In This Episode: OK, not an hour on clocks, but some! Timepieces, new monitors, and streaming TV (oh my!) Plotters, pens, and Bandersnatch! And space is grabbing our attention lately, with Ultima Thule and the moon.
This Week’s Hosts
- Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True the and Internet Spam Primer.
- Leo Notenboom, “Chief Question Answerer” at tech education site Ask Leo!
- Gary Rosenzweig host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media.
- Kevin Savetz, web site publisher and Computer Historian at Atari Podcast.
- Longer Bios on the Hosts page.
Show Notes
- In the warmup, we caught up with a bunch of fun stuff! Randy noted he has bought a decidedly low-tech pocket watch — a mechanical wind-up in a “steampunk” style. That reminded Gary that he bought and read the book Logitude that Kevin had previously recommended, and was so intrigued by the whole thing that to understand it better, he bought a 3D Wooden Mechanical Pendulum Clock set to build his own. Kevin and family have been streaming A Series of Unfortunate Events (Season 3) on Netflix (Randy’s been watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime), and making games for the BASIC 10-liners contest, and preparing to get better at Python to use his new AxiDraw plotter, inspired by neat plotter projects he has seen on Twitter. That, in turn, led to Kevin’s learning about pens, starting with New York Magazine‘s 100 Best Pens article, where he discovered his new favorite thing: the Prismacolor Premier Illustration Marker Set. Randy has been using the Zebra Sarasa “blue black” pens made in Japan. And Leo is enjoying his new Dell UltraSharp 38″ Curved Monitor, and has a new computer coming. Whew!
- Gary mentioned how computer screens are getting rather light and can now be clamped to desks or even hung on the wall without special hardware. No links: he just thinks it’s cool.
- Gary watched/played the new TV episode/game Bandersnatch, an episode of the Black Mirror TV series on Netflix. He highly recommends giving it a try.
- Randy has been keeping an eye on the Pluto probe, New Horizons (which he played a very small part in), that recently zoomed by the Kuiper Belt Object Ultima Thule. We also talked about China’s mission to the far side of the moon, Chang’e 4, which was illustrated by Chinese TV with the unfortunate image below by created by China’s official TV news agency, CCTV, that Randy grabbed from their video.
- And Gary talked about how Apple video content will soon be available on Samsung, LG and Vizio Smart TVs, in addition to Apple TV, signaling a change in strategy.
Monitors:
4K monitors can be great but they really shine for large items like wiring schematics. The only issue is that they have to be large so that you can take advantage by seeing the pixels when text is small.
Related to size, they need to be able to be adjusted low enough for ergonomics. If you are of average height with a chair adjusted to the ergonomic height (elbows at right angles while typing), a 43″ monitor needs to have its bottom edge almost on the desk to keep the head angle in the ergonomic range. I need to make a new stand for the unadjustable one that came with a monitor I have at my work desk. The top 1/4 of the screen is uncomfortable to look at for long.
ReCaptcha:
Your comment page erases the entire message when it goes to the Captcha screen after you enter the information and agree to the terms.
ReCaptcha: Yeah, that’s been bugging me, but it’s Google doing the page refresh, not us, and I don’t know how to change that behavior.
What I’m trying now is the newish “Invisible ReCaptcha” to see if that makes it better. It at least appears to….