Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Technology Connections" channel.

  1.  @seigeengine  or even "which is the same number in metres". heh.
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  2.  @Christopher-N  Don't know about concert flutes, but there are definitely electric recorders (and isn't that a gloriously ambiguous term in English?)
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  3.  @PiOfficial  A surprisingly large number of people do not understand the difference between 'kilo' and 'mega'... for that matter, a shockingly large number of Americans (purely due to lack of data regarding anyone else on this matter on my part) don't understand that '1 million dollars' and '1,000,000 dollars' are the same thing, and will proceed to treat 'million' as part of the Unit rather than the Number, resulting in truly nonsensical assumptions and opinions regarding taxation and the cost of doing a given thing at a given scale...
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  4.  @henningerhenningstone691  English may not manage 90%, but it's a lot higher than most people think... just... most of the words are like that... in the language we nicked them from... or were like that before centuries of sound changes made it really hard to tell, or etc.
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  5. is it really only fans? I saw helecopters and an aeroplane in there too...
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  6. Fortunately, were I live, it's pretty rare to find outlets covered by furniture... but it's very common for them (and light switches) to be positioned with the assumption that you would put very specific furniture in very specific places, making things quite akward if you have reason to do anything that Isn't That.
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  7. Quite a lot of them recomend products like the Finish nonsense in the video due to brand deals. So ignore anything that recomends a Specific brand, because that's just paid advertising. Amusingly, my Dishwasher not only had words to that effect, but actually came with a sample of such stuff.... and dire warnings not to use it with anything but the basic default setting because, unlike cheap powder, it's not actually compatible with any of the other cycle options.
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  8. This is also why a lot of modern games with 'loot box'/gacha mechanics dodge being labled as 'gambling' in a lot of jusridictions despite being entirely chance based and Quite Intentionally hammering all the same problematic mental triggers in the brain of the player and taking their money in the process: there's no way to 'cash out', because nothing that the player gets out of it is transferable in any way, shape, or form... Meanwhile, the fact that you CAN 'cash out' is precisely why buying physical trading cards in randomised booster packs is so much less concerning (well, that and the odds being FAR less absurd... until you get to multiple layers of 'might not even appear in a given pack' rarities, anyway)... if you don't get what you wanted, and what you got wasn't intersting enough to use anyway, you can trade what you got with someone else (or sell what you got and then buy what you wanted from someone else). Video game companies go out of their way to prevent that.
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  9. What's really fun is watching dvds translated from Japanese with the audio and subtitles both set to English. The issue is that the primary target for people who wanted to read the subtitles wasn't people who couldn't hear the English audio, it was people who would watch the thing with the Japanese audio on with English subtitles (there's a whole history here that basically amounts to the publishers of English versions of things being stupid, and large portions of the fan base also being stupid, on top of the more obvious and reasonable causes that one might expect). Consequently, the audio and subtitles would be (well, will be. This still happens, to my understanding) Independently translated from the Japanese, often by entirely different translation companies, with no attempt what so ever being made to reconcile the two beyond the natural consequence of lining up the timing with what was happening on screen. Which means that if you want to watch with English audio* but need subtitles, the results are kind of wild. *such as, say, when watching almost any anime with highschool girls in it. The Japanese audio frequently ends up being physically painful if you have certain sensory issues.
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  10.  @Konarcoffee  IF! The person you are addressing already had the relevant skillset. Otherwise, this claim is delusional nonsense.
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  11. of course, the reason oil based fuels have been the standard for so many things for so long is energy density. Even allowing for the lack of efficiency, it still fit more power into a given amount of storage space than anything else, and also more power into less Mass than anything else. The main thing that stopped EVs being competitive until recently (and still makes battery powered trucks nonsense) is that no batteries were able to beat that energy density... and the ones we have now are rather horrifically prone to exploding and/or catching fire if anything goes wrong (of course, this lead to the implementation of a lot more features to prevent this from happening, meaning in many cases they're safer than the older, less energy dense batteries... assuming they were made properly.) Of course, if you power your vehicle using overhead wires, you get to skip that issue entirely... which is why electric locomotives and EMUs (and trams, and trolley buses) have been pretty much universally superior to the alternatives basically since they existed (at the expense of the infrastructure to set them up costing more) anywhere the infrastructure for them has been implemented.
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  12.  @nnnnnn3647  No, shit urban planning, poor infrastructure, and a lack of public transit makes you a slave to the car. ICE vs EV makes not a scrap of difference to that issue. Except in so far as changing demand and usage patterns as people switch to EVs Might encourage increased spending on public transit infrastructure... (you know, the one thing that ACTUALLY allows you to NOT be a 'slave to the car'.)
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  13.  @nnnnnn3647  you might want to look into these rather clever devices invented... oh, over a hundred years ago now... we call them... Railways. Or, alternatively, Also over a hundred years old now, Aeroplanes! shocking! Then there are buses, rental cars, taxies (ok, that last one's a bad option). Heck, Bicycles!
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  14.  @asmodiusjones9563  Mind you, year round indoor kitchens predate AC by... a lot... Though usually in colder climates where days hot enough for that to be a problem if your kitchen has good air flow are not all that common.
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  15.  @MichaelButlerC  well, they're not great at traveling, as a rule.
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  16.  @GreatSageSunWukong  The freezer is at the bottom because, as a general rule, the bottom is more awkard to get at and the freezer is the part you need to get at least often (well, of the two doors, anyway.) Makes good sense from a usability/accessability stand point if you must have both in the same unit. Makes negative sense from an simplicity/efficiency stand point, of course. edit: Also what MrSheckster said above.)
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  17.  @cllewis1  Also the non-American audience.
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  18.  @foobarturkey  Linux is better than it used to be, and going by what I've seen since I last tried to use it, if it handles something At All usually handles it well. Still, last time I tried to use it I found myself in the weird situation where any given version supported Either my laptop's screen Or it's touch pad correctly, not both. Ended up installing Windows 8 (because I still had a CD for that) instead, which works just fine (it has plenty of its own problems, but none of the ones that actually affect me are deal breakers.) ... Of course, the reason I wanted Linux was because the thing Came with windows 10, which was Awful. (Also, this whole OS business is what caused me to give up on the shop I got the laptop from. When you pay someone who supposedly knows what they're doing to set up your computer Properly so it actually works right, you kind of expect to, at the other end, get a computer that's set up properly and actually works right, and if that's not actually possible you can reasonably expect that they'll actually tell you as much at Some Point! ... This is not what happened.)
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  19.  @busimagen  The difference is mostly units of measure of volume, if I recall correctly. That and possibly units of length smaller than an inch, which no one actually uses in the normal course of events. The Imperial system is basically just 'every specialised unit of measure of things relevant to a specific field, standardized such that unit X is always unit X, with people then prefering to reuse existing units rather than create new ones if the existing units were sufficient to their new task'. Over time some fell out of use as the specialty they came from was less significant, and then sometimes things were rationalized a bit when that left gaps that became an issue later. Imperial units are Very Good at the things they're intended for, and Terrible at everything else, and conversions are a pain. US customary units Started Out as British Imperial units, but then things happened. SI units (kind of sort of metric but not exactly) are intended primarily for scientific applications, and for stuations where great precision is needed, as well as to minimise, simplify, and/or eliminate conversions wherever possible. Officially only the base units and multiplying or dividing it by 1000 are actually Things in SI, but you'd be hard pressedd to find a country that uses the metric system that doesn't add additional units for practical reasons: Centimetres (1/100th of a metre) are pretty much universal, for example. Some places use decilitres (1/10th of a litres), most places will use teaspoons (5ml), tablespoons (10 or 15ml depending on country), and cups (250ml, or 1/4th of a litre, or 200ml, or 1/5th of a litre, depending on where you're talking about... good odds on one of those having it's origin in American units and the other in British, though it's quite possibly unrelated, but it's very confusing when you end up with the wrong one!) for cooking because it's just substantially more practical for things of that scale for that particular application. ... and don't be surprised if you find the occasional stray imperial unit still floating around for certain niche applications.
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  20. Used to be very common for cars to have three turn signals on each side here: front, rear, and one on the side, usually on the front doors. This was because you often couldn't See the front or rear ones from the sides because of how they were mounted. These days, the usual practice is for the front and rear lights just wrap around the corner of the vehicle so you can see them from the sides instead.
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  21.  @DreitTheDarkDragon  if you were looking for where to buy such an item, you'll probably have more luck looking for 'heatpump' rather than 'AC', and also looking for people who install them rather than to buy the individual item (It's not really the sort of thing one usually installs oneself, for various reasons.)
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  22.  @lordofhyphens  They are, esentially, what happens when you fuse the propeller blade and the wing into the same object... and then compensate for all the 'fun' consequences of that. They can even land just fine in the event of an engine failure, at least if the pilot knows what they're doing. Though... umm... bailing out of them in the event of something going more ... catastrophically... wrong is a bit iffy due to the whole 'getting clear of the rotor' thing.
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  23.  @Nphen  Good electronics are still expensive Now. There's just a lot more 'not so good but still good enough for most use cases' options to be had (and, if you want cheap, some absolute Garbage options too.)
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  24.  @alihms  Humidity is a whole other factor playing into the temperature issue.
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  25. Well, they do when it's new, I would imagine.
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  26.  @KekusMagnus  Well, the Heating Element never breaks down... Every Other part of the system is exactly as reliable as any other electric system. Which is to say that if you spent enough money and the people doing the actual work and/or their bosses didn't scam you, it's fine, but otherwise... Seriously, the number of heaters I've seen crap out and die (in a couple of cases starting fires) because of shitty wiring in other components... Like everything else, they're only as breakdown-proof as the person who built/installed/maintains them is reliable. They're just not particularly prone to failing for any reason Other than being actually broken. Or, you know, a complete loss of electrical power. That's a thing.
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  27.  @nnnnnn3647  It's... not meaningfully different from the current situation with ICE cars. Well, you trade the ability to store extra fuel in gas cans or the like on long trips for the ability to refuel while the car's sitting around in your garage overnight, and I'm sure it's not too hard to find use cases where that's a bad thing rather than a good one (though the sorts of vehicles and uses for which the ability to just load up extra fuel is relevant generally also have other requirements that make current EV tech less than ideal anyway), but other than that? The problem is the car and infrastructure designed around it, not EV vs ICE. EVs are fundamentally an attempt to make money off patching some of the flaws in the car based system. They're a step up in most regards, but they're still Cars, with most of the problems that brings with it. To avoid being a slave to the car requires properly implemented public transit (which, shockingly enough, should Also be electric in most cases... though overhead wires are vastly superior to batteries in almost all use cases. Capacitor banks are the answer to most of the 'but sometimes!' issues.)
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  28.  @BooBaddyBig  Ring circuits are a terrible idea that was only used to compensate for a Massive copper shortage at a time when mass rebuilding was necessary. Plug fueses are... debateable. That said, Switched Outlets, with the switch right there at the outlet, are an entirely different matter and there's a reason they're common even in places that never used ring circuits.
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  29. @luelou8464 I'd argue that both the 'bean counters' and the engineers answer to a common superior, and deciding between what one says needs to happen and what the other says needs to happen is That person's job. You can put Some of the blame on the bean counter of the engineer if they're not doing their job Properly, but ultimately the person making the decision between the two priorities is the one the responsiblity really rests on. (Yes, even, arguably Especially, if they just set a blanket policy of one or the other being 'superior' in the decision making chain.)
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  30. Indeed. If you're giving them all that data about you that they really don't need and shouldn't have (because it's google. It absolutely phones home and tells them everything it can at every opportunity, that information is where they make their actual money, making you pay to give it to them is just a bonus), the least they can do is actually provide the promised service properly.
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  31. avoiding conflicts like that is the point in 45 degree plugs (almost always down-right), and one of the advantages of the 'straight out the back' type (countered by all the down sides of 'straight out the back' if your plug design is bad). Actually, one thing I've noticed a lot where I live (not the USA), is that Multiboxes (powerstrips, I guess) tend to have 45 degree plugs, but the sort of things that fully expect they're going to be plugged Into a multibox tend to have 'straight out the back' plugs... and then there's the never to be sufficiently damnned wall warts. Bad enough when they all point Down (introducing the levering problem even in plugs that wouldn't have it otherwise), but then some genius started making multiboxes with two rows of plugs facing opposite ways to accomodate them... and after getting one I encountered, for the first time ever, a wall wart where the cable came out the TOP! Which, naturally, couldn't go in ANY of the sockets on that multibox. Though more recently I bought a multibox with... 10 sockets? 12? it deals with this by having some of the sockets further apart to accomodate wide wall warts, and as a result the sockets on one side are Not in line with the sockets on the other side (and they also have the two sides facing opposite ways), so there's always at least a couple of sockets that are viable for any given stupid non-standard plug. So long as you don't have too many that are non-standard in the same fashion.
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  32. When I had to replace my lamp a year or three ago, a full half the lamps that were to be had were touch lamps like this. Thing is, in my 30+ years of life, I'd never seen nor even heard of them before! The sales assistant did warn me at the time that the ones with dimmer switches tended not to play nicely with LED bulbs, but given that those cost more and I didn't need a dimmer switch anyway, that was fine. It's worked out pretty well for me so far ^_^ Edit: though my having not encountered them before is apparently a bit of a fluke, as they have been around.
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  33. Overhead lighting is Super useful for cleaning, or large spaces where several people are doing different things in different parts of the room while facing different directions, among other things. Of course, there are also situations where it's annoying or unhelpful, and lamps are quite useful. And then there's my setup where I've got both, and they're Super useful for the things they're good at... but I barely use Either of them because the vast majority of the time I have three LCD computer monitors going.
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  34. I have a related shirt. It has a picture of a drill, and says something to the effect of "remain calm, this is only a drill".
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  35. Pretty sure the actual problem is that in it's normal usage "vinyl" is a mass noun, which then causes it to sound decidedly off when treated as a count how in the context of "a vinyl". Certainly, when I was a kid (in the 90s), no one called them that, they were "a record", but either vinyl or record works equally well as X in "a X collection", because collection is a count noun.
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  36.  @startedtech  The solution to boiling water is to just buy an electric jug/kettle to begin with. Though I understand that these are actually rather rare in the USA, so you might need to import it... Mind you, you still don't want to buy the cheapest ones, as they're often...er... well, you get what you pay for. But the mid range one's still aren't actually expensive, by any real measure. Basically an electric heating element optimised (well, somewhat) for boiling water. To my recollection, the difference between heating an amount of water in one of those and heating it in a mettle kettle on a wood-fired stove is... well, my recollection is that they take about the same length of time (plus or minus having to set the fire if you hadn't already), with no risk of accidentally boiling the kettle dry (with all the consequences of that) if things don't go to plan. No idea with gas, never lived anywhere that used it (and wouldn't want to, honestly, all relevant local factors considered (including unplanned rapid disassembly events caused by gas company negligence...))... Of course, such stove related problems may or may not be down to how your electrical grid works and how the stove is intended to make use of it. Around here they're part of the house, essentially, wired into the house's electrical systems fairly directly (not plugged into wall socket or the like) and I believe draw more than the standard wall socket and associated circuit are rated for (240v, pretty much universally in residential environments). For comparison, fridges, washing machines, and even the hot water tank (usually the single biggest source of electrical demand in any given house, just... a bit more spread out than the stove) all plug into standard 240v sockets.
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  37.  @seraphina985  I'm not seeing why you'd want the brake lights on when the car is just stopped. The tail lights, at night, sure, but why the brake lights? They tell you that the car is decerating. If it's stationary (that is, not in motion) it's not decelerating. So what are the brake lights actually telling other drivers in those circumstances? I'm also not sure why you'd care what the driver was Intending to do, save perhaps as a back up if the sensors intended to engage the lights based on what the car is Actually doing should happen to fail (and only then, because if the two are in conflict then what the car is Actualy doing is the important information).
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  38.  @danielstickney2400  I imagine you were joking, but for clarity, that's backwards. Ring mains came about due to needing to do mass rebuilding while also suffering a significatn shortage of copper wire. The safety of the standard plug came about due to the need to compensate for the inherent horribleness of ring mains. Ring mains have since been done away with (save, perhaps, in sufficiently old buildings that no one's got around to fixing up), the safe plugs have not.
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  39.  @kc9scott  thinner wire, maybe, but also you don't have each outlet/light (or set there of) having to run a wire all the way to the switch/fuse/breaker box and back, instead the wires just run to the next (generally closest) one in the ring. That's where the saving in copper wire came from, it required substantially less than half as much. It was a post war measure to compensate for a shortage of copper wiring.
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  40.  @manuel0578  There's been something of a trend in recent times back towards the physical buttons as various manufacturers have realised that touchscreen/touch button controls aren't fit for purpose for a lot of the functions of a car. Mind you, for cooking, my experience is that for Some things touch buttons are a huge step up... and for others they just make everything more difficult. And the difference is quite simple: when the button does one thing, maybe two, same as it would if it was a physical button, it's great. When instead there's a bunch of menus and layers so that you can use maybe four buttons to do the job of what should really have been three dials? kind of awful.
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  41. You do run into the issue that the standard configuraiton is tailight = red, brake light = double intensity red. (usually this is done by having two lights in the module, with the break light control powering both of them while the tail light control only powers one) Brakelights often, but not always, include extra red lights (near the top of the vehicle) as well, which the tail lights generally don't, but that's very much an optional extra. Also that dimmer systems have (at least in the past) typically worn out faster. Oh, and flashing amber indicator lights have specific meanings (whether it be only on one side or the other (turning), both (hazard) or spinning on the roof (also hazard, but of a rather different sort)), which interacts poorly with the rather dumb idea that is using the car's red brake lights as turn signals even without flashing Red lights actually having a distinct meaning. All quite fixable, of course (and most places don't even have that last problem because, well, they don't do the dumb 'red turn signal' thing.)
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  42. Oddly, to my recollection, around here a Pack of AAAs and a Pack of AAs will cost basically the same... but the AAA pack will contain more batteries. On the other hand, you can often get 20 packs of AAs for even cheaper, not so much AAAs. Probably because the AAAs tend to go in things with much lower power draw, and thus last longer, while things that actually chew through batteries tend to use AAs. That said, used to be the two most common uses for Cs or Ds were tourches and Radios... these days the tourches use LEDs and run on AA or AAAs (I think I have a weird one that uses three AAAs aranged in a triangle with the holder in the middle in a space about equivalent to where the old C or D batteries would go), while radios either use AAs (quite a few of them) or larger rechargables (I have one that can take both, with the later being a standard cellphone batteries from back when those were actually replaceable, at least going by form factor, which came with it... except... this is just straight up a radio (well, it can play audio files off a USB flash drive if you don't mind setting the thing on fire, or a flash memory card, but other than that it's just a radio... a really budget radio...) and the battery, fully charged, won't even keep it powered for a single day. ... so in the normal course of events I just keep it straight off it's usb charging cable with no batteries in it and if it ever needs to run off battery power it's getting AAs shoved in there).
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  43. Discman equivalents were (barring a possible few exceptions I never heard of or encountered) terrible at the thing they were advertised to do: replace the walkman. CD players just really don't like the amount of bouncing that happens when you're walking around, nevermind jogging or running, and skipped Constantly, rather ruining the playback experience. MP3 players had no such issue. Portable CD players were great at taking up a heck of a lot less shelf space than a full stereo system though, and substantially less of a pain in the butt to move from place to place when you wanted to.
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  44. ​ @robertpendzick9250  Nonstandard configurations are entirely warrented in some cases (see the Steamdeck's weird battery that is Decidedly nonstandard... because the alternatives are making the thing massively bigger (it's already arguably slightly too big), gutting it's batterly life, or having the whole thing burst into flame), though whenever that is Not the case standard models should absolutely be used (You'd think the usual penny pinching practices would make this the norm already). Rechargable vs non-rechargable is a Big Deal. Frankly they should always be rechargable and it kind of pisses me off when I stop to think about it that rechargable AA and AAA batteries seem to have largely vanished (or at least been displaced from your typical battery display in random non-specialist shops) here while the non-rechargable ones keep on trucking. Mostly due to waste disposal issues, but also saving the customer money... of course the people who Make batteries would really rather you have to constantly buy more, so it's understandable why they went that way, even if it has a strong negative effect on my opinion of them. On replaceability, though, you're absolutely right. Making the battery non-replaceable (note that I'm discounting 'it's nonstandard for good reason and a reasonable number of spares were produced but it's many years later and they've all been used up now' here, as if one is really desperate in that scenario one Could assemble a viable alternative power supply, it just wouldn't be as good) is fundamentally inexcusable, and most of the time it's a scam to force you to buy a new one sooner than you otherwise would (batteries being a wear part)... of course, Sometimes it's just penny pinching to save on the cost of designing, buying/making parts for, and assembling a more reasonable battery housing (why bother when you can just glue it to the case?) and Exceptionally rarely there might be a valid reason for it (though most of these are also at least partially a price issue, though usually not just a matter of penny pinching). But usually it's the scam option.
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  45. Physical controls in cars are Still considered a good thing... by everyone except car manufacturers and certain flavours of techbros/idiots.
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  46.  @stantonfuerton  Mind you, it's not even a vowel shift in latin or one of it's daughter langauges, but a Germanic language... a shocking lack of forsight really.
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  47. ... it is though? That's kind of like asking claiming that dollars aren't decimal on the basis that a shop sells stuff for twelve or sixteen dollars each rather than ten or twenty.
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  48. The solution that will cause you the least grief is to use normal dumb switches that aren't connected to the internet of things. Save yourself, and any subsequent owners, untold hours (days, weeks) of headaches and frustration when one company or another pushes a broken update or goes out of business and compleatly bricks your entire lighting system. Among other unnecessary problems. Not to mention such things are almost never properly secure, and are almost always Connected To The Internet. If you can't see how That can go wrong, you shouldn't be ON the internet, for your own safety <_< And that's before getting into the nonsense that is Amazon and Google's abuses (both malicious and neglegent) of the access to the data they get out of such devices (and any other source, to be fair). I won't argue against the convenience when they're properly setup and working though. But, you'll save yourself and others a LOT of pain if A: the system is completely isolated from any sort of internet access (meaning you need physical access to actually change anything), and B: No part of it is propritory.
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  49. The switches have contacts on both sides rather than contact on one and no contact on the other. Not sure if the standard practice is to use the latter sort normally, or the former and just not wire up one of the contacts. You then wire up the circuit as power-switch-switch-light-power, with side A of switch 1 connected to side A of switch 2, and side B of switch 1 connected to side B of switch 2. When both switches are in the same position, you have a complete circuit and the light turns on, when they are not, you don't. Adding more lights works exactly the same as it normally does. Now, if you want to add a Third switch, it gets a lot more complicated.
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  50.  @jwb52z9  yes? There are situations where cars are necessary. There are situations where ICEs are still the best option. Both are a tiny percentage of the situations in which ICEs and cars are currently used, and aren't all a good reason to not replace both systems in the situations where superior alternatives are available. And fundamentally, public transit infrastructure IS the superior alternative in most cases. Extra bonus: in an awful lot of cases, railways can use existing highway right of ways for most of their trip. Heck, Good railways would allow for the highways they then share right of ways with to get Smaller due to reducing the amount of traffic on them. Even a four track rail right of way is less than half the size of highway with 4+ lanes in either direction, after all.
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