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

  1. One is supposed to remove the basket, tube, and grounds before pouring and the spoon from the cup before drinking. The metal one could likely use a good cleaning before making coffee. My grandparents had a double chamber percolator ( http://www.jitterbuzz.com/furn/suncof.jpg )(from Sunbeam, btw) in their GE All Electric Kitchen ( https://retrorenovation.com/2013/04/08/ge-wonder-kitchen/ ). The kitchen was very advanced with a built-in dishwasher, a washer/dryer (one unit that washed the clothes as a front-loading washer and then dried them spinning as a dryer) and a selection of pull-out kitchen appliance cords that could be plugged in to things like the double chamber percolated. The water was kept separate from the used coffee water until it was all finished and then a vacuum grew sufficiently strong to suck the liquid back down into the lower chamber.
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  2. Darn I thought this was going to be a review about a clothes drier that dried the clothes by freezing them.
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  3. Natural gas and propane are considerable less disreputable. I've sat in many a dark room warmed by propane when the electricity was knocked out and am grateful for a ready alternative. My step mother lives in Portola, CA, and at least once, if not several times, she is without grid-provided electricity for several days. She now has a propane powered backup generator that kicks in keep certain things running, including the microwave, refrigerator, TV, Internet, and several crucial lights. I don't see the electric grid replacing this alternative anytime soon.
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  4. I am not blind. I am not deaf (though, having to listen to some clients for hours, I sometimes hope), I am not wheel chair bound. While not exactly athletic, I have a full set of senses and movements available to me. That said, I have many friends not so blessed and I applaud this effort to make this channel more accessible to all. I wish our society start with the idea of being accessible, but I am glad you are getting there. All my support for this.
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  5. I understand No Effort November, but when December comes around and you can once again put some effort into things, instead of just asking questions, which I know you did in honor of the late Alex Trek, you might make some phone calls, perhaps many, many phone calls to find out why Sharp stopped making microwaves with this technology and why it didn't spread to other manufacturers. You are clearly smarter than the average bear and a reasonable investigator. For those of us who really do wonder "why?" please find out. I would love a microwave that worked as your grandparents unit. Some people see things are they are and ask why and others go find out why.
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  6. If you are going to do this in Fahrenheit, why are your charts in Centigrade? They show numbers followed by a C. Perhaps if you move the compressor from the bottom to on top of the fridge so the heat disappoints above the fridge (say, like as with the GE Monitor).
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  7. Now that you've covered subtitles, are you going to cover the supertitles used in the Met movie theater broadcasts?
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  8. My grandfather had an amazing house built in the 1920s in Red Bluff, California. It sat on the river that runs through town on a high bluff, but also at a bend in the river so it looked down one part of the river. Great spot. When it was first built, the lot extended out to the middle of the river and the builder ran a pipe down to just above the river bed. The pipe would suck up cold water from the bottom, run it up to the house's basement, and run it by an evaporative cooler. In very dry, very hot Red Bluff summers, it was a remarkably good way to cool the basement. I spent many a summer afternoon down there play cards, reading books, and listening to the radio. My Grandmother was a SF Giants fan and would sit transfixed by the radio, clearly imagining every part of the game being broadcast on the radio, yet in the cool of her basement. By the early 1960s, very large, 220v through-the-wall air conditioners were installed and the popularity of the basement began to fade. Eventually, the state bought river and its banks through condemnation the, the pipe fell into disuse, and the magically cool basement's allure faded. In the late 1970s, force central air was added and even the great wall units fell silent (except I would run the one in my room because I liked it really cold).
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  9. Stupid question: why isn't the compressor, the thing that actually condenses the gas into a smaller space called the condenser (at about 2:00) and the tubes that release the heat into the atmosphere called the heat exchanger?
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  10. In my home in Sacramento, California, the ground orientation indicates the outlet is switched. Several rooms, mostly bedrooms, have outlets that are controlled by a switch near the door. Those outlets are ground up. BTW, you should look into the British standard outlets and plugs. They are much safer.
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  11. Until I bought my iPhone, I never owned an MP3 player. I used the CD MP3 system to play music in my car (a Honda Accord, btw, the model up rom the Civic). My thought was why buy an MP3 player when I can use my CD players? Of course, I still have my vinyl collection from days when that was the main format.
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  12. I understand you live in a cold climate. I don't know why, you seem capable of moving, but your choice. However, I don't need heat pumps to get warm. In the some 30 years I've lived at my home, I've turned on the heater for a total of 33 days. Total. I probably could've put on a sweater. However, staying cool is the issue here. You don't really analyze the cooling benefits or whether ground- or air-based pumps are best in both moist, humid climates and dry hot climates such as I live in. Thus, I think there is a need for a fourth video.
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  13. Fun fact: White Out, the previously ubiquitous correcting fluid for correcting typewriter mistakes, was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham, who invented the first correction fluid in 1956 while working as a typist in Dallas, TX. She also gave birth to Michael Nesmith of the faux rock group, the Monkeys.
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  14. I am just shooting in the dark here, but could one send power through optical cable by using the light to create electricity at the end with photovoltaic cells?
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  15. Yes, for today, the screen refresh is very slow and the ability to review an entire document seems barely functional, however, compared with what was available at any reasonable price back in that day, this was wiz bang super fast. Creating letters or papers this was way was hours faster. Before I moved on to my Apple II, I had something similar to this typewriter and I remember feeling like I was living on Star Trek with it. It TYPED my papers WITH THE REVISIONS! How could ANYTHING be better?
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  16. Having a Bosch dishwasher, I looked and, yep, there didn't seem to be a pre-rinse location for soap. Then I noticed a small grill that connected to the soap container. From what I can tell, without tearing out my dishwasher and installing a window, water, during the pre-rinse cycle, enters through the grill, travels through a short, molded tube into the soap compartment, and carries away some of the soap. I checked this theory by powering down the dishwasher after the pre-rinse cycle and opening the soap compartment. Even with the dreaded tablet, the outer coating had broken down and that implied water had enter the compartment and also left (as there wasn't water in there when I opened it). If I my be permitted to theorize, I suggest Bosch has figured out people aren't putting soap in the pre-rinse soap compartment and many people use the tablets, so have an engineered a system to work anyway in spite of people not doing as instructed. Just as Pierre de Fermat had a solution for his Last Theorem, but the margin of the book was too narrow to contain it, I believe the proof of my theory is too difficult to fit into my kitchen. I leave it to you, my esteemed teacher.
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  17. I am on the order of three time your age and grew up with dishwashers. My grandmother had one in her GE All Electric Kitchen that really was a tub and was loaded from the top. From a wee age, I was taught to wash the dished clean before putting them into the dishwasher. There simply aren't any food particles of any kind on the dishes I put in. The whole point of the dishwasher isn't to pre-clean, but simply to sanitize. I am shocked, shocked like Captain Renault at Cafe American over gambling that one would use a dishwasher to wash dishes alone.
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