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