Seventeen years ago: “Our washing machine has suddenly started to leak.”
Today: The washing machine I bought in 2008 has suddenly started leaking.
Remastering the Master
By the start of the 1940’s, Alfred Hitchcock had left England for America. The “official” (if that means anything) Alfred Hitchcock page on Facebook has this collection of posters for his Forties movies.
Hitchcock’s peak was during the Fifties, especially when he had an unbroken string of masterpieces from Dial M for Murder in 1954, through Psycho in 1960. At that same time he also produced his excellent anthology TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
My personal favorite Hitchcock film is Vertigo, from 1958. The premise of the story is preposterous, but nothing is beyond belief when a man is obsessed with a woman.
The first time I saw Vertigo was in the 80s, when Hitch’s “lost” (long-withheld) Paramount movies were put back into release for the first time in twenty years. Denro and I attended a very memorable showing at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA.
I have Vertigo in this Hitchcock Blu-ray/4K HD combo package.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CPLM17C
My JVC DLA-HD750 projector is now an old model, but as Bismo can attest the picture quality continues to be outstanding. Although 4K content is scaled down to 2K for the projector, there are other differences that are readily apparent in remastering, besides image resolution and High Dynamic Range.
Recently, I complained about the terrible image quality of Alien on Amazon Prime. I purchased it with high expectations, as I very much prefer the presentation of Vertigo on Amazon Prime over both the Blu-ray and 4K HD copies.
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.)
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