Mailing List Archive

[OT] Re: NAS and replacing with larger drives
On Friday, 9 December 2022 13:38:32 GMT Frank Steinmetzger wrote:

> ...I never really bothered with live TV recordings in recent years. These
> days, if I find something interesting, I download the show form the TV
> channel’s website (called Mediathek in Germany, a word play on Bibliothek,
> meaning library). Interestingly though, the picture quality is noticably
> worse than what I receive via DVB-T.

I do nearly the opposite: I record every TV programme I want to watch, then
watch it at my leisure. That way I can skip through all the adverts, which I
loathe [1]. Freesat in the UK allows recording of radio series as well, which
Sky cannot do, so it's easy to capture late-night series and listen to them at
my convenience. I have something like 600 radio programmes on my satellite
box.

1. Mind you, UK TV adverts are nowhere near as gross as the screeching
horrors I was subjected to in Minneapolis 30 years ago.

--
Regards,
Peter.
Re: [OT] Re: NAS and replacing with larger drives [ In reply to ]
Am Fri, Dec 09, 2022 at 02:27:07PM +0000 schrieb Peter Humphrey:
> On Friday, 9 December 2022 13:38:32 GMT Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
>
> > ...I never really bothered with live TV recordings in recent years. These
> > days, if I find something interesting, I download the show form the TV
> > channel’s website (called Mediathek in Germany, a word play on Bibliothek,
> > meaning library). Interestingly though, the picture quality is noticably
> > worse than what I receive via DVB-T.
>
> I do nearly the opposite: I record every TV programme I want to watch, then
> watch it at my leisure.

This summer I bought my first TV ever since I live on my own – after about
20 years of not having one. I haven’t missed TV and still don’t (just wanted
a bigger screen for movies played from the PC and to relax on the couch in
the evening).

> That way I can skip through all the adverts, which I loathe [1].

Who doesn’t? With my little antenna, I get all the public stations with good
quality and no ads, but I don’t care for the encrypted private, ad-financed
channels for which I need to pay a yearly fee these days (on top of the
mandatory public TV “tax”).

> Freesat in the UK allows recording of radio series as well, which Sky
> cannot do, so it's easy to capture late-night series and listen to them at
> my convenience. I have something like 600 radio programmes on my satellite
> box.

Ooof, I listen to podcasts and can barely keep up, time-wise. To have a
conneciton to the original topic: I still have lots of movies and series on
the NAS which I haven’t even started to watch.

> 1. Mind you, UK TV adverts are nowhere near as gross as the screeching
> horrors I was subjected to in Minneapolis 30 years ago.

I can only imagine.

--
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Please do not share anything from, with or about me on any social network.

Bees aren’t at all hard working, they just can’t fly any slower.
Re: [OT] Re: NAS and replacing with larger drives [ In reply to ]
On Friday, 9 December 2022 14:38:14 GMT Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> Am Fri, Dec 09, 2022 at 02:27:07PM +0000 schrieb Peter Humphrey:
> > 1. Mind you, UK TV adverts are nowhere near as gross as the screeching
> > horrors I was subjected to in Minneapolis 30 years ago.
>
> I can only imagine.

Actually, I doubt you can unless you've experienced something like it - in
which case I sympathise. :)

--
Regards,
Peter.
[OT] Re: NAS and replacing with larger drives [ In reply to ]
On Friday, 9 December 2022 10:34:00 GMT I wrote:

> in the 1970s the national grid was monitored and analysed with a Ferranti
> Argus 500 machine with 24KB RAM and a 2MB disk. It was common for
> American visitors to believe that was just driving the control engineers'
> displays, and where was the main computer?

Er... There was no RAM in those days, not of the type we know today. In fact
it was 2-microsecond core store. Each tiny ferromagnetic toroid was threaded
with one X wire, one Y wire and (I think it was) a sync pulse wire. A
remarkable labour of love to build such a thing.

--
Regards,
Peter.
RE: [OT] Re: NAS and replacing with larger drives [ In reply to ]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk>
> Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2022 3:35 AM
> To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: [OT] Re: [gentoo-user] NAS and replacing with larger drives
>
> On Friday, 9 December 2022 10:34:00 GMT I wrote:
>
> > in the 1970s the national grid was monitored and analysed with a
> > Ferranti Argus 500 machine with 24KB RAM and a 2MB disk. It was common
> > for American visitors to believe that was just driving the control engineers'
> > displays, and where was the main computer?
>
> Er... There was no RAM in those days, not of the type we know today. In fact it was 2-microsecond core store. Each tiny ferromagnetic toroid was threaded with one X wire, one Y wire and (I think it was) a sync pulse wire. A remarkable labour of love to build such a thing.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Peter.
>
Well, it wasn't built with transistors, but it was Random Access Memory. As opposed to Sequential Access Memory like mercury delay lines. And it was periodic refresh, just like most modern RAM.

That 24KB though would have been literally 196,608 ferrite cores (assuming it was an 8 bit byte on that system), and they were probably hand-soldered.

Although it looks like the original Argus line used 12 bit words. So it was probably a 6 bit byte. Still, a lot of soldering.

Interestingly, the Argus 400 and 500 series was one of the first systems to use multilayer PCBs and the company had to develop a lot of the techniques for creating those themselves.

LMP