should have installed the heater in orientation where the fan blows hot air towards the floor. This would circulate the cool air in the room faster and increase heat transfer from the heater to the room because hot air will raise towards the ceiling anyway so you should focus on getting warm air close to floor.
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  41. I don't know how much did you pay for those logging temperature probes but open source "Ruuvitag" would have been a nice option here. The idea is to run single (pretty high quality) Bosch sensor with a small battery and output the data as Bluetooth LE signal. You put a smartphone (or some other compatible device) nearby and use that to log as many sensors as you have. The con side of this setup is that you need additional device for logging, the pro side is that you can keep the logging side in room temperature and monitor all the probes wirelessly. As an additional bonus, you can change the software in the sensor devices to do other stuff that hobbyists have figured out. That said, it seems that the price of Ruuvitag has nearly doubled since it was originally published so it's starting to get too expensive.
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  42. Interesting product, and I agree this "new" design is superior! It seems that it's poorly available. I cannot find it any common shops here in Finland. Every place just sells the old style variant with two handles (obviously covered with lots of plastic to make it more "modern"). That said, Amazon seems to be show many variants when I search for "Safe Cut Can Opener".
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  43. 9:00 Different manufacturers have different ideas how to park wipers in high position. For VW cars, you have to turn off the engine and take off the key and within ~3 second activate the wipers.
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  44. I think all new houses should be built to be fully electric. And 100 A seems plenty unless you can get really cheap service with higher max current.
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  45. As a comparision, here in Finland pretty much all single family houses have 3 phase 230 V service (nominally "240 V" but intentionally run at exactly 230 V due historical reasons). And in addition to your usual circuit breakers building code requires all new wall sockets to have fault detection (50 mA leakage to ground will trip the circuit). The only exception is wall sockets designed for single use only for devices that are not moved (e.g. freeze, refridgerator and other devices you really want to keep powered all the time) where fault detection is not required. And the voltage between 3 phases is around 400 V. Most homes have service connection through three 35 A fuses that means max is 3*35A*400V = 42 kW in total. That's enough to run 10 kW stove, heat water and the house and all the electronics in the whole house.
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  46. Great research! I've been saying for a long time that I want smart fridge but not "smart as in WLAN connection and web browser" but "smart as in it optimizes second derivative of the temperature inside the fridge".
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  47. 9:27 The ultrasound humidifiers cause exactly the same power usage as the boiling water thingy - the evaporation takes the same amount of energy per 1 g of water no matter how you convert the water from dropplet to gas. In case of ultrasound humidifier the energy is taken from your house heating system. Granted, it might have better COP than 1.0 that electric heater in water can do. If you need to heat your house anyway and you need to use humidifier, the boiling versions are least bad option because it causes least issues with lime stains and avoids mold and algae inside the humidifier.
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  48. If you used Oklab color space, your color wheel would show constant brightness when you rotate the hue. Even the cyan and blue would appear to have constant brightness unlike in sRGB or many other commonly used colorspaces.
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  49. This is basically mechanical PWM controller. And I was thinking our induction stove had bad design then its PWM cycle appears to be around 3 seconds. The sound makes me think it's using relay with an actual electromagnet instead of bi-metal mechnical part, though. Actual induction switching is obviously solid state relay so I have hard time understanding why there's additional relay but maybe it's some kind of failsafe? And yes, our induction stove most definitely has actual knobs instead of touch UI. I still have to use the touch UI with one press to activate the "boost" option that increases the max power but if I'm happy without using the boost option, the real rotating knobs are enough for everything.
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  50. As a Finn, our outlets are super-safe compared to any option you can have in the US. Look for images of grounded CEE 7/3 outlets with protective shutters and CEE 7/7 plugs for details.
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