My understanding is that the machine has an internal 915MHz oscillator, with the stylus in the circuit. The stylus capacitatively measures the depth of the groove. The groove has very fine ridges with a wavelength less than the length of the stylus tip, so to coasts over them rather than moving up and down with each one like an LP.

Anyway, those ridges modulate the 915MHz frequency a little, which is then passed through a peak detector and you end up with a PWM signal like you get from the laser of an LD player. From there the process is the same, with multiple RF carriers down in the 10MHz and below range, or something like that. I haven't looked into it too closely TBH.

I have a Hitachi player, which has composite video and stereo audio output, and RF. The video off the disc is composite, but some Laserdisc players did have s-video outputs that were supposed to be better as the player's electronics did some more advanced signal processing. I don't think they ever made any CED players like that. No high definition either, although to be fair there were very few Laserdiscs in that format and I think only one player that supported it.

With CDs the issues are mainly down to drives not being able to read areas of the disc that are marked in the table of contents as unused, like pre-track gaps that sometimes contain stuff, and subcode channels. The way the SCSI and all subsequent interfaces works, there is just no standard way to read some of that, but people have found debug commands for some drives that let you read the internal cache which contains the wanted data.

They must be thinking that their primary market, the air industry, will be a much safer long term bet too. No point upsetting them when the AI bubble will probably not last much longer.

They have a similar problem in Ireland. Everyone is taught Irish, many signs are in both English and Irish... But when someone periodically does a test to see if they can do everyday tasks like sending a letter or ordering a coffee in Irish, they quickly find that everybody else abandoned it after school and can't understand them.

I do wonder how it affects education. Learning another language can be good for your understanding of English, but learning something like Spanish or Chinese is more likely to be of practical use to you by itself. Educational outcomes in Wales are quite poor, but that's mostly down to poverty.

If only the US had a domestic battery, solar, and turbine industry that could supply them, they probably wouldn't be bothering with this stuff. It's the constrained supply from China, and the political issues.

I tend not to watch films on the machines, I just run them to test and repair them, and then each disc once to make an archival copy of it. Reason being that they are old and the parts are not easy to source. My current Laserdisc player is made up of parts from two machines, and has a new belt for the tray mechanism.

NTSC video is about 6MHz full bandwidth. Laserdisc is full bandwidth, VHS is about 3MHz, and CED is about 4.2Mhz. The video quality is further reduced by the modulation scheme that uses a 915MHz carrier with AM modulation from the disc grooves. So it's better than VHS, but not nearly as good as LD, and in practice the added expense isn't really worth it. You need a stylus which wears out and degrades the disc, unlike LD which is a non-contact laser. To be fair the stylus doesn't touch the signal part of the disc, but the side walls it rides in do degrade and affect the signal amplitude.

Anyway, it should decode with existing software and a bit of tuning, but I don't think anyone has done it. The signals are just the usual AM modulated NTSC video and FM sound. The beauty of capturing the RF is that you can wait for decoding software, and decode it again if that software improves. I haven't found a suitable tap point in the player either, and it may need amplification. One of the nice things about LD players is that the Pioneer ones are very easy to tap.

I need to modify my VHS player to get HiFi audio out of it. My capture system only gets one RF signal at a time, so I have to capture video and audio separately, and then manually align them based on using a capture of the player output using a cheap USB capture card as a reference. You can get dual channel capture systems, but I don't do many tapes so I'm living with it for now.

DVDs can look very good. You probably saw the Technology Connections video about the budget re-issue ones being worse. The engineer can tune the mastering process to make them look better, far more than they could with Laserdisc. They are of course much easier to preserve as well. CDs are a bit more complex due, especially audio ones. You would think they were just a really basic kind of filesystem and digital data, but they are much more complex and only certain drives can make archival grade copies. I'm looking for such a drive, but they are expensive now people know about them.

Women entering the workforce was due to two main things.

1. Financial independence. Relationships break down, and women used to get trapped in them for financial reasons. Removes the pressure to quickly find a partner in the first place, and to compromise on quality to do so.

2. The cost of living has increased faster than wages, so two decent incomes are needed where one manual labour job used to be enough.

It's still money. The cost of living has risen faster than incomes. Used to be one person could support a family, now it needs two, for example. We moved from ownership of things to rentals and subscriptions, so there is no end point where you e.g. have the security of owning your home, or can reduce your mortgage payments and put money into children and a pension.

We have been telling people for decades to be financially responsible, and are now surprised that they are being financially responsible.

The reason why trying to help parents with extra cash for children is that it doesn't address the financial problems they are actually concerned about. Offer them a half price family home and you might get a more positive result.

It's not, this started long before social media. It's due to modern life being marginal for young people.

Used to be that one person could earn enough to support a family and buy a nice house, before they were 30. Living with parents or in shared accommodation tends to put a damper on your sex life. Not having money to go out, saving it all to try to own the place you live and contribute to your pension, limits your dating opportunities. Having a main job and a side gig soaks up a lot of your free time.

Young people have been comprehensively shafted, and the older generations are still demanding more of them because they were promised a pension and healthcare into old age, which is now lasting decades longer than it used to.

Most TVs have bad speakers on purpose, so they can sell you a soundbar. There isn't really a technical reason for it now. We have figured out how to make small speakers sound really good, and can automatically tune them to the listening environment too.

My eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, but I can see the difference between 1080p and 4k from normal viewing distances (a few metres). It's not just the ability to resolve pixels and lines, it's more subtle stuff like how moire patterns appear, and how noticeable things like digital sharpening are.

I'll admit that it is subtle, but it's also very clear once you see it. People used to have the same revelation with 100Hz CRTs. Said they couldn't see the flicker of a 50Hz one, but once they did see it for the first time it became easy to spot.

We have been here with print. Your eyes might not be able to resolve higher than about 350 DPI at normal reading distances, but printing at twice that resolution still looks better. It's partly down to the fact that with digital sampling you have to consider Nyquist - to reproduce a certain frequency, you must sample at at least twice that frequency, and filter higher frequencies to avoid aliasing. And you need to do that going both ways - analogue to digital, and digital to analogue.

When they do show homes for new build estates, they fill them with extra small furniture. A short bed that your feet overhang, a child size toilet, mini appliances. And even then they look cramped.

I'm sure the AI is tuned to do the same, to exaggerate the space.

It's not new either. When you buy food the packaging often shows a "serving suggestion" that bares little resemblance to what comes out of the container.

In this case it is a downgrade in the listing. While it looks nicer than empty rooms, it obscures details you want to see. Likely combined with the agent trying to hurry you around the property so you don't notice all the defects that the AI covered up.

Unlikely. The plant was closed for economic reasons (too expensive to repair after storm damage), and the main buyer of that energy switched to renewables. Even if Google pays for the repairs and re-opening, once they are gone as a customer it looks doubtful that there will be a market for that expensive energy.

The fact that it was uneconomic to fix after the last big storm is a warning to anyone looking to buy that energy that unless they are willing to self-insure against future big costs, it could go away at short notice in the future. Plus the licence only runs to 2034, so the cost of renewal and probably enhanced safety testing is on the horizon too.

I have a thing about commercial failures. Computers, games consoles, video formats... I wasn't intending to get any CED stuff, but I saw a couple of basically mint units being sold a "junk" in Japan.

The word "junk" in Japanese (as in jyanku, a loan word) means "untested, sold as seen, no warranty", but I find that in practice a lot of it is actually in perfect working order. Hard Off branches usually have a little test area with power, batteries, tapes and so forth where you can check out junk for yourself before buying. I plugged on in and it powered up okay, so decided to take a punt.

One day I hope that ld/vhs-decode will add support for the format. It's actually not all that interesting beyond the technical details and how cool the cartridge system is, because from what I've seen all the discs ever released were just Western movies (as in Hollywood or European, not cowboys).

I am actually much more active with Laserdisc and VHS, where I archive them by capturing the raw RF signal using a Domesday Duplicator. If you aren't familiar, someone wanted to preserve the old BBC Domesday system from back in the 80s, which used a proprietary Laserdisc format. To that end they built a special capture device that samples at 40MHz, to ingest the analogue RF signal direct off the laser pickup amplifier. Laserdiscs use PWM to generate an RF signal that is similar to analogue broadcast TV, but free from interference and with higher bandwidth.

VHS is similar, it's an RF signal, or even two RF signals if the tape has HiFi audio. The main difference being much lower bandwidth, resulting in a poorer image. That said, a couple of the tapes I've done, in particular a Japanese pro wrestling one, look amazing. Beyond anything I thought VHS could ever do. Some of the Laserdisc stuff looks practically HD in places.

Anyway, I've been preserving various discs and tapes with the Internet Archive, all Japanese stuff. Some of it is fascinating. There are some ones about various NASA missions from the Apollo and Shuttle eras, with dual original English and a dub into Japanese. They dubbed the radio comms, and the voice actors seem to have taken it pretty seriously. I've got some promo discs too, showing off the quality of Laserdisc, and often they are unintentionally hilarious. It was the 80s and 90s, so much of it is speed boats, flimsy excuses to put models in swimwear, creepy guys taking photos of them... Cultural artefacts that are preserved, hopefully forever now.

Since Newsnight was gutted I find I don't really use the TV for that kind of thing.

Technology Connections is the reason why I own a CED player.