jcrawfordor

7 ms·

31.
by jcrawfordor 1y ago
Silent films were inconsistent on frame rate, especially early on. The cameras were hand cranked and so the frame rate was determined by the operator. It wasn't unusual to speed up and slow down the frame rate within a scene to achieve
32.
by jcrawfordor 1y ago
I wrote an article about this almost a year and a half ago, and I was wondering how it's held up. I think Scientific American is remiss in not digging a bit deeper, because to me one of the main parts of this story is a commercial phen
33.
by jcrawfordor 1y ago
I agree that the article text could be clearer. As I understand it, it was originally incorporated as Multiscreen Corporation (probably to work on some kind of multi-projector format which were in vogue at the time) and then renamed to IMAX
34.
by jcrawfordor 1y ago
This is definitely an area for debate. I've seen the physical resolution of a 70/15 film frame estimated at 70MP, which is obviously a lot more than the ~8MP of 4k. The MP comparisons between film and digital are a little iffy tho
35.
by jcrawfordor 1y ago
Thanks! email to me@computer.rip should work, sorry if it has given you trouble. Theater organs are one of my weird little interests, so maybe it's a leap but when I saw a tangential mention that Preston Fleet had been a theater organi
36.
by jcrawfordor 1y ago
I think you're right, I mixed up some different locations. Here's the cool thing: while I was checking that against newspaper archives I happened to run across an older version of an illustration I saw used in the '90s, but t
37.
by jcrawfordor 1y ago
Modern speed control technology has expanded the incline range for steel-wheeled trains quite a bit. Inclines that would have historically pointed towards rubber-tired or non-traction systems are usually within the range of steel wheels wit
38.
by jcrawfordor 1y ago
the constant-current drivers in LED lighting are a very different concept from constant-current lighting circuits, which are a ~1920s technology rarely seen today. constant-current lighting circuits can be miles long, operate at up to 1kV o
39.
by jcrawfordor 1y ago
It should be understood that the largest impact of the Starfish Prime test, knocking out streetlights, was the result of a very specific design detail of the street lights that is now quite antiquated (they were high-voltage, constant-curre
40.
by jcrawfordor 1y ago
There's a few different reasons things are more complex, but one interesting wrench to throw in is that audio tones may not be the best way to send DTMF. Many digital telephone networks support out-of-band DTMF where the digits are sen
41.
by jcrawfordor 1y ago
CDMA networks broadcasted the time (from GPS) in the clear as part of the base station advertisements, so you used to see CDMA used as a precision time source without any kind of subscription required. CDMA equipment required accurate time
42.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
The backdating is trivially detectable unless you manage to get the database operations to happen the wrong way around, which is why the whole "holding a packet" thing has to happen. But part of the reason for the blackout period
43.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
Battery power on common battery phones (in a common battery phone there isn't actually a battery, the terms here are mostly historic) is required for a carbon transmitter to work and, for DTMF dialing, it's used by some DTMF keypa
44.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
Most lotteries, all of them that I'm familiar with, blackout ticket sales for several minutes around the draw to avoid order sensitivity issues like this. It's funny, lotto vending machines here don't say when the drawings ar
45.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
The current state of HomePlug is weird, the organization behind it dissolved in 2016 and basically dumped the spec on the table (they made it public domain). Since it's closely related to IEEE 1901 it doesn't seem likely that Home
46.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
the typical "industrial" version of powerline is IEEE 1901, which for example is used by some electrical utilities for SCADA and by some smart meters. The difference can be somewhat academic as many modern powerline protocols are
47.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
There are commercial machines, but it's important to understand that in the textile industry there's a big difference between commercial and domestic machines, and it's not necessarily that commercial machines are better. Bes
48.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
I don't think licensure is really that much of a barrier, though. One of the huge trends going on is that nurses are increasingly replacing doctors in primary care. In my market it's unusual to have an actual doctor as a primary c
49.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
There's a couple reasons that I know of, plus I suspect it may be cheaper for the manufacturer. One is that the media type selection in the printer driver (especially glossy vs. matte) changes the ink composition used for black, and yo
50.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
There's a couple of problems with the theory. First, the reason inkjet printers use color ink for monochrome documents is pretty well known. While there is no doubt a degree of "profit optimization," there's a printing b
51.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
Honestly a lot of those recordings probably do sound a lot worse than the radio audio. I rarely see YouTube recordings that are as audible as the radio is in person. Here's what seems to be the reason: The common splitters you can bu
52.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
I'm sure this depends on where you live, but my Amazon shipments are late such a large portion of the time that they end up refunding most of the shipping costs I pay. It's like free prime for the patient!
53.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
Flying multi-engine aircraft with an engine shut down is a routine training and test maneuver, so these aircraft have all been flown a lot of hours with an engine out. The tricky thing about ETOPS is ensuring very high engine reliability (s
54.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
when you're trying to take relative measurements of the motion of objects within the field of view, which is how you do these fine position measurements, you don't have a lot of choices for objects with a measured location accurac
55.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
Cox Media Group is attached to Cox Enterprises which owns Cox Communications, one of the largest US cable providers. They distribute set-top boxes with an integrated voice assistant. So, I would wager that is at least one source, and I woul
56.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
This story was widely reported, but it's a little questionable. The slides are genuine, but they seem more like a prospectus for something Cox wants to do than something that they're actually doing. The presentation also never c
57.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
Davis Instruments is on the pricey end but their WeatherLink Live gateway has a simple local JSON API. For years I scraped it with Prometheus for use in Grafana but I have since switched to HomeAssistant for the analytics/visualization
58.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
The size and cost of this unit and the AirTag to put in it get close, but not quite to, the size and cost of a cellular asset tracker. Roughly $30 more to get into a reputable brand asset tracker. The promised ten-year life is better than t
59.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
"Engage with the full spectrum of CRUD operations to craft and manage multiple calendar datasets." The readme for this shell script somehow has "starting at $25k per year" vibes.
60.
by jcrawfordor 2y ago
I think the problem with modern cars in the US is quite the opposite - the increasingly well-tuned optics are exacerbating the problem. Modern cars indeed have a very sharp, well-designed cutoff at the top of their beam patter. This makes c

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