Category: Tech

Prattling Repost: The Other Computer War

Something I posted four years ago that’s worth repeating, now that the video of the movie has been replaced with a fresh HD copy. A part of Acorn Computer became ARM, the leading designer of processors for mobile computing:

At the same time the competition between Microsoft and Apple was beginning, in England there was the computer rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn. I think somewhere in the basement I still have my tiny Sinclair Z80 computer, which was distributed in America by Timex. This 2009 movie, featuring Martin Freeman, is a lot of fun and well worth watching.

Alexa, We Need to Not Talk

Having watched “The Man Trap” on Star Trek, Thursday, September 8, 1966 at 8:30, I’m a first generation fan. Despite that, I don’t care to converse with computers, so there are no smart speakers in the house. My FireTV remotes have a mic for Alexa, and using the button for it means you don’t have to start commands by saying “Alexa…” I test the feature occasionally, with the results being useful about 75% of the time.

Amazon has a new feature, called Sidewalk, integrating with their Internet of Things (IOT) things. Creating a WiFi mesh between residences sounds cool, but just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done.

Yesterday and Today

In 1972 we stopped putting men on the Moon, but our Earthbound future was just beginning. That year, Stewart Brand explained it in his article “Spacewar” for Rolling Stone.

The world of tomorrow, that we have today, was also described in 1972, in perfect detail, in a couple of films. The promise of interactive television, as narrated by DJ Casey Kasem…

… didn’t happen with analog cable systems, but it was of course eventually realized by digital networking.

“Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing” was produced in 1972 at WGBH-TV in Boston. That same year, WGBH also produced a much more entertaining movie, the cult favorite Between Time and Timbuktu. It opens with none other than my childhood idol DJ from WABC in New York, Cousin Brucie.

https://youtu.be/Sdp5-YdS9aE

Cheap Thrills

More of my urgent retirement time-wasting has been accomplished with my 60″ 4:3 video projector arrangement in the living room. The screen was a freebie from work, and the new-old stock Viewsonic projector was a $65 eBay acquisition. Upon arrival, the only thing that showed its age was the projector’s rotting air filter foam, that was easily replaced with some foam I had on hand. With a TV tray table and a $25 Bluetooth speaker, I can set everything up — and take it all down — in just a few minutes.

The trick to getting the best picture is watching everything with my laptop computer, so the projector runs in its native 1024×768 resolution. The laptop has the now-rare feature of a VGA connector, and the projector’s inputs are analog-only, including VGA. (Tech note: native VGA is required on the laptop, because copy protection prevents HDMI-to-VGA conversion from working.) Being an early 3-LCD design, the claim was, “vibrant, true-to-life images with better color brightness and a wider color gamut.” (Better than sequential DLP color was what they were implying.) I connected my X-Rite ColorMunki Display meter to the laptop and ran free DisplayCal software. The results live up the manufacturer’s claim. The resolution and color profile are adjusted automatically when connecting the VGA cable to the laptop.

Being intended for business presentations, the projector’s contrast ratio isn’t good enough for modern dark shows and movies. But this quirky, inexpensive, cobbled-together setup is perfect for my intended purpose of watching old cartoons and TV shows streaming over WiFi, or with a USB DVD drive I’ve had for years. It’s fun to realize how much video projection had progressed in the 20 years since the Kloss Novabeam of the mid-80’s.