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...
VWestlife
This Does Not Compute
Michael MJD
Tech Tangents
Janus Cycle
LGR
Posy
Cathode Ray DudeA 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.
He's just Dutch :)
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.
Ultima Underworld is my favourite so far, that's an outstanding game.
Huygens Optics
CuriousMarc
Applied Science (<- not the journal)
clabretro
xkcd's What If?
optimumThe whole thing reminds of some 80s PBS and Wes Anderson mashup in the best way.
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.
The circuit is the game.
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?"
Think of all of the 80s TV shows and movies we’d be streaming today if the quality weren’t so poor.
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.
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.
Sometimes the original negatives are in really good condition, but you still have to redo the color-grading, because the original color-grading was done chemically onto some transfer which now has faded or was just pretty bad to begin with, if you even can find it.
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
Do you know where I could find a good example of what a telecine'd video would look like, or are they indifferentiable today?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ha! Joking?
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".
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.
We had VHS and used it just to ingest tapes into Video8, keeping our collection purely video8.
dvh•5mo ago
haunter•5mo ago
robertlagrant•5mo ago
hdgvhicv•5mo ago
There’s then the in depth programs which spend half an hour or an hour on a specific subject (dispatches, panorama etc)
People are less interested in long form news though, so public service broadcasters in the U.K. have a duty to reach as many people in as many ways.
Sesse__•5mo ago
TylerE•5mo ago
Sesse__•5mo ago
rs186•5mo ago
bigstrat2003•5mo ago
eldaisfish•5mo ago
Please, stop thinking in binaries.
Telaneo•5mo ago
I wouldn't want to read a phone review that was text only, but one that has a set or two of images and video to show of the camera, a size comparison to a different phone, and you've got most of what you'd want to put in a video anyway. The rest of many youtube videos are just talking heads and stock footage. The substantive parts of many videos, the stuff that actually should be video for better information density, is rarely a majority of any given video.
Video is definitely a more engaging form of content for me, but claiming it's more effective at information transfer as compared to text is ridiculous.
TylerE•5mo ago
Telaneo•5mo ago
TylerE•5mo ago
Telaneo•5mo ago
All the cases of him comparing the form factor, that is, the size of the casette, with something else, are easily shown with either pictures or diagrams.
kalleboo•5mo ago
fishgoesblub•5mo ago
dagurp•5mo ago
rs186•5mo ago
His videos are long but every minute is worth it.
Let someone else make watered down videos that appear to cover everything but don't actually explain anything.
gosub100•5mo ago
numpad0•5mo ago