betamaxthetape

Do you have a source for this? Sounds interesting...

Note that there is another Comet (4B variant, so one of the later ones) preserved at the National Collections Center [1] near Swindon. However it is not available to view [2].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Innovation_Park#Na...

[2] - "[Some items] - including large aircraft - ... are therefore not featured on the tour." https://www.scienceinnovationpark.org.uk/visit-us/public-gui... (at the bottom, "Note on Large Aircraft")

> After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix.

Oh, I would absolutely love to know more details about this. I'm fascinated by the history of telecoms. Would you consider writing a blog post about it? (Or if you prefer, my email is in my profile!)

Is that stack available anywhere? Or do you have a copy?

PhD student here, working on 5G systems. I too would be very interested in this. Email in my profile - and am happy to link you to my academic email once you've reached out if you want to confirm my academic credentials :)

Fantastic footage, many many thanks for uploading it. Have you considered openly licensing it under creative commons of some sort?

Part of the reasons for the loss at the BBC was due to copyright / licensing issues.

> Long-standing agreements with UK talent and musicians unions made it difficult too. Most UK television programmes were only ever contracted for one domestic repeat broadcast and so once a programme had been repeated once, there was often considered to be no point in further retaining the transmission master. It’s purpose had been served.

From: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-video-f...

No, please, the UI is one of the best things about it. I can run YouTube on my 20-year-old iMac G4 (PowerPC G4 processor, 1GB of RAM) and it ... just works. Most other sites fail completely - Gmail Basic HTML view and Hacker News being two notable exceptions.

An earlier (1968) venue with a similar concept was "The Birds Nest", a pub / nightclub in the UK.

> They renamed The King’s Head, an almost brutalist post-war booze bunker at 2 King Street, installing a state-of-the-art steel dance-floor, light-show projectors and a high-end sound system.

> They also installed an in-pub telephone network so that if you saw someone you liked the look of, you could dial their table and have a chat across the room.

Source: https://boakandbailey.com/2020/10/watneys-birds-nest-pubs/

[This information comes to me entirely second-hand, through articles and an episode of a podcast, so I can't vouch 100% for the accuracy.]

Nitpick: the lack of the FM radio stems directly from the lack of headphone jack - the radio relied on wired earphones to work as they were used as an antenna.

So losing the FM radio is more a consequence of the decision to remove the headphone jack, rather than an active decision to remove it.

Still sucks, though. The FM radio was one of the most useful features of my previous phone. By the time I upgraded to a newer phone, its battery lasted for an hour at most during normal tasks, but I could get 12+ hours from the FM radio.

There are now very few phones that have my personal "wishlist" of removable battery + headphone jack + FM radio. And these are all budget phones so if you value a decent camera, you may be out of luck. Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options.

If you are interested in the translations, another copy of the video [0] on YouTube has baked-in English translations.

Disclaimer: I don't speak Korean, so cannot vouch for their accuracy!

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPPlTX2a974

There are several options. LiveCode [1] (formerly open source, now closed) can open HyperCard stacks and is compatible with round 85% of the native syntax - so some things will work, and some bits will need rewriting. I am pretty sure they offer a free trial so you can check to see how well it does at converting your stack before committing.

If you are on a Mac, the command-line stackimport tool [2] will convert the stack to an XML-based format which you can inspect with regular tools.

As a final option, if you just want to get your stack running on the web (and don't mind it being a bit clunky), HyperCard Online [3] (my project!) lets you upload a stack where it will be available on archive.org, and playable directly in the browser, thanks to in-browser emulation of the entire Mac / HyperCard system. You can see examples of stacks using this technology in the collection [4].

[1] - https://livecode.com/

[2] - https://github.com/uliwitness/stackimport

[3] - http://hypercardonline.com/

[4] - https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks?sort=-date

Interesting. But was it ever developed commercially? I can't find any consumer products actually using the counter (either for rental or for lock/jam-after-certain-plays). But that could just be because I'm using the wrong search term - I imagine that there is a brand-specific term and searching "VHS tape play counter" isn't helpful since all the results are for either repairing VCRs, or for accessing the tape counter functionality in the VCR.

Do you have any more information on this? It sounds really interesting, and I'd love to learn more!

I still use LXDE, the predecessor to LXQT, on my daily driver: a Thinkpad T420 (~12 years old) with 8GB RAM.

Low resource usage is the main reason I use LXDE. I often need to run several (4+) VMs, each of which can eat up to 2GB RAM. (These are headless VMs running specialist networking software). When running all of them I need to be really, really careful not to use up all my RAM because if I do, my system just freezes. Everything is stuck - cursor, clock, applications, etc. At this point my only choice is to reboot.

I don't know if this is due to a poorly-configured system (isn't swap supposed to prevent this?), but it certainly makes me much, more aware of memory usage.

It's also nice to be able to use the same base system (Debian + LXDE) on my modern T420 as well as a Pentium 3 laptop with 128MB RAM. I don't think I'd be able to say the same with KDE or Gnome!

Of course, in my haste to post, I forgot the most important bit - the link to the advert itself!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6jrYeBA7BA

To add some context for those not in the UK or Europe...

I am guessing the advert you are referring to is the "Get lost in great stories" one [1] run in Vue cinemas. Other UK cinemas (Picturehouse, Odeon) mention the "big screen experience" but I think the Vue one is the only one that singles out that watching on a phone / laptop / TV can lead to a negative experience.

It's certainly one of the longer "please switch off your phones" messages, at over two minutes in length.

I used to enjoy seeing the adverts and trailers before a film at the cinema, but that was when I rarely visited. Now that I'm going much more regularly (sometimes multiple times a week), the lack of variety is very obvious: when I am forced to sit through the exact same collection of four or five adverts / trailers multiple times, it gets a bit old.

This is exactly what I have found! StreetComplete encourages me not only to take regular walks, but also to explore new areas local to me that I haven't previously visited (since, after a while, you need to move to a new area to find 'quests' that you haven't already completed).

I have discovered lots of places in my local area thanks to StreetComplete!

The easiest thing to do for such cases is to add a note, perhaps with a picture of the building if you're comfortable.

There must be folk who dedicate their time to searching the OSM database for unresolved notes, because whenever I leave a note on StreetComplete mentioning an inaccuracy (e.g: a path where there isn't actually one, a driveway marked incorrectly as a road, etc.) I get an email alert a few days later notifying me that the note has been resolved - often by someone who lives in an entirely different country (and who can use the information I provide in the note plus the satellite imagery to resolve the note).

It is a side-by-side comparison of OSM data from 2012 (left) and the current OSM data. In my local area the difference is massive: the 2012 data has some roads but that's about it, no buildings, house numbers, etc. That's all present on the 2022 version (disclaimer: partly because I spent several months walking around mapping things with the StreetComplete app [1]).

For me it isn't down, just taking a very long time (multiple minutes) to load the 2012 data.

[1] https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete

You might want to contact SalmonSnail [1]. They've been digitizing a massive amount of lost / forgotten 35mm slides, and uploading them to their Flickr account [2].

[1] https://www.timewormarchive.com/contact

[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/salmonsnail/albums

I'm not sure I agree with this. The prices that things sold at might have been cheaper 20 years ago, but the advent of the web with used-goods marketplaces has allowed people to access things that were previously not available or hard to find.

I can go onto ebay and order things from the US that were never available locally in my home country. The same with Yahoo! Auctions for items sold only to the Japanese market. And not only can I access things that I couldn't before, but I can easily search for things. Want a copy of an obscure record? No need to search dozens of local stores - Discogs will probably have a few copies for sale. Need a book to complete a collection? Try a quick search on Amazon or Abebooks.

While the prices that things sell for may be higher, I find that it is considerably easier to collect things now than it would have been before the web.

From the article:

> Hostage negotiation has become something of an industry, with conferences, conventions and shared strategies.

The video produced to introduce Atom 1.0 [1] is my all-time favourite tech announcement video, and I honestly don't see that ever changing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7aEiVwBAdk

This used to be the case in the UK. There were a few companies that would install solar panels on your roof, at no cost to you. You could use the electricity generated by the panels at no cost.

The catch was that the companies took the feed-in tariff (the government subsidy for generating renewable electricity), and that you needed to commit to having the panels on your house for a minimum number of years (making it unviable if you rented, or planned to move in a few years).

In the mid-2010s the UK changed how the subsidies worked, changing from the feed-in scheme where you were paid per unit of electricity generated (regardless of if you consumed that energy or sent it back to the electricity grid) to the Smart Export Guarantee, where you are only paid for the electricity that you sent back to the grid. According to Wikipedia [0] this caused many of the companies operating the "free solar panels" schemes to go out of business.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed-in_tariffs_in_the_United_...

Interesting. Are there any guides you would recommend to get into collecting animation cels? For example, how to avoid fakes?

That TV is still smart by my standards. It runs Tizen, features something called "Samsung Workplace" (which "supports wireless cloud service access"), and has WiFi (whether or not this WiFi connection can be used by Samsung to update the OS is not specified, but I would think it is likely).

Am I the only one sad to see the original machine gutted out? I get that these machines aren't particularly useful (I have one myself) but it really does seem a shame for it to be modified in this way.

Update: the BBC has released an official statement [0] confirming the launch of the two shortwave broadcasts.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2022/millions-of-russians-...

This [0] is the tweet the article is referring to, since it doesn't actually link to it. I cannot find any official BBC source confirming this - anyone able to help out?

The official announcement [1] from NEXUS about their medium wave service clarifies they they have switched on a separate transmitter on 1323 kHz, in addition to their regular shortwave broadcasts on 7290 kHz.

[0] https://twitter.com/aborgnino/status/1497278772965527553

[1] https://www.nexus.org/humanitarian-radio-broadcasting-at-the...