Alec is probably my favorite YouTuber. I remember catching his videos before he really blew up and they ticked all my nerd boxes! Unlike other youtubers I enjoy, I never seem to get tired of his content — keep going!
His channel is a fresh breath of air on today's YouTube. No clickbait titlea/thumbnails, no exaggeration, no drama, no filler content? That's rare these days. Everything is well organized and clearly explained. His videos are often long, but every minute is valuable. His videos are like the opposite of CNET -- you learn more after watching 2 minutes of Technology Connection compared to 20 minutes of CNET.
him and "cathode ray dude" are likely my favorite youtubers for this exact reason. When their videos come out I'm cracking out the snacks and watching it on my OPS tv
YT recently recommended his explanation of how pre-computer pinball machines worked to me - a series of 3, hour-long videos. Gave me something to look forward to on my commute. I shared it with everyone I know, and now I'm sharing it with you:
Not from the same Youtuber but that video reminded me of another great one about how mechanical bowling alley machines work: https://youtu.be/Iod6uwUGM2E
I've been a huge fan of these videos. They explain electro-mechanical pinball machines incredibly well plus they're beautifully photographed. A remarkable amount of effort, thought and care went into creating them.
I have my name listed in all of his videos going back to right around when he started his Patreon. You can find me on the first "page" as it scrolls by. Love his videos.
Posy seconded. He's weird (and I'm certain he would agree), but in a fun and interesting way. The music used in his videos is composed and recorded by himself, btw.
A recommendation of mine is Bad Obsession Motorsport. Two men in a shed put a Celica engine in an Austin Mini. So far it's taken 12 years and 41 episodes. Some astonishing engineering going there.
If you're into cars, I'll also recommend "driving 4 answers". Very well researched and presented videos about engine technology.
The first time I came across his channel I felt similarly, but coupled with the dry humor, passive aggressive offhand comments, and intentionally long pauses waiting for the joke to land, I began to feel like it went with the tone of the content. I wasn’t sure at first, but he seems very self aware.
The whole thing reminds of some 80s PBS and Wes Anderson mashup in the best way.
I am a big fan of his channel but in a lot of his videos lately, the tone has been somewhere between holier-than-thou and outright preachy. Just because you spent a week researching a semi-obscure topic enough to present about it on YouTube of all places doesn't make you an authority on the matter, and it absolutely doesn't mean you're suddenly qualified to dismiss people who disagree with your conclusions.
I prefer his videos where the vibe was more along the lines of, "Hey, I've been playing with this neato old technology lately, what say we nerd out about it for 38 minutes or thereabouts?"
It's so sad how back when Sony was an electronics company, it fought the content makers in court for the right for people to make recordings.
Then Sony became a content company, and stopped making things to allow people to make recordings.
With advances in technology, I should be able to pop an SD card in my TV and record what I see, then bring it over to a friend's house and pop it into his TV so we can watch together.
It happened 20 years ago, so some folks around here might be too young to remember the Sony rootkit fiasco [1]. Sony decided it would be a good idea to put on their music CDs an auto-run program that would install a rootkit on your Windows computer, whose job it was to be a watchdog for Sony's copyrights.
I have a non-smart budget TV. It doesn't have many features but it does let you record over the air digital TV to a USB stick. Unfortunately, the playback is incredibly janky.
I tried playing the recorded content on my laptop but I was really surprised to find that it had been encrypted. I don't get the business case for them implementing this. It's broadcast unencrypted and I can easily record it on my laptop using a dvb-t dongle.
Maybe it's a condition of using the FreeView brand in the UK? I don't know.
I will admit I haven't tried this, so I don't know if there's some encryption that would be problematic but there are definitely HDMI video capture devices that are very reasonably priced and would let you record content. BUt most all content is online so it seems there would be very little demand for the feature you are talking about. I can just go to my friends house and log in to whatever app and watch the same stuff I can at my house, or use something like a Chromecast.
TVs in Japan let you do exactly this. You just plug in any sufficiently fast USB mass storage and can record tv to it. There’s some sort of encryption scheme bound to the tv though so it’s not portable. There may be someway to transfer the recordings to other tvs but it’s limited.
There’s even a companion app that will stream recordings on your tv to your phone.
I'm fond of the HDHomerun devices. They just expose a set of URLs over the local network corresponding to channels. You can point VLC to them or just download a chunk of the bitstream to process later.
I'm sure you could appliance that up to trigger an automatic recording on conditions like "card inserted".
I have such a huge nerd crush on this guy. Witnessing the incredible skill of making even the most humble and obsolete of technologies seem like an absolute pinnacle of human ingenuity is always a pleasure.
I actually think that "old tech" is pinnacle of human ingenuity.
When you see the inside of a camcorder, or a VCR as per his latest videos, those were object humans had to design not only for aesthetics but also for their function.
I'm not sure I'm clear but now, I feel like everything is just a randomly designed box stuffed with circuit boards. And more importantly, I really frequently feel like most objects I buy today are never tested by real people before being sent to production lines. If it was the case, somebody, somewhere would have noticed that a tactile snooze button alongside the buttons to change the hour on an alarm clock is stupid, or that the screen is too bright for you to sleep.
When objects were a complex arrangement of things that moved smartly together to create a function, the people designing had to test them. They also had to think actively about ergonomics because there were real constraints to solve in creating a camcorder that you can use with only one hand so you'd better place the buttons in an ergonomic place.
I'm currently in the middle of cleaning/ rehabbing, a 30ish year old Kenmore vacuum cleaner that I inherited from my grandparents when they died a decade ago. It's not precious or an heirloom or anything, but it's still works perfectly.
The thing that struck me when completely disassembling it to clean it was how well and how simply engineered it was. The vacuum is held together with four screws which once you remove them The top simply lifts off and everything is right there. The only "electronics" is a single relay. Everything inside comes apart and goes back together very easily with no tools. There is even a wiring diagram on a sticker inside the case. The powerhead is similar, two screws and two clips (with text and an arrow pointing to the screwdriver slots to release them). Again, very simple and modular and repairable inside with another wiring diagram and instructions for replacing the belt on the inside of the case. The "headlight" bulb is incandescent and socketed. The rubber bumper around the edge is attached with tab-and-slot and not overmolded so it is easily replaceable. I haven't looked, but I'm sure there's a comprehensive catalog of replacement parts available.
It's apparently been a very successful design for them because they're still selling models which are extremely similar[0]. It looks like some of the molds are probably the same.
Because at the time it may have been the pinnacle of ingenuity. Engineers had to figure out a new thing, or a way to do a thing in certain constraints, with what they had on hand, and had to be clever about it.
And they don't have to do that now designing things like folding phones to be super thin with no gap and with cameras with optical zoom and all that? The engineering of a bleeding edge folding smartphone seems pretty ingenious to me.
This video was recommended to me yesterday and I refused to watch, I believed it would take me into some kind of rabbit hole. Either this guy videos or about VHS (or worst, both).
From the comments here, it seems I was right. But now I regret, I could live with a couple of hours of sleeping depravation (I guess).
Technology Connections is a rabbit hole of its own, and if you let it it will send you into a billion more.
You watch 2h30 about RCA's CED (video disc format from the mid 60s which didn't see production before the early 80s at which point it was DOA), and when the playlist ends you're sad and wonder if you should watch it again. It's great.
It upsets me that so much video was recorded on tapes instead of film, because it didn’t wear well and looks awful today. The only hope we have now are approximations using AI.
Think of all of the 80s TV shows and movies we’d be streaming today if the quality weren’t so poor.
Of course tape isn't the best, but you can actually squeeze more out of tape than you might expect.
One of my latest nerd rabbit holes has been using the Domesday Duplicator, and now the MISRC, to extract higher quality video from old VHS, VHS-C, and 8mm video. Thanks to the vhsdecode project you can now bypass most of the original hardware and use software to reconstruct the video from the raw RF. It's expensive, computationally, but with a proper RF extraction you can now capture better video than the the original hardware ever could.
I haven't tried it yet, but I hear that with dirty tricks like "stacking" multiple passes, or even captures from multiple tapes, you can further enhance it.
Film can definitely wear badly, like there’s some 1970s colour stock that just fades into nothingness.
80s movies would be near universally film, mostly 35mm.
TV is complicated, US network TV would also be film (again, mostly 35mm), but the mid 1980s saw the start of a transition to doing editing and other post production on SD videotape, a situation that lasted until the late 90s / early 2000s and HDTV becoming common. You can go back and redo post from the raw film, like Star Trek TNG, but that takes a lot of effort so only big shows have had it done. Other places like the UK often used SD video for more things barring “prestige” shows (and even then they tended to 16mm) so those will be stuck in SD.
The end result of a modern film "transfers" looks so good that people massively the amount of effort that went into the restoration.
The color has always faded. They have to color-grade it back to what they think it originally looked like, though it's more common to use artistic license what they it was originally intended to look like. Artistic interpretation always leaks in, and it will never match what someone saw in the theatre (and there was massive variation between prints even when they were brand new).
At least with TV shows like TNG, we have the tapes to use as a reasonably solid reference for what color was actually broadcast.
And then there is scratch and dust removal. They do so much in-painting to get the clean result that we associate with 35mm film today.
In the UK, indoors studio shots were on video, but outdoors location shots had to be on film, so there was an obvious difference in look when they cut between them.
Monty Python lampooned this in a sketch where Graham Chapman goes outside, exclaims "Good Lord, I'm on film!" and then flees indoors to the safety of video
Major movies, yes. But a lot of B films were on tape, and most of the distribution of movies in the early 80s was tape, so as companies went out of business, what was left was tape.
I’m over 50 y.o., but I remember movies from Blockbuster that I can’t find now because they were minor and only distributed on VHS tapes which were dumped over the years. I can find just about anything that was on film.
It wasn't. 80s TV shows and movies were overwhelmingly recorded on film. Primarily because it was much easier to edit film than tape.
And we are streaming a ton of them now that they've gone back and scanned the original film in 4K.
It's awesome. Heck you can watch I Love Lucy from 1951 in glorious high definition, sharper than anyone ever viewed it originally. It's basically magic.
If you want 1980's, go watch St. Elsewhere or Cheers. They have cinema detail now instead of the fuzzy TV detail you would have seen in the 80's.
Film needs to be developed to be able to see the content at all. Regular color films after shooting is covered in extremely photosensitive, opaque gray paste, and it needs to be washed and cleaned in temperature controlled acid bath to remove the reactive part and only leave the image on the film.
Tapes, on the other hand... You can just rewind it, play it, and overwrite a few times. Cost differences are significant to say the least.
Very few movies were shot on tape, and those that were did it deliberately for the effect of looking awful (Blair Witch Project).
For TV shows made in the US, they were still generally recorded on film, but then editing on tape became common in the late 80s. (In the UK, recording on tape was a lot more common. Not sure about other countries.) If there was enough interest in the show (and the company hadn’t destroyed the film), it would be possible to go back and reconstruct the show from the filmed footage. Unfortunately, I only know of one case where that happened, and reportedly disc sales weren’t enough to turn a profit.
Blair Witch was shot and edited on tape, converted by telecine to 35mm film for release and then they did a transfer of the 35mm for release on home media. It was only last year that we got a release straight from the tape master.
Memory unlocked. Around 1980, our local, government mandated, public access program for cable TV would loan out the first over-the-shoulder camera he showed, along with the sorta-portable battery VHS recording rig. White balance was always a challenge with those. AV nerds could go out and tape random events that nobody would watch but it kept us off the street.
I remember as a kid we had a whole bookcase of those small cassettes for the family camcorder. I always loved getting to put the tiny one into the full-sized VHS, felt like magic that it actually worked when you popped it into the VCR.
Readit News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg
Fascinating (and insanely impressive) to see how a bunch of switches and stepper motors implement complex logic.
A recommendation of mine is Bad Obsession Motorsport. Two men in a shed put a Celica engine in an Austin Mini. So far it's taken 12 years and 41 episodes. Some astonishing engineering going there.
If you're into cars, I'll also recommend "driving 4 answers". Very well researched and presented videos about engine technology.
Ahoy (if you like Amiga and old video games, I cannot recommend enough)
Ben Eater
Majulaar
Tantacrul
And of course Veritasium with the consistently super interesting science videos.
The whole thing reminds of some 80s PBS and Wes Anderson mashup in the best way.
I prefer his videos where the vibe was more along the lines of, "Hey, I've been playing with this neato old technology lately, what say we nerd out about it for 38 minutes or thereabouts?"
Then Sony became a content company, and stopped making things to allow people to make recordings.
With advances in technology, I should be able to pop an SD card in my TV and record what I see, then bring it over to a friend's house and pop it into his TV so we can watch together.
The future has been monetized.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
I tried playing the recorded content on my laptop but I was really surprised to find that it had been encrypted. I don't get the business case for them implementing this. It's broadcast unencrypted and I can easily record it on my laptop using a dvb-t dongle.
Maybe it's a condition of using the FreeView brand in the UK? I don't know.
Anyway, it is very sad.
There’s even a companion app that will stream recordings on your tv to your phone.
I'm sure you could appliance that up to trigger an automatic recording on conditions like "card inserted".
When you see the inside of a camcorder, or a VCR as per his latest videos, those were object humans had to design not only for aesthetics but also for their function.
I'm not sure I'm clear but now, I feel like everything is just a randomly designed box stuffed with circuit boards. And more importantly, I really frequently feel like most objects I buy today are never tested by real people before being sent to production lines. If it was the case, somebody, somewhere would have noticed that a tactile snooze button alongside the buttons to change the hour on an alarm clock is stupid, or that the screen is too bright for you to sleep.
When objects were a complex arrangement of things that moved smartly together to create a function, the people designing had to test them. They also had to think actively about ergonomics because there were real constraints to solve in creating a camcorder that you can use with only one hand so you'd better place the buttons in an ergonomic place.
I'm currently in the middle of cleaning/ rehabbing, a 30ish year old Kenmore vacuum cleaner that I inherited from my grandparents when they died a decade ago. It's not precious or an heirloom or anything, but it's still works perfectly.
The thing that struck me when completely disassembling it to clean it was how well and how simply engineered it was. The vacuum is held together with four screws which once you remove them The top simply lifts off and everything is right there. The only "electronics" is a single relay. Everything inside comes apart and goes back together very easily with no tools. There is even a wiring diagram on a sticker inside the case. The powerhead is similar, two screws and two clips (with text and an arrow pointing to the screwdriver slots to release them). Again, very simple and modular and repairable inside with another wiring diagram and instructions for replacing the belt on the inside of the case. The "headlight" bulb is incandescent and socketed. The rubber bumper around the edge is attached with tab-and-slot and not overmolded so it is easily replaceable. I haven't looked, but I'm sure there's a comprehensive catalog of replacement parts available.
It's apparently been a very successful design for them because they're still selling models which are extremely similar[0]. It looks like some of the molds are probably the same.
[0] https://kenmorefloorcare.com/products/vacuums/canister-vacuu...
From the comments here, it seems I was right. But now I regret, I could live with a couple of hours of sleeping depravation (I guess).
You watch 2h30 about RCA's CED (video disc format from the mid 60s which didn't see production before the early 80s at which point it was DOA), and when the playlist ends you're sad and wonder if you should watch it again. It's great.
Think of all of the 80s TV shows and movies we’d be streaming today if the quality weren’t so poor.
One of my latest nerd rabbit holes has been using the Domesday Duplicator, and now the MISRC, to extract higher quality video from old VHS, VHS-C, and 8mm video. Thanks to the vhsdecode project you can now bypass most of the original hardware and use software to reconstruct the video from the raw RF. It's expensive, computationally, but with a proper RF extraction you can now capture better video than the the original hardware ever could.
I haven't tried it yet, but I hear that with dirty tricks like "stacking" multiple passes, or even captures from multiple tapes, you can further enhance it.
80s movies would be near universally film, mostly 35mm.
TV is complicated, US network TV would also be film (again, mostly 35mm), but the mid 1980s saw the start of a transition to doing editing and other post production on SD videotape, a situation that lasted until the late 90s / early 2000s and HDTV becoming common. You can go back and redo post from the raw film, like Star Trek TNG, but that takes a lot of effort so only big shows have had it done. Other places like the UK often used SD video for more things barring “prestige” shows (and even then they tended to 16mm) so those will be stuck in SD.
The color has always faded. They have to color-grade it back to what they think it originally looked like, though it's more common to use artistic license what they it was originally intended to look like. Artistic interpretation always leaks in, and it will never match what someone saw in the theatre (and there was massive variation between prints even when they were brand new).
At least with TV shows like TNG, we have the tapes to use as a reasonably solid reference for what color was actually broadcast.
And then there is scratch and dust removal. They do so much in-painting to get the clean result that we associate with 35mm film today.
Monty Python lampooned this in a sketch where Graham Chapman goes outside, exclaims "Good Lord, I'm on film!" and then flees indoors to the safety of video
Major movies, yes. But a lot of B films were on tape, and most of the distribution of movies in the early 80s was tape, so as companies went out of business, what was left was tape.
I’m over 50 y.o., but I remember movies from Blockbuster that I can’t find now because they were minor and only distributed on VHS tapes which were dumped over the years. I can find just about anything that was on film.
And we are streaming a ton of them now that they've gone back and scanned the original film in 4K.
It's awesome. Heck you can watch I Love Lucy from 1951 in glorious high definition, sharper than anyone ever viewed it originally. It's basically magic.
If you want 1980's, go watch St. Elsewhere or Cheers. They have cinema detail now instead of the fuzzy TV detail you would have seen in the 80's.
Tapes, on the other hand... You can just rewind it, play it, and overwrite a few times. Cost differences are significant to say the least.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2efhrCxI4J0
For TV shows made in the US, they were still generally recorded on film, but then editing on tape became common in the late 80s. (In the UK, recording on tape was a lot more common. Not sure about other countries.) If there was enough interest in the show (and the company hadn’t destroyed the film), it would be possible to go back and reconstruct the show from the filmed footage. Unfortunately, I only know of one case where that happened, and reportedly disc sales weren’t enough to turn a profit.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube