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stevewm posted:I've been following him for some time. I am a Patreon supporter even. He actually isn't in his parents basement! Believe it or not, he does the videos from the basement in his second house now! insta posted:Second house? Ugh, guillotine then. No, hang on. If he's moved out of his parent's basement and into a new basement, then that is his first house. So, we don't have to guillotine him. For which I am glad.
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Apr 27, 2020 17:42
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Shut up Meg posted:If you haven't watched Technology Connections entire catalogue, then you really should. I love Alec's videos. Sometimes on the comments of other tech videos, totally unchallenged, I see the odd person or two talking poo poo about how he's "too gay" or "manic" or "annoying" but given what people rise to the top on YouTube, I cannot fathom why they think *Alec* is too much. He's one of the most thorough and sweet creators on YouTube. Also that homophobia (and he's never shared his sexuality, they're just judging his affect) is unsurprising in the tech community but gross. 3D Megadoodoo posted:If you ever want to see a bunch of old men, some of which have literally already died, arguing for decades, postal history is your friend. Oh, of course I do! Tell me everything! Please, give me a shot of philately drama in a thread about hobby drama sometime, there's probably one I've got squirreled away somewhere, but if there's more obsolete tech, I'm all ears. 
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Apr 27, 2020 18:07
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Shut up Meg posted:No, hang on. If he's moved out of his parent's basement and into a new basement, then that is his first house. FWIW, I'm a Patreon too  He's great.
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Apr 27, 2020 18:36
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His videos about how CRT TVs work kept popping up on my youtube so I started watching them and immediately subscribed a while ago. My internet hindbrain that wants to be lovely to people told me not to like him, but I pushed past that and have really enjoyed his videos.
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Apr 27, 2020 18:44
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Technology Connections' jokes and sarcasm do grate on me, but his content is some of the best out there. Pretty much everyone making videos on old technology (except Techmoan) is kind of a weirdo in some way. I think the 8-Bit Guy has shown that it doesn't matter if you have the personality of a brick wall, you can build a following just from having great content and production value.
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Apr 27, 2020 18:54
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wa27 posted:Technology Connections' jokes and sarcasm do grate on me, but his content is some of the best out there. Pretty much everyone making videos on old technology (except Techmoan) is kind of a weirdo in some way. I kinda lost interest in 8-Bit Guy when I found put he was a bit of a gun nut. There's also this.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyTbghMf7Sg
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Apr 27, 2020 19:17
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Nocheez posted:I was going to be that guy, but Pressure is a lovely Billy Joel song. I was blissfully unaware of this song, but yesterday it was on the radio at work and I knew exactly what it was when I heard the lyrics.
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Apr 27, 2020 19:43
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Porfiriato posted:https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/lost-notes/a-million-dollars-worth-of-plastic I've always heard there wasn't an actual winning record, that they printed one backing sheet with a 'you're the winner, here's how you claim it' under the record. Even though the whole premise was 'play the record to see if you win'.
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Apr 27, 2020 20:24
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mehall posted:I didn't know about IRS records, and the R.E.M. bit was printed a lot smaller, I don't know when he received all of these, he might've only had a day or two to glance at them and do a bit of homework, so I can see missing the little R.E.M. text, especially when the focus is on the format, not the content. From how it sounded from the Foone thread, it was even more slapdash than that. Foone had basically all the information needed for a quick overview, he was just in such a rush to get it out he either never asked Foone for it or didn't read what was given to him. There were also a few formats that LGR/Techmoan/etc had covered in longform video too that he apparently never even saw. He was really confused by CD Video when Techmoan put out a video months ago answering literally every question he asked in that video.
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Apr 27, 2020 21:00
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Dick Trauma posted:Do you have any flexidiscs? Some of mine were smooth on one side. hey, great idea. ive got a bunch of flexidisks around, maybe some of them will be in decent enough shape for this
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Apr 27, 2020 21:08
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Beartaco posted:That part was really interesting too. I'm not from the States so I'd never even heard of these rental vending machines. This will blow your loving mind, then. Pennsylvania has some of the dumbest alcohol laws in the country. This is a result of the end of prohibition, when the legislature wanted legal booze but the governor was an ardent prohibitionist. So what got passed was an alcohol control measure designed to, and I quote, making buying booze "as inconvenient and expensive as possible." Every bit of time since then has been people trying to drag the LCB into the future with rope and a lot of muscle power and the LCB digging in and taking a contested step forwards every once in a great while. A bunch of years ago, people were realizing "Wait, we can get into grocery stores in most states, including New Jersey, and buy wine. Why can't we do that here?" After making the requisite noises about how it prevents underage drinking, or how state monopsony on buying wine gives the consumer better prices and selection (really), they decided to throw a dog a bone and implement a pilot program of...wine vending machines. A very few select grocery stores were allowed to spend a shitload of money to install these kiosks. To buy wine through them, you make your selection, swipe your ID, then you blow into a breathalyzer (can't sell booze to someone who's already drunk, after all), and then look into a camera so a state employee in Harrisburg can verify you match the ID and approve the sale. And of course that means that those vending machines didn't work on Sundays or holidays. And as a bonus, the state got sued by the company it contracted to build and install the machines, because they aborted the program (because people hated it) after only 32 had been installed rather than the 100 it contracted for. I'm not sure what the outcome was but it involved at least $300,000 in legal fees. It also lost over a million dollars on the program itself. Aix posted:hey, great idea. ive got a bunch of flexidisks around, maybe some of them will be in decent enough shape for this This was the best one. I need to find it, I'm sure I have it packed away somewhere: https://www.discogs.com/Billy-And-The-Boingers-Bootleg/release/1220755 Phanatic has a new favorite as of 03:26 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 27, 2020 21:23
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wa27 posted:Technology Connections' jokes and sarcasm do grate on me, but his content is some of the best out there. Pretty much everyone making videos on old technology (except Techmoan) is kind of a weirdo in some way. Technology Connections is one of the few of the channels I have seen that will issue corrections and retractions, as well as research the thing before talking about it. -- meaning he doesn't do dumb poo poo like talk out his rear end about things. I respect the gently caress out of that these days, and I like the sass too. It's kind of how I think.
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Apr 27, 2020 21:24
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Aix posted:hey, great idea. ive got a bunch of flexidisks around, maybe some of them will be in decent enough shape for this Laserdiscs are nice when you need a flat record, too.
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Apr 27, 2020 21:25
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Wasabi the J posted:Technology Connections is one of the few of the channels I have seen that will issue corrections and retractions, as well as research the thing before talking about it. -- meaning he doesn't do dumb poo poo like talk out his rear end about things. I saw one where he mentioned searching the US Patent database in order to find the answer to a minor question that he could have skipped and no-one would have even noticed.
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Apr 27, 2020 21:36
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Phanatic posted:blow into a breathalyzer (can't sell booze to someone who's already drunk, after all), Even before coronavirus this sounds like an awful idea. 
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Apr 28, 2020 02:47
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That's why they mandated it.
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Apr 28, 2020 02:58
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I will say that the Norwegian wine and liquor monopoly (called, in true traditional social democrat style, "The wine monopoly") is ... kind of great, and I'd vote to keep it. Sure, the opening hours are a bit paternalistic, but it's not that much worse than the beer hours. They have done mail order forever for anyone not living close to one, and they were decently early with a web version. They have a huge selection, and you can get everything in every store if you give them time to ship it internally - at no extra cost, since that would discriminate against the smaller towns. Their pricing is ... well, it's outrageously expensive for the cheap stuff, but that's the alcohol taxes at work. They aren't supposed to run a profit, so they are amazingly affordable for the expensive stuff; you get rich old men camping outside on the days when they get the rare Burgundies and the like. And, yes, buying on behalf of an entire small country does get them some interesting expensive wines, and good prices (before tax...) on the more mainstream ones.
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Apr 28, 2020 03:56
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ishikabibble posted:Thread favorite Techmoan has a much more in depth video on 8mm and its whole thing as an attempt at making a replacing VHS format, and he goes into films getting distributed on it and their subsequent use in airlines. Oh that's neat. I figured that when he said 8mm movie you'd actually need a projector.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:43
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Speaking of 8mm, has Techmoan or anyone ever done a video on the commercial releases of movies in 8mm/Super 8 film format for home projection? It apparently was a thing for a time in the 70s/early 80s before videotape really took off, but I can't imagine it was that popular - most 8mm home movie cameras were silent, so I wouldn't imagine many people had an 8mm/Super 8 movie projector with sound. Here's an article I found that talks a bit about them, but it's a complete pain in the rear end trying to search for info since Google just returns a bunch of results related to the movies "8mm" and "Super 8". https://www.homecinemachoice.com/content/super-8-when-home-cinema-was-super
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Apr 29, 2020 03:23
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Around 1980 my local library had a silent Super 8 black and white version of Star Wars. It was only a few minutes long but I was still enthralled by it.
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Apr 29, 2020 03:30
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This has just reminded me that for the first 7 years of my life, my parents had an 8mm video camera. I don’t remember it, but I do remember when my parents bought a VHS camera when we traveled to Japan the summer before my 2nd grade year. I still have VHS tapes that my mother made by setting her new video camera up on a tripod in the basement, pointed to a screen on the wall where she projected the old soundless videos and recorded them onto VHS while giving color commentary. I transferred them to DVD a few years ago along with later home videos, but the only fun ones to watch are those with her audio descriptions.
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Apr 29, 2020 04:10
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I watch Technology Connections for the jokes and also he's cute
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Apr 29, 2020 05:17
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empty baggie posted:This has just reminded me that for the first 7 years of my life, my parents had an 8mm video camera. I don’t remember it, but I do remember when my parents bought a VHS camera when we traveled to Japan the summer before my 2nd grade year. I still have VHS tapes that my mother made by setting her new video camera up on a tripod in the basement, pointed to a screen on the wall where she projected the old soundless videos and recorded them onto VHS while giving color commentary. I transferred them to DVD a few years ago along with later home videos, but the only fun ones to watch are those with her audio descriptions. I had a similar experience, except my grandfather had them on Betamax with commentary. Some of the footage was pre WWII. If he hadn't transferred them, we would have had nothing. The original films sat in a Michigan garage for decades. My grandfather died 2 weeks after I finished all of the transfers. We watched them at the wake and laughed and cried our asses off late into the night. Also of note, the Betamax player released the magic smoke moments after transferring the last tape.
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Apr 29, 2020 05:32
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Phanatic posted:This will blow your loving mind, then. oh my god holy poo poo I think I have an idea what tech they used for the camera / breathalyzer. I used to work for a house arrest company that had gear like that and i'm sure is in the timeframe. Basically it was a modified DOS system that was highly futuristic and NOT Y2K compliant, and it fit into a big tower size case, like actual tower size. It had some kind of card that was essentially a bank of modems, and another one that had those stabby AV outs, the ones that had actual impedance ratings written next to the jack. It also had a headset and what was pretty much an answering machine, and a bank of black and white crt monitors. The way it worked is you would enter someone into the system, then record a series of short instruction clips, like "[client] take your test now." "Press send." It would call these people's landlines according to a schedule you had to put in, and on the other side was a little crt with a vaccum tube camera. It also had a breathalyzer. What would happen is they would pick up the phone get the message, and have to take the test. What the camera saw would show up on the screen and they would check to see that the alcohol results were in frame with their face, then they would hit send and it would transmit a super low quality pic back to the system to get stored. You could interrupt the test and talk to them at any time if they were loving up or refusing the test. The part that was inside the house was completely dumb and you could do stuff like hook two of them together and they would be able to send one image frame back and forth, that's how we tested them to see what was broke and what wasn't. Sometimes you would have to press on the sides of the screen to get it to work for some reason. The system could handle a shitload of people if you had enough land lines and monitors and stuff, and as long as they weren't dicking around it would work pretty much automatically. Iirc they had some kind of really weird system of like magnetooptical disks to store the records and these were absolutely bolted on way after the fact as an upgrade, they looked like they were a decade in the future from the rest of the system. I think it was specifically this kind of disk because literally nothing else worked with either the software or whatever weird peripheral bus that thing had. It was super archaic in general but that thing was goddamn bulletproof and if you powered it on right now i'm absolutely confident that it would still work, assuming there are any non-destroyed pieces of endpoint hardware. When I quit I made sure to steal one of the vaccum tubes, because I wasn't able to find even one pic in gis for any of the system here it is:   It says it's a Panasonic S4097 Matsushita, made in japan, 28 28 U Someone put a sharpie mark on it so it's probably failed. By the time I quit the system had been pretty much gutted and all the really fun poo poo like the monitors and printer and other really weird neat pieces were stolen or made their way to a dumpster.
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Apr 29, 2020 13:23
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Thats a Vidicon tube... it is what was used before CCDs and CMOS sensors came along. Vidicon tubes where pretty much out of regular use by the late 80s. Its strange they would have used vidicons in the 90s/00s. The end user hardware must have been of a old design.
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Apr 29, 2020 13:48
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It was a highly specialized system, the kind that moves fairly slowly, and yeah it was pretty old. The next system they came out with had regular sensors, although I don't know what kind. It was old enough we were debating how possible it would be to replace certain components with gear developed in house. If I knew the kinda stuff I know now I think we would have at least got to a super lovely prototype. But this wine vending machine system is totally the kinda poo poo that would have used something similar either the old version or the newer one. The companies that work with this sorta stuff would be salivating at these kinda ludicrous government programs, and manufacturers would love to crack open an additional market. The fact you had another person on the other side checking the pics is absolutely 100% house arrest tech of a certain era imo. These days things are different, but a lot of gov policies require really weird stuff like that because when stuff like house arrest and breathalyzers first came out nobody making policy had any idea about tech. Even now there's people dictating policy that probably should not be involved.
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Apr 29, 2020 16:59
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Phanatic posted:This will blow your loving mind, then. the soviets just used a pencil
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Apr 29, 2020 18:24
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Pham Nuwen posted:the soviets just used a pencil *checks box sovietishly* vodka, check
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Apr 29, 2020 19:18
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Pham Nuwen posted:the soviets just used a pencil NASA doesn't use pencils because the dust in zero-g from them could get into the electronics and short things out or cause fires, things you don't want to happen in space
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Apr 29, 2020 19:23
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Iron Crowned posted:NASA doesn't use pencils because the dust in zero-g from them could get into the electronics and short things out or cause fires, things you don't want to happen in space And NASA has been a little pyrophobic since Apollo 1.
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Apr 29, 2020 19:26
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Iron Crowned posted:NASA doesn't use pencils because the dust in zero-g from them could get into the electronics and short things out or cause fires, things you don't want to happen in space Both sides used grease pencils
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Apr 29, 2020 19:26
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NASA doesn't use pencils because they use laptops, jeez
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Apr 29, 2020 19:34
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An American who found himself in Moscow asks a man carrying two suitcases what the time was. "Certainly," says the Russian, setting the two bags on the ground and looking at his wrist. "It is 11:43 and 17 seconds. The date is February 13th, the moon is nearing its full phase, and atmospheric pressure stands at 992 hectopascals rising." Amazed, the American asks the man if his watch is from Japan. The man assures him that it is Soviet technology. "That's fantastic!" the American says. "Yes," the Russian answers, picking up the two suitcases. "Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go charge the batteries."
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Apr 29, 2020 19:37
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What do you call a machine the size of a warehouse, burns 40 gallons of diesel per minute and cuts an apple into 3 pieces? A soviet machine designed to cut an apple into 4 pieces.
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Apr 29, 2020 19:54
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I thought this was the thread for obsolete technology, not obsolete jokes.
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Apr 29, 2020 20:02
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Nocheez posted:I thought this was the thread for obsolete technology, not obsolete jokes. Obsolete Jokes you say? America!
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Apr 29, 2020 20:20
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Cojawfee posted:What do you call a machine the size of a warehouse, burns 40 gallons of diesel per minute and cuts an apple into 3 pieces? A soviet machine designed to cut an apple into 4 pieces. We here have more crude version of this being "What does not blink, does not buzz and definitely cannot be put into rear end?" "The Soviet-made blinking rear end-buzzer"
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Apr 29, 2020 20:20
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Nocheez posted:I thought this was the thread for obsolete technology, not obsolete jokes. Just substitute "Russian" for "Soviet" and the jokes still work. 
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Apr 29, 2020 20:33
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shovelbum posted:*checks box sovietishly* How many grams?
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Apr 29, 2020 21:33
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Der Kyhe posted:We here have more crude version of this being "What does not blink, does not buzz and definitely cannot be put into rear end?" "The Soviet-made blinking rear end-buzzer" it's not that it can't be put into rear end, it's that it lacks a flared base
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Apr 29, 2020 21:38
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