DOuG pRATt – Page 31 – Prattling Before the Pratfall

The Same, But Different

Two electronics repair guys I enjoy watching on YouTube are British. Mend It Mark is in England, while Graham of Spare Time Repair is now in the U.S.

By chance, Graham and Mark each recently tackled the same model CD player. It’s instructive and entertaining to compare how they go about the process of troubleshooting. (No, I haven’t yet replaced the battery in my Pixel 4a phone.)

Graham’s player had previously been worked on by somebody else and, it seems, modified. It couldn’t be fixed.

Mark’s player had a different set of problems. It was restored to working order.

… And That’s the Way it is

The first time I ever heard about the potential for lasers working over fiber optic cables was on The 21st Century, a long-lost CBS-TV series hosted by Walter Cronkite. Another on-target prediction was every home office having a computerized communications console for remote work.

Light Speed

Is Amazon Web Services developing its own, presumably proprietary, high-density fiber optic cable packages? I have my doubts, but that’s what is said in this Marketplace report.

It seems more likely that AWS is doing what Meta is doing, and working with Corning’s new fiber optic products.

Maybe this has a fuller explanation of what AWS is doing. (Full disclosure: I pay AWS $0.15/month to store some files.)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-insights/building-resilience-inside-awss-nine-million-kilometers-of-fiber-optic-cabling/

200 (or 341) from ’69

Another single from early ’69. Perhaps not as compelling as the previous two I featured, but it’s nice enough. Released on 12/28/68, ‘Things I’d Like to Say’ was the highest charting single for The New Colony Six, peaking at #16.

Here’s lots more from the year of Woodstock to hear. This playlist is supposed to have 341 songs, but when embedded it shows only 200 tunes. A fair trade-off, considering there are no commercials when embedding videos from YouTube.

This link should include all 341 selections, but beware of commercials, unless you have one of the ways of stopping them. I use the Brave browser for that purpose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P71VGlwsqZM&list=PLMxAGUGGn2xLcDYavRMMNTD64xOCRvXr7