Comments by "ZGryphon" (@ZGryphon) on "Ringway Manchester" channel.

  1. About 20 years ago I worked at a (now sadly defunct) local newspaper here in the rural USA. We had a scanner in the office that was always listening for the local emergency services, for obvious reasons, and occasionally someone would address us directly. Usually it was the fire department dispatcher, casually letting us know that the current call was for equipment testing or something and we shouldn't get too excited. :)
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  2. Maybe he was a rabbit leading an army of rats. Wouldn't be the first time a dictator didn't come from the nation he was leading to war...
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  3. During the playback of the DFD21 error, I keep picturing some hapless 18-year-old Bundeswehr conscript, left alone in the control booth while his superior goes to the john, stabbing frantically at buttons and trying everything he can think of in a steadily rising panic while the computer voice lady goes completely off the rails and the tone generator has a total meltdown. In my head, it has the same comedic energy as the scene in Modern Times where Charlie Chaplin can't keep up with the pace of the assembly line.
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  4. The chronic failure to understand the inverse-square law on top of that is just a fun bonus. :)
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  5. When I was a kid, I had a family friend who went to what was then North Texas State University. He worked for a while at the university's campus radio station, KNTU. While he was there, the university's name changed to "University of North Texas", and there was a running joke for a while about whether the powers that be would unthinkingly try to adjust the station's call letters to reflect the new name. (They didn't. It's still KNTU.)
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  6. That guy who always yells about how he's endangering national security will be on the case.
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  7.  @colorsofsound4782  That East German one with the worn-out tape of the church bells would do it for me. At night while keyed up from trying to do crimes already? Noooo thank you!
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  8. AT&T had a similar building in downtown Worcester, MA when I was in college there in the early '90s. (I assume the building is still there, but I don't know who owns it nowadays.) Huge, windowless, sinister, out of place with everything around it. In honor of the company's logo at the time, we all called it the Death Star.
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  9.  @scratchpad7954  I did say it was a running joke. I don't think anyone there was dim enough to think there was ever a genuine possibility of it happening. :)
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  10. I love how this thing was already '80s cyberpunk levels of sinister, and yet people still made up physically impossible things to claim it could do to make it more sinister.
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  11. I remember that happening when I used to visit my grandparents in the far north of Maine as a kid; one of the four TV stations they could pick up on VHF was CHSJ-TV Saint John, which had an... uneasy relationship with the CBC in those days. It often seemed as though either the station or the network couldn't hit a time slot in the butt with a bass fiddle.
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  12. When I was in high school, my old Tandy PC's built-in speaker occasionally used to pick up the local AM station, the transmitter of which was on a hill not far from my house. I first noticed it one quiet Saturday afternoon when no one else was home, and it creeped me out until I recognized the rhythms of the faint voice I was hearing and realized it was the play-by-play of a baseball game. Then it creeped me out even more. Baseball ghosts are the worst kind. :)
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  13. My parents took me to that film when I was just little, thinking it was a lighthearted comedy about teenage hacker hijinks. That opening scene haunted me for... some time. "Sir, we are at launch, TURN YOUR KEY"
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  14. "What was the point of going to Portugal to pick up this signal?" commenters ask. Clearly, the point was to demonstrate to other agents that yes, don't worry, you can go on holiday to Portugal and still pick up your instructions from the Center. :)
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  15. "Meanwhile, my handle is spelled 'eadweard', but is pronounced 'Throat-Warbler Mangrove'."
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  16.  @RingwayManchester  That's a familiar tune! I read recently that when the KGB supplied arms to the IRA back in the '70s, they went to great lengths to ensure that even the gun oil used on them and the cloth they were wrapped in (to say nothing of the guns themselves) were sourced from West Germany, so that if the shipments were intercepted, the Soviet government could not only deny responsibility, but double down and be the first to be shocked, shocked that Bonn was backing the Irish separatist movement. The more things change, etc.
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  17. I might actually resubscribe to watch The Lincolnshire Poacher. At least the first season, before they killed off all the characters I liked and changed everything around in the finale to be Edgy and Unexpected.
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  18. Here in my hometown in the US, there was a similar controversy a couple of years ago over the local power company swapping people's old meters for a new model that has wireless communication capabilities. All they do is transmit their findings to a receiver, so that the meter readers can just drive around polling meters from their van instead of having to get out and walk around, entering people's yards, to read each meter in person. For whatever reason, someone decided that this was one radio source too many and launched an extensive, somewhat-better-spelled leaflet campaign against the power company. They weren't even addressing the real, if somewhat niche, privacy concerns (oh no! Bad Actors might hack my "smart meter" and... uh... find out how much electricity I use, I guess)--just blowing a huge cloud of FUD about RF exposure.
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  19. "I'll never call golf a dull game again."
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  20.  @Blackjack701AD  A B-25 did hit the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945, but it was lost in fog en route from Massachusetts to Newark, not trying to dock somehow with the top of the building. (B-25s can't dock with buildings, since, not being airships, they can't hover.)
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  21.  @hippiusteenius  "Comrade, you have been selected for a critical state security assignment..."
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  22. It'd be funny if the "alarm sound" ones were literally just the soundtrack for a ridiculously inefficient alarm system that's designed to tune a loudspeaker to that frequency if the alarm goes off rather than having an annunciator of its own. Has to be running all the time, since you never know when the alarm might go off! :)
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  23. That's the former consumer electronics division, which is now a completely unrelated company with the same name (Motorola Mobility). It's kind of like how the Rolls-Royce that makes cars no longer has anything to do with the ones that makes jet engines. The Motorola that makes public safety comms equipment (Motorola Solutions) is still an American company, for the moment.
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  24. There's a modem-encoded text file included as one of the audio tracks on Information Society's 1992 album Peace and Love, Inc. under the title "300BPS N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode or ASCII Download)", which, conveniently, is also the instructions for how to decode it. It's a short story about some weird stuff that supposedly happened to the band in Brazil.
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  25. "It's supposed to be Clair de Lune..."
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  26. Picturing some Cuban spy sweating profusely and struggling to write down the message fast enough, wondering why on Earth the DGI hired a damn auctioneer to read the numbers.
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  27. Heh, whereas my instinctive reaction when I see those old LP antennae in the pics in this video isn't to find them spooky or sinister, it's to think of VHF TV from when I was little. In my hometown, everybody's house had an antenna that looked very much like that (but smaller) back in the day. It was a mark of distinction in my elementary-school days when your parents took theirs down--it meant you got cable. :)
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  28. This video made me feel very old, mostly because I don't know what a single one of those musical genres is, except maybe techno. :)
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  29. "I'll bet these cops have got SCMODS." "... 'SCMODS'?" "State-County-Municipal Offender Data System."
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  30. Like the poet said, any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
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  31. Another possibility is that whoever generated the recordings had a real Bell System switching computer set up in a "sandbox" environment, in which they had full administrative control and could make it "say" whatever they wanted, within the limits of its capabilities. That would have required a pretty well-funded operation--those machines were not cheap--but technologically speaking, it would've been the easiest, least risky way of doing it. The actual voice sounds very authentic to me.
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  32. And now we know the real reason Radio Shack was driven out of business! #TinfoilHatModeEngaged
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  33. Ah, OK, I was puzzled by that. "Black gang" is also sailor slang for the engine room crew (dating back to when they shoveled coal), but the phrasing didn't make sense, since surely that type of black gang would have been aboard already.
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  34. Have you seen 28 Days Later ? Basically that.
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  35. Based on the very distinctive tones, it seems clear that the Three-Note Oddity was operated by the American Telephone & Telegraph Corporation.
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  36. Oh hey, I didn't know the UK had that "let's blow through the biggest pile of venture capital we can swing as fast as humanly possible and leave absolutely everybody below the executive suite in the lurch" phase too. I ended up working for at least three such companies in the US in that era. So many worthless stock options...
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  37. Meanwhile, the girl you meet on the Internet is probably an SVR agent. Six of one...
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  38. The one pictured at 3:05 looks weirdly residential, like some kind of abandoned farmhouse with a bizarrely arranged fence.
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  39. Mathematically impossible if the pads really are only used once. (See also: Project VENONA)
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  40. Gotta have something to fall back on after the Reticulans shoot down all the satellites. You have to figure it'll be the first thing they do.
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  41. Local Pronunciation Corner: Here in Maine, Winter Harbor is pronounced "winnahaaba". ;)
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  42. I guess they kept calling the rising triple tone "The Squeaky Wheel" because "Bad Day in the Cardiac Ward" is too many syllables.
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  43. That hypothetical modern ten-year-old's formative experience will be in software rather than hardware, that's all. It's different, but not necessarily less valid.
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  44. As a friend of mine in college used to say, "Some people, you know, they just will not do."
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  45. In the little town in the woods where I live in the US, the local cell providers give less than one-tenth of one crap whether we think their tower is an eyesore. They just threw it up on a ridge, blatantly obvious from everywhere in town, and to hell with your forest views; just be grateful you have service, you bunch of hillbillies. That'll be a hundred bucks a month, and be quick about it.
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  46. Thanks, I hate it! (... the sound, not the video. The video's great. :)
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  47. It rends my soul on a level younger people won't understand for decades to see the phrase "old classic car from the early 1980s." (My first car was a 1984 Oldsmobile. :)
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  48. Wow. It really is a wonderful toy.
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  49. Around where I live, we don't have 5G towers yet, so the thing people have latched onto to get paranoid about instead is the "smart meters" the electric utility has been going around putting on subscribers' houses. These have an RF transmitter of some kind in them that the meter readers can ping from a distance so they don't have to get out of their vehicles to check them, enormously simplifying their working day, and for a while there I was getting about a leaflet a week in my mailbox from some Concerned Citizens' Organization that was absolutely convinced these things were going to give everyone cancer within a month (while controlling our minds on behalf of the Deep State, naturally).
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  50.  @glennk2973  Not that kind of smart meter. The type I'm talking about is still the usual thing on the outside of the house, it just reports its findings to the meter readers by RF so they don't have to physically enter the yard and walk up to the house to read it.
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