1,325 karma · joined October 18, 2020
That drove me crazy for about a week trying to figure out what the noise was coming from... Pinhole water pipe leak? Cat stuck in the flue? Once I realized what it was, I didn't mind it much. It is better than loud old compressors suddenly kicking on and burrr'ing away then stopping.
So now my policy is to retrofit all old refrigerators with digital STC-1000 thermostats. A bit more work to cut out some plastic, split the hot wire and tap into a neutral wire (easy enough to follow the bulb) but cheaper, super reliable, and gives very consistent and highly controllable results.
Two such upgraded refrigerators are still working without an issue several years later. Though both required replacing the relay (with a solid state relay/capacitor unit) at about the same time, and one after replacement of the evaporator fan motor due to noise issues.
It's likely not possible to do much better. I never said that was the most practical method.
If you're a fan of paper, you could base64 encode the digital photo and print that out onto paper with a small font, or store the digital data in several QR codes. You can include a small preview too. But a couple hard drives or microSD cards will hold many millions of times as many photos in less physical space.
These days the FCC is unlikely to care, but I suspect viewership would suffer if any of the major broadcast networks downgraded their "main channel" signal to SD.
This explains the typical arrangement, as well as listing some of the extreme cases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subchannel#United_Stat...
Circa 2019, after the FCC "repack" / "incentive auction" (to free-up TV channels for cellular LTE use) it became very common for each RF channel to carry 4+ channels. But to be fair, many broadcasters did purchase new, improved MPEG-2 encoders at that time, which do perform better with a lower bit-rate, so quality didn't degrade by a lot.
They're called GPUs... They're ASICs rather than FPGAs, but it's easy to update the driver software to handle new video codecs. The difficulty is motivating GPU manufacturers to do so... They'd rather sell you a new one with newer codec support as a feature.
That can happen at even the highest bitrates if "HDR" is not enabled in the video codec.
Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9j89L8eQQk
That's basically what a rack console is. At 1U it was skinnier than laptops from prior decades. They're not exactly a laptop form factor, but to get them smaller you would have had to accept a much lower screen resolution, which would risk some systems not being able to display (e.g. your server may have booted-up to 1280x1024 while your laptop could only do 800x600), or would have needed to be quite expensive to add an ultra-high DPI screen.
Still, at various times there were briefly devices like that available for purchase at closeout prices... like the failed "Motorola ATRIX lapdock":
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/motorola-laptop-dock-review/
https://www.amazon.com/AT-Laptop-Dock-Motorola-ATRIX/dp/B004...
I'd say the USB-HDMI capture card is a better solution all-around. I even prefer it to USB "crash carts" because you aren't dependent on the manufacturer keeping their proprietary software software updated for each subsequent Windows/Linux/Mac release.
A Display Controller Board for driving a laptop screen from an external input is going to add at least $20 to the price of the laptop. Considerably more expensive than the $6 USB-HDMI capture devices which do the job (and have more utility).
The HDMI output port on your laptop (if you even have one, many only offer miniDP) can't just be run in reverse. The board would need to be updated to allow switching it between output and input, at considerable extra cost.
Abstract proclamations don't affect people. Taking something away from them, affects them. That's when the rubber hits the road. That's when the public starts turning on the politicians. Even the strictest party-line voters don't support EVERYTHING (or even most of what) the party says and does.
> They don't let their kids watch educational shows.
> They have an entire "alternative" media infrastructure set up.
"PBS has also reported a diverse ideological split among its consumers [...] 26% who self-identify as Republicans and 37% who say they are independents."
https://www.thewrap.com/defund-pbs-npr-impact/
"Among those that voted for President Trump, PBS/public television has a much higher positive image rating (60%) than the traditional broadcast networks (37%), cable TV networks (41%) and newspapers (24%)."
"66% who voted for President Trump favor increasing or maintaining federal funding for public TV"
https://www.pbs.org/about/about-pbs/blogs/news/survey-shows-...
The PBS affiliate stations in most need of federal funding are typically in rural, largely Republican areas. Let their own base tell the party they're not happy about being cut-off from their baseball documentaries and all the educational shows their kids watch.
"Brother printers do not intentionally degrade print quality based on whether a Brother Genuine or third-party ink/ toner cartridge is used."
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/06/brother_firmware_upda...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/brother-denies-using...
Source comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1hm4fi6/...
Tabloid printing used to be quite inexpensive... Any 11" wide dot-matrix printer could manage it.
The rise of inkjets made it relatively more expensive. I resorted to rescaling tabloid (11x14") printouts to US Legal (8.5x14") to keep old business applications working.
In recent years, as A3 format copiers (with network printing) have become very common in offices everywhere, it's becoming inexpensive to print on tabloid sized paper once again.
That's the usual chicken & egg problem... If they sold more units, the prices would have come down. But people weren't buying many, because the prices were high.
Itanium, like Alpha, or any other alternative architecture, would also have trouble and get stuck in that circle. x86-64, being a very inexpensive add-on to x86, managed to avoid that.
Listing all the deficiencies of something, and putting together a thing that fixes all of them, is the kind of "designed by committee" project that everyone hates. Real progress requires someone to put together a quick project, with new features they think are useful, and letting the public decide if it is useful or not.
If the buses and cars are on the same roads, going the same speed, the car will get you to your destination faster, and everyone will go by car. Buses only get ridership if they have dedicated lanes where they can go faster than regular car traffic:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22143...
That sounds like DEC Alpha to me, yet Alpha didn't take over the world. "Proprietary architecture" is a bad word, not something you want to base your future on. Without the Intel/AMD competition, x86 wouldn't have dominated for all these years.
So, just like Youtube, then?
And a decent list here: https://ideaexplainers.com/video-sites-like-youtube/
I struggled with that myself (yt-dlp documentation could use some work). What's currently working for me is:
yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[width<800][vcodec~='^(avc|h264)']+bestaudio[acodec~='^((mp|aa))']"“When an airplane crashes, the safety belt…may become a deadly hazard.”
- Scientific American Dec 1951 “The Dangerous Safety Belt”
"Aviation requirements for basic safety features, including passenger safety belts, were codified in 1972"
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/how-airlin...
TV broadcast tower agreements are not ossified. Every year some station switches from one to another. Comcast buying NBC led to quite a spate of that in several markets. It can be slightly disruptive on the fringes (like Comcast/NBC*) or it can go unnoticed or even improve reception.