Today’s tech trap: Anybody who tells you that older slimline (laptop-style) CD-ROM drives have trouble reading CD-R’s, even the ones installed in servers, is correct.
Category: Tech
YouTube on speed
My FiOS 25 Mbps service is so reliable that I don’t bother checking the speed much anymore, but when I do I use Speakeasy. Now YouTube is offering its own interesting speed test. Right-click on a YouTube player to try it, or go to this link.
Lately, I’ve taken to channeling YouTube through the player installed on this site, which provides several advantages for me. The videos I create myself need about 750 Kbps to play smoothly, which is no problem for a broadband connection, but pushes a DSL link hard. I am hoping to add a feature that will automatically detect a slower connection and compensate for it.
Audio’s magnetic personality
Magnetic recording tape. Perfected by the Nazis, it is one of the most important innovations in the history of audio, along with Edwin Armstrong’s invention of frequency modulation. These two technologies changed everything.
Magnetic recording in studios, and vinyl microgroove records for homes, first appeared at about the same time — 1947-1948. The transistor was also created in 1947, but it wouldn’t be established in high fidelity audio for another 20 years.
The first tape recorders were brought to America from Germany after World War II by a man named Jack Mullin, who modified one of the units and demonstrated it for Bing Crosby’s technical producer. The tale is told at the end of this link, with the fascinating story of the development of videotape.
On October 1, 1947, two takes of Philco Radio Time with Bing Crosby were recorded magnetically by Mullin, and edited into a single, seamless show. The audio player has a minute of that historic program, preceded by a minute of how Bing sounded on January 29 of that year, using disc recording technology. You may recognize the name of Bing’s guitar player, whose son had a successful career as a record producer and musician, and be sure to catch the name of Bing’s arranger-conductor, who would later have a connection to the Peanuts TV specials.
With Crosby’s financial backing, Ampex began manufacturing tape recorders. One of the first production units was given to Les Paul, who had played guitar for Bing. It’s impossible to overstate the influence of what Les Paul did with his tape recorders.
Here are a couple of captivating videos of Les with Mary Ford, performing two of their best known numbers, taken from films of TV shows. Ironically, Ampex wouldn’t perfect magnetic videotape recording until Les and Mary were off of TV. In the second clip, Les kids around before getting to the real demonstration of how he and Mary did what they did so beautifully. These are worth watching twice — first, for Les, and then for Mary. I eat up this stuff like ice cream.
These clips are being streamed from Oobleckboy on YouTube. The comments are his.
Dishing on the Dash
Sony’s new Internet appliance, the Dash, looks very slick, and Sony’s using a Beatles song to promote it. They can do that because they own the publishing rights to most of the Beatles catalog, but not the performance rights to the EMI/Apple recordings.
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Discussions about flexible-yet-limited Net appliances, like the Chumby and the Sony Dash, include a lot of naysayers. They call them glorified alarm clock radios, and for now they’re right, but in the big picture they’re wrong. Eventually you’ll see touch screen devices like these built into refrigerator doors.
Boilerplate: putting the kettle on
It’s sort of like Zelig meets Iron Man, by way of the Tin Woodsman. It’s Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel.
Is it a graphic novel? A faux Dorling Kindersley™ book? Watch this promo video of an ultra-nifty idea that’s very nicely done, combining classic illustration techniques and computer effects.
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Netflix flub
As you can see, I’ve been using Netflix for over six years.
In all this time I’ve never had a problem with Netflix. Until now.
We rented ‘Blade Runner: The Final Cut’ on Blu-ray, and the disc was defective. It froze at a certain spot and wouldn’t recover. (Yeah, yeah… I cleaned it and tried again, etc.) So I returned it and asked for a replacement. They sent a high-def disc, but it was in the defunct HD-DVD format! I returned the disc, indicating it had been mislabeled. So what did they send? Another HD-DVD copy. Grrrr…
This time I called and actually got to speak with someone. “Destroy this disc!” I told him. I’m not going to bother asking for another copy from Netflix. I think Bismo owns ‘Blade Runner: The Final Cut’ on DVD. We’ll watch that.
BTW, Best Buy and the Sony outlet stores have stacks of the BDP-N460 Blu-ray player for only $140. If you can use Ethernet instead of Wifi for streaming video, that’s an incredible deal.