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

  1. It's a shame this wasn't invented by Pioneer. They'd have figured out a way to make it play Laserdiscs, too. :)
    4400
  2. My microwave is designed to thwart the one-second-left method by making a louder noise when interrupted than when it reaches the end of the cycle normally. Nice job, Panasonic!
    2600
  3. I have a couple of light switches in my house that have those little neon lamps in them. The neon's on when the switch is off, so you can find the switch in the dark. Pretty neat.
    523
  4. Ah, brake cleaner, or as my father the hobbyist mechanic calls it, "cut finding spray". The subject of this video brings back fond memories from my misspent youth. I worked in an ISP network ops center where we had a lava lamp (to pass the time on the overnight shift, I guess). Once at the weekly NOC staff meeting, the manager chewed us out for misusing severity zero in the trouble ticketing system. Severity zero was for the worst problems, real future-of-the-company's-at-stake stuff, and someone used it for something that wasn't, causing the ticket system to page the manager at home in the middle of the night for what he didn't consider a good enough reason. That night about 10:30, the bulb in the ops room lava lamp burned out, so I performed the required lockout/tagout procedures for failed electrical equipment, opened a severity zero ticket for it (complete with all the troubleshooting steps and a recommended course of action, which was for senior personnel to get a purchase order and buy a new bulb at OfficeMax), then escalated it to the manager for good measure. The next afternoon when I got in, the lava lamp was fixed and the ticket was marked, "Repaired per recommendation," and closed by the manager. He never said a word to me about it. :)
    481
  5. When I was a kid in the late '70s, my parents still had one string, ancient even then, of C9s that were painted instead of made from tinted glass. They got even hotter than the tinted-glass kind. Like, lose-your-fingerprints hot. That was also back in the days when Christmas lights were wired in series, so when one bulb burned out, they all went out, making finding the dead one an incredibly tiresome process. Luckily, I had a nightlight that used the same size bulb, which my father would commandeer as a bulb tester. Ah, nostalgia. In retrospect, it's really kind of amazing how terrible those old light sets were. Between that and pre-polarization appliance plugs, it's a wonder anyone survived the 1960s.
    397
  6. On the plus side, the thorium mantles can take pride in being one of the few products on the market today for which the California Proposition 65 warning is actually justified. (As oppose to, say, the small brass-faced hammer I bought a while back. I guess brass could be known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm, if you ground it up and snorted it or something?)
    179
  7.  @Simoneister  I'll give him a pass on that one, because he clarified that it was a pair of pairs, which is just the miracle of buying two of two of them. The odd number is harder to forgive. ;)
    168
  8. I miss the dishwasher that was installed in my house when I moved in. It was from 1963, had a door like a bank vault, sounded like an entire army group mobilizing through the kitchen, and would reduce any dish to complete cleanliness in 45 minutes, tops. It was a sad, sad day when it finally stopped working and had to be replaced by a modern machine that is much quieter, but takes like five hours. (Probably isn't going to last 50 years, either.)
    166
  9. Data point: In the northern half of Maine where I live, we don't have a natural gas pipeline network, so most of us are burning No. 2 fuel oil delivered by truck, either in forced air systems or, as in my 100-year-old house, boiler-radiator systems. A few avant-garde types (like my father) are using propane out of cylinders instead, like you, and of course there are the holdouts who still burn wood, and those pellet stove wackos, but fuel oil is still by far the most common choice in these parts. Hot water systems are still pretty common as well, although that's at least partly because central air is pretty uncommon in private homes. It's only hot enough to need AC for about six weeks a year, anyway.
    105
  10. And now you can write it off as a business expense! Clever. :)
    89
  11. Also needs to go away: the way GM vehicles put their reverse lights on when they aren't in reverse (or even running), but the owner did something with the remote power door locks.
    88
  12.  @deusexaethera  Real men sound like they have a pretty unhealthy lifestyle.
    82
  13. So, at first, I wanted to call this device The Bowdlerizer, but then I decided that, in honor of the era it comes from, it should be dubbed the PearlClutcher 2000. (The modern HD version is, of course, the Pearlclutcher 5000, because camelcase is no longer "in", and for some reason marketers skipped right past the 4th and 5th millennia after "2000" ceased to be futuristic.) My favorite bit of TV censoring from that era has to be from the network broadcast edit of On Golden Pond, in which Jane Fonda's character's declaration that "my father is a goddamned poop" has the "god" muted out, but not the "damned". It's doubly funny because "poop" is in the original line, not a redub!
    79
  14. Please accept these five (5) points for your employment of the critically underused word "crossbuck".
    78
  15. In the section about the weasely package wording, I noticed that if you keep reading, the claim on the package about being the best product goes on to explain that it's the best at one very specific part of the process, which would be an entirely unsatisfactory outcome if it was the only thing that happened. Marketing!
    67
  16. Right? I'm like a damn vampire over here, constantly feeling compelled to pause and count them.
    67
  17. I'll see your daisy wheel failure and raise you an exploding chain printer. Boy howdy, there was a reason those things were enclosed in those armored housings. :)
    65
  18.  @frother  Eh, he had it coming, bitching out the whole crew for one guy's honest mistake.
    59
  19. As a kid, I remember being told in health class that the reflex to close your eyes when you sneeze is there because if you didn't, your eyeballs would pop out. Which is a hell of a thing to drop on a ten-year-old with seasonal allergies.
    54
  20.  @amdphone2750  It's also not as prone to corrosion as the usual plas... oh.
    52
  21. Agreed, the "Ove" Glove is brilliant. The rare steam-resistant version even more so!
    46
  22. I used to have one of these in my living room that would turn on spontaneously whenever I did a load of laundry. Something in the power fluctuation the washing machine caused when it switched cycles was enough to trip the lamp in a whole different room, which probably tells us something about how well my house is wired.
    43
  23. On the one hand, those Circline lamps remind me of the house my grandparents had when I was a kid, because when they built that house in the late '60s, they lit the whole place with them, having been convinced by some salesman at the building supply place that they were The Future. On the other hand, spending time in that house did feel a little like being in the black-and-white part of The Wizard of Oz, because the whole place was lit with Circline lamps. :)
    40
  24.  @haroldbeauchamp3770  Whether it has a purpose is not relevant to the larger matter of it being stupid. This is often true of things automotive designers do. :)
    36
  25. Apparently those folks didn't realize that the problem wasn't CFL technology, it was that motels almost invariably use the cheapest, crappiest examples of whatever lighting technology they have.
    33
  26. I remember seeing a BBC documentary about utility usage in the UK, some years ago, which showed the havoc that happened (and probably still happens) in England's electrical grid control center every weekday. At... I forget the exact time, six or seven in the evening, a certain popular TV show ends, at which point everyone who was watching it simultaneously switches on their electric kettle. Power dispatchers sitting at their consoles watching the show themselves, so they know the exact moment the credits start rolling and all hell breaks loose. Pumped storage plants being dumped in France to help meet the demand spike in the West Country. Complete pandemonium for five or ten minutes, every weekday at 5:59 PM or whenever it is, and then by ten past six or so it's all over and everything's working normally again. Household HVAC trends on a slightly less precise timetable, admittedly, but that's what the pattern reminded me of. In terms of lowering overall demand, I think it's time we, as a society, explored the possibility of using usage patterns to identify digital-currency mines and then launching cruise missiles at them. That option should be fully tested before ordinary citizens start letting utility companies adjust our appliances for us.
    32
  27. I know, right? You just want to go and click to a higher tier.
    28
  28. As a motorcyclist friend of mine, who was once nearly sideswiped in slow-moving rush-hour traffic by a BMW, screamed while reaching into the open driver's window and ripping the turn signal stalk off the steering column, "GIMME THAT! NOT F---ING USING IT ANYWAY!"
    27
  29. "The sky above the port was the color of TV connected to a DAP visualizing the output of Alec's microphone."
    21
  30. Heh, when I saw WarGames the first time, the theater showed the reels out of order. I still don't really understand that movie's narrative sequence.
    20
  31. I know, right? I spent my entire adult life struggling against people touching the damn screens (seriously, I worked in a network ops center and everyone else there was a screen toucher, despite the fact that they weren't touchscreens then, wtf was that about?), and then suddenly it became the thing you have to do. This is how I know there are gods and they are against me.
    20
  32.  @logangraham2956  Building a turntable with sufficiently accurate 33⅓, 45, and 1800 RPM modes might be challenging. :)
    20
  33. I've grown jaded enough to assume that the manufacturers only really put that on there so people can't sue them after they ignore it and hurt themselves.
    19
  34.  @SetitesTechAdventures  Huh. OK, fair enough. I didn't think of TOSLink as being the kind of things that get unplugged and plugged back in a lot. In any application I've used them in, they get plugged in and stay that way until I move to another house. :)
    19
  35. Oh wow, I remember Circline lights. My grandparents had them the hallways and such of their house when I was a kid. They were in normal Circline ceiling fixtures, though, not these... things. The ghastly character of the 1960s-tech fluorescent light they made was the same, though! To bathe in their (showerless) downstairs bathroom was to get a sneak preview of what one would look like as a week-old corpse discovered in one's living room armchair by neighbors alerted by the smell.
    18
  36.  @christianelzey9703  Or worse, World War I.
    15
  37. I remember seeing an early analog synthesizer (I want to say possibly an original ARP Odyssey?) that had an aftertouch function, where you could get one voice by pressing a key normally, but switch to a different one by pressing harder--sort of like the faux volume function on this piano, except you could set the second voice to be a completely different instrument if you wanted. It mainly stands out in my memory because if you didn't select a second voice for the aftertouch, it didn't have a default one to fall back to, and instead just made a weird buzzing noise. This was probably not intended to be musical (if it was intended at all), but as they say, the street finds its own uses for things.
    15
  38. I agree, it's so annoying to have to keep telling my Japanese microwave that I really want everything in miles per hour.
    13
  39. Y'know, I can't help but think that the engineer who came up with that "bury the thermostat sensor in the wall, then dial it way down [or would that be up? - ed.] to compensate for the proximity of the refrigerant lines" hack was really proud of it. It avoids all that complicated manufacturing that would be required to give the probe access to internal air and yet hide it from view. So elegant! It works fine as long as nobody does anything weird, and who's going to do anything weird with this grade of fridge, right? Right? Heh. No one at Guangdong Fridge Factory No. 3 saw Alec and his huge wadge of warm soda cans and his salvaged GPU fans coming. :)
    11
  40.  @dgpsf  It's like the opposite of how movies converted to 4:3 by pan-n-scan often had the credits sequences squashed instead to avoid cropping the text. When I was little and didn't understand how any of this worked, I always wondered why, in the openings of old Westerns on VHS, Clint Eastwood always looks like he's 17 feet tall and weighs 94 pounds. I assumed it was like that in the original and was some bizarre artistic choice by the director. :)
    10
  41. "Awake, my Muse! Portray the pleasing sight That meets us where they make Electric Light. Behold the Electrician where he stands: Soot, oil, and verdigris are on his hands; Large spots of grease defile his dirty clothes, The while his conversation drips with oaths. Shall such a being perish in its youth? Alas! it is indeed the fatal truth. In that dull brain, beneath that hair unkempt, Familiarity has bred contempt. We warn him of the gesture all too late: Oh, Heartless Jove! Oh, Adamantine Fate! Some random touch—a hand’s imprudent slip— The Terminals—a flash—a sound like “Zip!” A smell of burning fills the started Air— The Electrician is no longer there!" - Hilaire Belloc, "Newdigate Poem" (1893)
    10
  42. Well, you get half a pound of plastic up to 1800 RPM, it's gonna make some noise. Older players take a while (and make a cool sound) spinning down when they stop playing, too.
    9
  43.  @vitriolicAmaranth  Although you'll want to work harder to find your HEV helmet than Gordon could be bothered to do.
    8
  44. iseewhatyoudidthere.jpg
    8
  45. In a similar vein, presumably because of some flaw in my eyeballs (astigmatism?), the blue part of white LEDs' output reaches my brain as if it were coming from a few degrees away from the actual source. This is always annoying, and really disorienting when the white LEDs in question are, say, the headlights of opposing traffic.
    7
  46. Guys, for the record, I wasn't looking for a solution to this. I live by myself, anyway, so if anyone is cooking something in the night, everyone in the house is already awake. :)
    7
  47. I guess once the beans are out, you have a field-expedient hole saw...
    7
  48. My house doesn't have a water heater as one usually pictures them, which puzzled me the first time I ventured into the basement and didn't see one anywhere. It has oil-fired hot water baseboard heating, and the domestic hot water comes from a holding tank connected to the main heating loop by a heat exchanger, so that you're not showering or making dinner with the same water that's been going through the radiators. It's the only house I've seen set up like that (although I'm sure there must be plenty of others, it's not like the heating system here is some kind of one-off handmade custom rig). Also, to be fair to Thomas Midgley (about whom I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis in history, as it happens), "As far as we know, it's harmless" was also true of Freon in his lifetime. His other most famous invention, lead tetraethyl... not so much, admittedly.
    6
  49. I always wondered what those chrome squares on film cartridges were for, but never had a piece of equipment that actually used them. Somewhere around here, I've got my mother's old Minolta SRT201, on the back of which is a table for translating DIN film speeds into ASA. That camera has automatic nothing, so I assume all the ASA knob does is set the internal light meter's expectations, but it's been a very long time since I used it, so I can't remember for sure. Wasn't there a fancier incarnation of computerized 35mm cartridges, right before film cameras stopped being a Thing for the mass market? I seem to recall TV commercials where Kodak was predicting they would be the Next Big Thing, at almost exactly the moment when the Next Big Thing was obviously digital. Also, when you showed your first camera, it made me nostalgic for mine, an Instamatic X-15. Good ol' square-frame 126. I can still remember the smell of spent Magicube™ flash cubes.
    6
  50. I just want to note that the YouTube filename for this video ends in the string "fuptnik", which I have decided is the Russian word for someone who's a bit obsessive about HVAC technology.
    6
  51. Off the top of my head, Smith-Corona repeatedly went bankrupt and the name is now used by a company that makes label makers, the part of Remington that made typewriters eventually became part of Unisys, and Underwood was bought out by the Italian typewriter maufacturer Olivetti, which still makes other kinds of office machinery.
    6
  52. Oh hey, my grandmother had one of these. It was the last in a long series of typewriters she had throughout her life. I might have it in my basement right now, in fact. I remember thinking it was pretty cool at the time, and it was a great sort of psychological bridge to the power of word processing for someone who had spent the previous 40+ years as a conventional typist. Switching straight from an electric typewriter to a PC would have been beyond the level of patience she had for technological change, but going from the Selectric to this to a PC worked.
    6
  53. This reminded me of the old commercial for... was it insurance? See, I like commercials that fail as advertising because they let me forget what they were trying to sell me, but are so entertaining as tiny films that I remember the actual content forever. Anyway, this one involved a guy in a tract house trying to figure out what the Mystery Switch in his garage did, unaware that he was causing his next door neighbors' garage door to repeatedly crush their car.
    5
  54. Lacking evidence to the contrary, I choose to believe that Alec just passive-aggressively called out his father on stepladder safety. Because if I had a YouTube channel, that's totally what I would do, except in my case it would be about that museum piece of a floor jack someone refuses to replace in his garage.
    5
  55. My family never used these when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, but I am just barely old enough* to remember when regular Christmas tree light bulbs were like the ones I assume are buried in these things, with the little screw fittings, like the ones you used to find in nightlights. Ours were colored by being painted on the outside (the oldest ones with solid paints, not transparent), and got so hot you'd lose your fingerprints if you touched them. Good times. Good times. * Either that, or my parents were just so cheap that they hadn't replaced their terrifying Christmas lights with more modern ones by the time I was old enough to remember them. We only stopped using them and bought fairy lights when we got our first artificial tree in about 1985, and the old bulbs started melting the fake needles. Between that and the state of the art in electrical kitchen appliances in the '70s, how we didn't all die in a fire is beyond me. :)
    5
  56.  @georger64  I once lived in an apartment that had one of the original Radaranges (the permanently installed ones). It didn't work very well, but the controls made me feel like I was launching a nuclear missile from a submarine, so all was forgiven. :)
    5
  57.  @oldmanuserphan  That is also a great band name.
    5
  58.  @endoresu  Because it would cost a dang fortune, that's why not. When I was a kid in the '70s, my parents built a house my dad designed to be heated with electricity. During our first winter there, the price of electricity just about doubled, and it's never come down since. Dad put in a wood stove and thenceforth we were only ever allowed to turn on the electric register in the bathroom.
    5
  59. Well, I haven't been in a darkroom in probably 35 years, but as soon as you got out the bottle of stop bath, all the smells came back to me...
    5
  60. OG Selectrics are complicated enough inside that it wouldn't feel entirely implausible to find out that they incorporate Victorian mechanical time travel technology.
    4
  61. I reckon they ought to be "top outlet, ground on top; bottom outlet, ground on bottom" so that two downward-right-angle plugs can be used without screwing around with adapters. (Or side-by-side with the receptacles rotated 90 degrees, instead of over-and-under so the wires are constantly in each other's way.)
    4
  62. The approximate equivalent here in Maine is "I shoulda bought it when I saw it at Marden's!"
    4
  63. I have an MP3 player cleaner! Or I guess if you want to be boring you could call it a microfiber cloth. Friggin' touch screens... :)
    4
  64. I have a textbook from a "history of technology" course I took as an undergrad which includes a reprint of my second-favorite magazine advertisement of all time. It's from sometime in the 1910s, I think, and it shows a lady vacuuming a parlor using one of the newfangled electric vacuum cleaners... which is connected to the light socket in the ceiling, because as you note, that was clearly a perfectly reasonable thing to do in those days. :) Anyway, I wish I had switched outlets in this place. Instead, in order to get LAMP to work from somewhere within reach of where I'm likely to find myself in the dark, I have to use those things that are like extension cords, except they don't actually extend the outlet, they just have a switch at the other end of the wire. The house probably needs to be completely rewired, but who the hell has that kind of money? Not me, that's for sure.
    3
  65. "That's there to give future generations something to do."
    3
  66. Speaking of early LEDs being expensive: When my father graduated from college in 1974 and embarked on his career as a mechanical engineer, he went out and bought himself a brand new Texas Instruments SR-50, one of the earliest handheld scientific calculators (back when they were still called "electronic slide rules"). It had a 10-digit LED display and cost $170 (ca. $1,150 today), which was reportedly more than he paid for the car he was driving at the time. Obviously not all of the SR-50's cost came from its display, but even so, it's illustrative of how pricey microelectronics were at that moment in time. A mere two years later, the very similar TI-30 cost all of $25.
    3
  67. When I moved into my current house, the living room windows were massive fixed single panes like store windows, facing almost directly west. The living room was more or less intolerable in the afternoon, even in the winter. Replacing them with modern double-hung windows helped a lot, but I still have to run thermal blinds on the inside to keep things under control in the summertime. Maybe I should look into putting up some awnings... Although one consideration there is that the west side of the house isn't one of the gable ends, so in the winter there's a lot of ice and snow falling past those windows from the roof above. That'd have to be taken into account.
    3
  68. Neat. I've got a slightly-more-modern 620 Brownie Hawkeye on my nicknack shelf here--no idea whether it would still work if I could get film for it, my mother gave it to me just to look nice on the shelf--but the dead format I really miss is 126. My very first camera was an Instamatic X-15. I can still call to mind the smell of a fired Magicube...
    3
  69. I remember in Richard Feynman's memoirs, there's an anecdote where he was asked by a group of rabbis to rule, as a physicist and fellow Jew, on whether the spark that happens inside a light switch constitutes fire, and thereby whether they were breaking the Sabbath by turning electric lights on and off. As I recall, being both irreligious and not that kind of physicist, he declined to offer a ruling.
    3
  70. I initially thought it was the kerosene lamp pinging as it cooled. Once you know what it is, though, it does provide a potentially useful contrast between ambient background radiation and how radioactive the mantles are.
    3
  71.  @samdillon2258  They do, but it's not very good.
    3
  72.  @rolerroleris533  I have no idea, but I doubt it. It sounds like the same kind of folksy silliness as "if you swallow an apple seed, an apple tree will grow in your stomach." Health class in US public schools in the '80s was... a journey.
    3
  73.  @toasTr0n  I reject your reality and substitute my own!
    3
  74. Yeah, it's kind of parallel-Earth-looking. I think it's partly the lack of holes and partly because the shape of the prongs is a little off.
    3
  75. My favorite CD-R blanks were the Verbatim ones with the blue dye layer. It was just a nice, soothing color, particularly once the disc was burned. I still have a bunch of old mix discs made with those blanks someplace, probably in the box of stuff that came out of my last car that had a CD player when I sold it.
    3
  76. I once saw a museum exhibit about the very early canned food that went along with Victorian expeditions to places like the Arctic and Antarctica. They were much larger cans than we're used to today, more like two-gallon paint cans, and the people who had to use them didn't even have openers that good to use with them. Their usual method was hammer and chisel. One of the cans in the exhibit had been opened in such a manner, and it looked... well, about like you would expect a big can that had been opened with a hammer and chisel by a man wearing heavy fur mittens to look. Against a backdrop like that, maybe it's not a surprise that once we got to the "knife with gearwheel" stage, most people decided eh, good enough. :)
    3
  77. A dust collector can also be a lamp wtih the right ignition source... for some values of lamp.
    3
  78.  @a64738  Harsh. Do you have cheap gas or hydroelectric there, or are you just screwed?
    3
  79.  @grafando  Yeah, I looked into switching to a propane/heat pump combo (like my father's done at his place) a couple years ago, couldn't get financing for the $10K+ it would have cost up front. They said my existing system wasn't old enough to justify replacing it.
    3
  80. @J500 L6000 Techmoan has talked about those a couple of times. IIRC, he's dismissed the idea of getting one, mainly because they can only play plain black records (no colored or transparent vinyl, picture discs, etc).
    3
  81. At today's TP prices, that would cost about $40,000.
    3
  82.  @MonkeyJedi99  That is genius.
    3
  83.  @steveurbach3093  The FIG.s alone must have taken months.
    2
  84. I still miss the Hankscraft-Gerber 240 vaporizer we had when I was little. My mom would set it up in my room whenever I was ill, which, since I was an asthmatic child who was also susceptible to nasal infections, was, uh... often. Mind you, it was so good at its job that you had to be careful lest the wallpaper start peeling. That's a thing that happened. A bit strangely, and yet somehow not at all surprisingly, someone has posted a short video here on YouTube just showing one working, sans commentary. https://youtu.be/xEV6q4xpl28
    2
  85.  @squirlmy  I have the need to correct typos so deeply ingrained that I am compelled to fix mistyped search terms, even when Google knew what I meant and gave me the results I was after.
    2
  86.  @talideon  It was either Coronation Street or EastEnders, I can't remember which now.
    2
  87. This one is particularly fascinating to me, because it lights up (as it were) a lot of old memory fragments that I hadn't thought about in years. Got me properly nostalgic. Many years ago, I had a mid-'60s VW Beetle that had a big red illuminated knob on the dash for the hazard lights. Pull it, and the right turn signals would come on. Then you'd signal a left turn with the stalk, and presto! Four-way hazard flashers. I'm not sure whether that was the intended behavior--I suspect not, as that car had a number of strange electrical habits--but that's how that particular one worked. Also, I remember when I was a kid (back in the days of thermal flashers), it was very common for hooking up trailer lights to cause hyperflashing. I assume that had something to do with the fact that the trailer light connectors were almost always aftermarket and had usually been installed by the owners, who were generally the kinds of guys who thought they knew how to do stuff like that but really didn't. :) Also also, the bit at the end with the Bolt drifting out of phase reminded me of grade-school-age me noticing the fact that the aircraft warning lamps at the tops of the local radio station's AM and FM transmitter towers did that. They would look like they were in sync for a few flashes, then drift into a weird syncopation, then they would seem to be exactly opposed for a while, and so on. Endless fascination, for a child of a certain bent of mind.
    2
  88. Uranium yellow is the best yellow.
    2
  89.  @rocbolt  "Uranium rainbow" sounds like one of those 1960s euphemisms for some sort of accident involving nuclear material.
    2
  90. Long ago, my roommate had a late Pioneer LD player where the tray for the laserdisc was also a five-CD changer carousel. I might be misremembering this part, but I'm pretty sure you could even leave the CDs loaded when you played an LD (but not play the CDs while the LD was in there). I miss that machine, and LDs in general. As an aside, one niche market LDs did hold in the US was collectors of Japanese animation, because LD was so much bigger in Japan and because no heartless beancounter had invented region locking yet. Pioneer even recognized this and released a number of anime titles on LD in English translation for the US market, tiny though it was.
    2
  91. The years immediately following the approval of rectangle lights were a hilarious time for car design, because a lot of manufacturers rushed to adopt the newfangled lamps immediately, but didn't bother restyling the cars they put them on past making the headlight enclosures fit the new lamps. The result was a whole generation of weird, awkward-looking cars that were clearly styled to have round headlights, then had square ones put on. For an example, look up a photo of a 1975 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, then compare it to a '76. Not only did GM go from round headlights to rectangular ones without restyling the car, they went from two round ones to four rectangles. Hoo boy.
    2
  92. Neat. That might just edge out my previous favorite latent heat stunt (the water cooling system used on Maxim-type machine guns), just because it's so weird.
    2
  93. I used to have a camper trailer that had a dual-mode fridge--you could run it on electricity or propane, depending on whether you were parked someplace with an electrical supply. I never used the gas mode, because I wasn't into roughing it in undeveloped campgrounds, but it had one, all the same. :)
    2
  94. @Punished Epstein, A Man Denied His Vengeance That was, indeed, the point. Anyway, it's not like I was neglecting other urgent duties to do it. There ain't a lot else to do in a commercial NOC at 10:30 PM on a Wednesday. :)
    2
  95. "Hey, family member, be a pal and set the oven to 400°, willya." Easy! Assuming the family member you addressed doesn't just tell you to do it your damn self, of course. :)
    2
  96. Good idea, I keep meaning to do that and never getting around to it. It's required by law in some places--notably France, where the fact that everyone who had a car already had a hi-vis vest made possible the slightly odd signature of the gilet jaune ("yellow vest") protests.
    2
  97.  @thanatos454  Now that you mention it, I did see the same cat cross the hallway twice in the same direction just before this video dropped.
    2
  98.  @NoNameAtAll2  YouTuber musician, notorious in his fandom for staring into the camera as if it owes him money and he wants it to know he's still not over Macho Grandé.
    2
  99.  Dave Jones  Yep.
    2
  100.  @f-s-r  Won't be long before they keep your health insurance company up to date on your habits while they're at it.
    2
  101.  @grafando  That wasn't just for a heat pump (which wouldn't be much use by itself in this climate), it was for replacing the existing boiler with a propane-fired one as well as a supplemental heat pump for the first floor.
    2
  102.  @deusexaethera  Or the ceiling above the charging pad.
    2
  103.  Waggsmith YTP  I had one, that's what made me think of it.
    2
  104. Ha! I've long assumed those things were a manufacturing artifact, but I was never quite bothered about it enough to find out. I'll tell you an off-label use of them I absolutely hate, though, and that's when manufacturers of electrical things ship things with a zip-tie fastened through those holes for no evident reason, so that you can't unpack the product and... you know... use it without going and getting a pair of wire cutters. Packaging that requires tools to remove is one of my pet peeves in general, and that particular manifestation really forces my lute.
    2
  105.  @iwontliveinfear  The kid who came to try and repair my old one stared at its guts like James Bond trying to figure out how to disarm the nuke in Goldfinger: completely bewildered and on the edge of panic. Which is why I had to get a new one. :)
    2
  106. I had a similar experience, except I would guess I'm about 15 years older, because the device in question was, I kid you not, a U-Matic machine.
    2
  107.  @brunoprimas1483  That must be what it was, then. I'm pretty sure the person who showed it to me had one of those as well as an Odyssey. (He was very into synthesizers of that period generally.)
    2
  108. I have a couple of old-fashioned four-foot fluorescent tube lights on my (enclosed, but unheated) front porch. They're handy for gauging how cold it is out at night in the winter. If I flip the switch by the door and the porch lights are slow and flickery, it must be below freezing. If they don't come on at all, I know it's at least 10 below zero F out there. :)
    2
  109. Fascinating. I never heard of this before--I guess it was a little bit after my time. Certainly a great example of doing more with less, electronics-wise. It's probably just as well they didn't exist when I was a child. I could easily picture my nerdy child self getting obsessive about reverse-engineering the game codes. This is in no way a demand, but if this were to turn out to be the on-ramp to a series of videos looking at the electronic toys and edutainment devices of the transistor era (Merlin, Speak & {Spell|Read|Math}, et al), I would... not be bothered by that. :)
    2
  110. Monty Python teaches us that vicars like that sort of thing most of all.
    2
  111. They're the same thing...
    2
  112. I know what you meant, but I'm really enjoying the image of a can with a self-opening lid. How would it know when was the right time to open? Would it be voice-controlled? Or connected to a smartwatch app that monitors the wearer's vital signs for evidence of acute bean cravings? :)
    1
  113.  @TechnologyConnections  The house is 101 years old, although the current heating system dates to the '90s sometime. I do appreciate the elegance of the design, although in practice it annoys me slightly in the winter. The first winter I lived here, it took me a while to figure out that I should shower in the morning and THEN turn the thermostat up for the day--the boiler can't bring the house up to daytime temp and provide decently hot water on the domestic loop at the same time, and the storage tank is too small to cover the difference.
    1
  114.  @TechnologyConnections  Huh, OK. I never used one, so all this time I had it filed in my head as an attempt at a next-gen 35mm system. Now I'm even less surprised it didn't work.
    1
  115.  @catfan__  do they indeed
    1
  116. In re the cost of early prerecorded videocassettes: I'm old enough--just--to remember when they became available to rent. At the one store in my town that offered them (which was a pharmacy, of all things, in its "day job"), they took the act of renting the tapes out more seriously than they did renting out the machines to play them. You could rent a VCP (not R, because not capable of recording) by the week and with no deposit, but the contract for renting the tapes read like a criminal indictment. May the gods themselves help you if you don't bring it back after one night, and if anything happens to it, even they won't be able to intervene. They wouldn't even consider selling you a copy, even used, because then they'd have to get another one to replace it in their own inventory, and it wasn't in the operating budget.
    1
  117. The one where the pitch goes up between the two tones indicating that the elevator is going down annoys me out of all proportion to how significant the problem is. Also, I would be horribly tempted to make the chime on any elevator I was responsible for just a voice saying "DING," like some kind of narrated comic book panel.
    1
  118. Amazingly, all those replies and no one realized that it goes back to mechanical typewriters. As in, from before they were even electrical. It took significant force to engage the shift lock* mechanism in one of those, and not every typist could manage it with just the left pinky finger (statistically the weakest finger on the majority of people), so the key had to be wide enough to get two fingers onto it. As for why it's still that way today: for the same reason that telephone keypads are inverted from calculator keypads. 'Cause That's Just the Way It's Done.™ * not caps lock in those days--"shift" literally shifted the whole typebar apparatus, so locking it would also lock in, for instance, the symbols on the number row
    1
  119. 3:38 I instinctively wanted to point first at my left earphone, then at my right. I may have been psychological scarred by the mandatory hearing test in second grade.
    1
  120. Don't you get a lot of lint that way? My dryer vent spent a year or so with the hose unhooked from the back of the unit once, unbeknownst to me, and I couldn't figure out for ages why the room it was in was so dang dusty all the time.
    1
  121.  @Falcodrin  The Tandy 1000 I had in high school used to do that sometimes. The local AM station would play very quietly from the built-in speaker when the computer wasn't even turned on. (I lived about half a mile from the transmitter.) Super creeped me out the first time I noticed it, until I figured out where the mysterious mumbling voice in the living room was coming from (and that what it was saying was the play-by-play of a baseball game :).
    1
  122. Neato. I completely agree that there's something immensely satisfying about these old pig-iron SLRs. I've got my mother's old Minolta SR-T 201, which was one of this camera's direct competitors and is very like it in a great many respects. (The 201 is the 1975 updated version of the SR-T 101 that has an integral flash hot shoe on top of the viewfinder and, amusingly, the "memo holder" thing on the back cover, which, given the timing, I bet was copied straight from the F-1.) Even the battery... door? Port? Hatch? for the light meter battery is very similar. The reticle for the light meter is slightly different, but works on basically the same principle.
    1
  123. 1:06 Hi, this is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message, I'll get back to you. Universal Pictures used the aptly named "Universal Ring" in everything for years and years and years. Vinyl, hell, I wouldn't be surprised if it was on an Edison cylinder. :)
    1
  124.  @niceguy191  Exactly! What kind of unwarrantedly extravagant behavior is that, anyway? (Also, I knew someone was going to quibble about what kind of fans they were...)
    1
  125. The root answer to questions 2 and 3 is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in short: things fall apart.
    1
  126. I've got one of the special two-level desks from my old high school's typewriting classroom--they stopped offering the course and sold off all the stuff at the end of my senior year (1990–91). Sadly, as in your school's case, the typewriters were too used up to be worth snagging one of those too, but the desk has served me well for many years. The lower part where the typewriter was meant to go is the perfect spot to put a printer, which seems appropriate.
    1
  127. In favor of what? I don't think I've ever seen an alternative for infrastructure wire available in a builder supply place. Romex and off-brand clones thereof are it.
    1
  128.  @TechnologyConnections  Aha. Gosh, residential electricians must love that rule, if homes in Chicagoland are built anything like they are here in Maine.
    1
  129.  @Spudz76  heyoooooo
    1
  130. Have you checked to make sure it hasn't been transported to the past for use in a video? It could happen!
    1
  131. Or Full Metal Jacket. "You're the kind of guy who would wow a guy up his act without the common gee-whiz courtesy of a reacharound."
    1
  132. Non-inverter microwave ovens control their power levels by duty-cycling the magnetron, too. I wonder if the ones from back when they had knobs instead of digital electronic controls used something similar to do that.
    1
  133. One of the best visual gags on television, which would absolutely not work now, is Frank Drebin's jacket on Police Squad! It was patterned to look like herringbone tweed interacting destructively with NTSC encoding. If you looked closely, you could tell it wasn't, because it wrinkled and the pattern on the sleeves moved with his arms, but when he held still it looked exactly like the real(?) thing.
    1
  134. Postulated: The light bulb cartel conspiracy theory grew up, went to conspiracy college, and became the one about how the Medical Establishment could cure (insert terminal illness) easily, but chooses not to because it makes more money from palliative care.
    1
  135. I wonder whether the film/tape split in BBC productions (MPFC, original-formula Doctor Who, et al) was less noticeable at the time of original broadcast, since UK TV broadcasts were at 25 FPS, only one off from the usual frame rate of film. The difference is pretty noticeable in 30-FPS NTCS transfers of vintage Doctor Who episodes, and I would assume is startlingly obvious in any HD remasters of same. I mean, you'd still have that hard-to-quantify difference in "feel" between the two, but the frame rate disparity in the original sources would be better hidden. Also, in re the post-production having to be re-done for an effects-heavy show whose live-action photography was on film: this was recently done to the 1990s HBO series From the Earth to the Moon, which was reissued on Blu-ray to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 last year. (The necessity for it is also the reason why there probably won't be a Blu-ray release of the Director's Edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, since they spent a huge amount of money to re-make a bunch of the effects shots in that film... for DVD, only a couple years before HD formats came along. D'oh!)
    1
  136.  @toweri_li  That said, it makes some sense for the two colors used to be far apart on the visible spectrum, so red and blue were probably not entirely arbitrary choices.
    1
  137. As soon as you lifted up that Smith-Corona manual, I could smell it. I spent a fair bit of my childhood and early adolescence, before we got a computer sophisticated enough to run a word processor, banging out Grodd only knows what nonsense on a typewriter very like that one, which had been my mother's when she was in college.
    1
  138. I had one of those as a teenager (late '80s, and it was old then; I found it at a yard sale). It was great at stopping me from having epic nosebleeds at night in the winter, but it also programmed my developing brain so that even now, 35 years later, I have a hard time sleeping if there isn't a fan running somewhere in the room. :) I'll take that over the nosebleeds, though.
    1
  139. I wonder if the Lumière brothers believed in nominative determinism.
    1
  140. Was it one of the ones with the ribbon cartridge that goes in the side of the machine? I've got one of those kicking around here somewhere. Used to be my grandmother's. I think Smith-Corona electrics were usually set up to type in Elite, which is a slightly dressier fixed-pitch font than Courier.
    1
  141. Mine does that, I have an obscure love for it. Up to 99 is that many seconds, and then 100 is one minute.
    1
  142. "Should you or any member of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in 30 seconds." (Also: I somehow never heard of this at the time, but I remember laughing out loud at the Circuit City employee who tried to sell me a DIVX deck...)
    1
  143. Oh! This is the thing I posted about on your previous LD video earlier today. Time, it's weird on the Internet. :)
    1
  144.  @carlam6669  The other chemicals also have distinctive smells, but stop bath is the strongest, most arresting one.
    1
  145. Oh hey, I had a three-drum clock when I was a kid. From what I can recall of the styling and typography of it, I'd guess it was from the '50s sometime; I found it in a random yard sale my mother dragged me along to one day around 1980. I had it by my bed for years, but it was so long ago I'd forgotten all about it until you mentioned the type in passing here. I don't know what ever happened to it... probably got thrown out when my father moved out of that house while I was in college, along with a lot of my other stuff. His midlife crisis was... an event. :/
    1
  146. Also, now I'm remembering a sketch comedy show (I forget which one, maybe Almost Live! ?) that did a fake ad for variants on this product that were triggered by other noises, including (if memory serves) The Screamer, The Shotgunner, and The Blow-to-the-Solar-Plexus-er.
    1
  147.  @jpdemer5  Yeah, the tag thing is fair enough, but I've bought a couple of things recently that had the tie without a tag. Just there for no apparent reason. (As for the proof-of-new idea, I would think anybody up to shady electronics resale would just... put on a new one.)
    1
  148. Oh hey, a Time-O-Lite®! My mom had one of those in her darkroom back in the day.
    1
  149.  @dabeste6163  (shrug) I was perfectly content to pay the cost of the old one doing its job faster. It's not as though I spent my days staring at my electric bill and muttering, "This dishwasher is going to banrkupt me, I've got to do something."
    1
  150. With the best will in the world, I find it very easy to believe that numbers of this product went unsold. :)
    1
  151. When I was a kid, I assumed the Dolby system was invented by Thomas Dolby, because as we all know when we're children, two things having the same name cannot be a coincidence. :)
    1
  152. secrets ets ets ets ets of of of of the universe verse verse verse
    1
  153.  @ananthropomorphictalkinggo6641  Besides which, being concerned about lead's potential as a carcinogen is like worrying that the field of daisies you're falling toward without a parachute might bother your allergies.
    1
  154.  @44R0Ndin  In this instance, we're talking about a brass-faced gunsmith's hammer--wooden handle, steel head, faced with a brass disc about the size of a stack of two dimes. It weighs only a few ounces, of which maybe an ounce is the brass bit. Whatever the alloy's precise composition, I sincerely doubt it would be possible to get lead poisoning or cancer from that. Perhaps if you ground it up and snorted it, but then you'd have bigger problems.
    1
  155.  @44R0Ndin  You should probably have saved that for your doctoral dissertation on risk management, although I suppose it's unlikely that you'd get caught if you recycled it.
    1
  156. Oh, so that's why the tape deck in my old Pontiac kept either autoreversing or just ejecting the one of these I used to have. The "pretend you're a real tape" spindle mechanism must have been jamming. And all these years I've been blaming the Pontiac.
    1
  157. I used to test the GFCI outlet in the bathroom of my childhood home faithfully on the first of each month. I had no idea what it did or was for, probably until I was in high school, but as soon as I was old enough to read the instruction on it, I followed it. I was... just that kind of child. :)
    1
  158. Wow, now that lights up an old memory track. When I was little, my grandparents ran a restaurant, and they had a pair of giant coffee percolators, one for regular, the other for unleaded decaf. The one they used for regular was the bigger of the two, and could probably make something like five gallons of coffee at a time. When it was running, instead of the little "perk perk perk" noise a normal one makes every second or two, it would sit silently for ten or fifteen seconds and then make this terrifying harrrrumph, like an elephant public speaker clearing his throat. As a very small child, I was quite frightened of this device. I used to try to time my passage through the dining room so that I wouldn't be right in front of it when it went off.
    1
  159. Was that one of the special mosquito-repelling ones for porches? I vaguely remember having one of those, long ago.
    1
  160.  @TechnologyConnections  Yeah, I don't recall it being outstandingly effective.
    1