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Jedit posted:So, two things that should be obsolete: Yale locks, and crime. Unless your home is set up like a fortress any lock, no matter how resilient or tamper proof is only going to keep honest people honest anyways. Even if they don't have well-honed lockpicking skills a common thief could just throw a brick through a window and gain entry that way.
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Oct 26, 2015 03:12
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ryonguy posted:Keurig: An over-complicated, expensive way to make a small amount of lovely coffee. I think they'd be lynched for trying something like that.
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Oct 26, 2015 03:13
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Geoj posted:Unless your home is set up like a fortress any lock, no matter how resilient or tamper proof is only going to keep honest people honest anyways. Tamper-resistant locks guard against lovely insurance companies.
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Oct 26, 2015 03:15
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:I think they'd be lynched for trying something like that. Wrong way around, I think.
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Oct 26, 2015 03:20
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Geoj posted:Unless your home is set up like a fortress any lock, no matter how resilient or tamper proof is only going to keep honest people honest anyways. The key to protecting your home from burglary is not being absolutely secure, but just appearing more secure than your neighbours. Sir Unimaginative posted:Tamper-resistant locks guard against lovely insurance companies. Also this.
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Oct 26, 2015 03:30
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Apparently lock-picking is almost non-existent as a actual crime, because criminals are not concerned about damaging doors/windows to gain entry. And carrying lock picks or bump keys means that you're carrying burglary tools, which isn't that great if the police search you. Similarly I've read that the NYPD apparently stopped tracking pickpocketing statistics entirely some time in the early 2000s.
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Oct 26, 2015 03:45
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blugu64 posted:I had a crook remove my passenger side window, without breaking it, set and leaned against the car, and only stole a pack of fig newtons and some spare change. The mechanic didn't believe me when I told him what happened My parents once had the rear passenger-side door of their 1983 Escort wagon stolen, and nothing else. The cop who took their report was just as puzzled as they were.
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Oct 26, 2015 03:53
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Powerlurker posted:My parents once had the rear passenger-side door of their 1983 Escort wagon stolen, and nothing else. The cop who took their report was just as puzzled as they were. Probably to replace the door on a similar year Escort. Body pieces aren't the most common target of theft but it happens once in a while. Probably a crime of opportunity, thief noticed the matching car, had the tools, and went for it.
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Oct 26, 2015 04:07
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XYZ posted:Like the Keurig coffee brewer? Like cold soda? Well have I got a doomed to fail product for you! They make SodaStreams look downright economical.
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Oct 26, 2015 04:30
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C.M. Kruger posted:Apparently lock-picking is almost non-existent as a actual crime, because criminals are not concerned about damaging doors/windows to gain entry. And carrying lock picks or bump keys means that you're carrying burglary tools, which isn't that great if the police search you. quote:In 1990, there were 23,068 reported incidents and an estimated $9,487,008 in property lost to pickpockets in the city, police statistics show. Five years later, those figures were halved. And last year, there were fewer than 5,000 incidents reported. And as you said, now they don't track it at all.
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Oct 26, 2015 04:38
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flosofl posted:They make SodaStreams look downright economical. I see you haven't heard about paintball CO2 tank adapters for sodastream.
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Oct 26, 2015 04:40
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Geoj posted:I see you haven't heard about paintball CO2 tank adapters for sodastream. Why go for amateur hour? Just get an adapter to hook a line up to a commercial beverage cylinder. http://co2doctor.com/freedomoonespec.htm
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Oct 26, 2015 04:46
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Why SodaStream at all? One of these: http://www.morebeer.com/products/kent-shutoff-qd-set-soda-bottle-cap.html?a_aid=hbf?a_aid=hbf hooked up to any regulated CO2 source. Fits on any plastic bottle with the "standard" threads. Which is every plastic soda bottle. I have mine hooked up to a 10LB CO2 tank with a 50PSI regulator. Put liquid in bottle, put cap on bottle, attach blue thing to cap, shake vigorously for about 20 seconds and done. 10LB tank holds enough CO2 for easily a year of daily use and only costs $12USD to get filled, at least in my area. Also carbonates things MUCH stronger than a SodaStream can ever possibly do, if you prefer that.
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Oct 26, 2015 05:01
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Ooooh, I've always said a good Dr pepper should be cold enough to hurt, and carbonated enough to burn. Maybe I should set me up one for the occasional times Id use it.
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Oct 26, 2015 05:56
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Lowen SoDium posted:My first thought was "Why would I buy this over the already existing Soda Stream which is cheaper, smaller, and quieter?" I'm just impressed that Keurig managed to make a product that is less useful than a Soda Stream. They seriously tried to market what's basically "Soda Stream but more expensive and difficult to use" as if it would be a great idea. Bill Posters posted:The key to protecting your home from burglary is not being absolutely secure, but just appearing more secure than your neighbours. The best way to not get burglarized is generally to not be a good burglary target in the first place. Make it difficult to get in, yeah, but also have poo poo like visible cameras and bright lights or even leave TVs or lights on when asleep or gone to make it look like the house is occupied by awake people (not a lot of burglars are willing to bust into an occupied house if they're only out for theft). You can deter crime by just making it too much effort or risk to go through with it, which means only leaving yourself victimized by the guys who are determined enough to get past or not care about your security efforts in the first place.
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Oct 26, 2015 08:17
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I don't understand why you'd need a Sodastream or whatever in the first place. Then again I almost never drink soda so maybe I'm just not the target market.
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Oct 26, 2015 11:06
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I don't understand why you'd need a Sodastream or whatever in the first place. Then again I almost never drink soda so maybe I'm just not the target market. I drink way too much soda and I don't even understand the things. Aside from being too expensive there's no way it can beat the quality of of brand name soda.
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Oct 26, 2015 11:11
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BattleMaster posted:I drink way too much soda and I don't even understand the things. Aside from being too expensive there's no way it can beat the quality of of brand name soda. My friend uses one to make fizzy water for guests and I can see the appeal of having fizzy water on tap, without having to lug big bottles from the supermarket to your home, or filling up your store room with them. The economics are appalling though.
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Oct 26, 2015 11:24
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BattleMaster posted:I drink way too much soda and I don't even understand the things. Aside from being too expensive there's no way it can beat the quality of of brand name soda. I got one as a gift a few years ago. I'm still on the first CO2 can, so I'm not a big user, but I don't use it to make a bottle of fizzy water to dump Sodastream-branded syrups into. I use it for making my own tonic water, making my own flavored club soda, etc.
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Oct 26, 2015 11:38
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Keurig are probably marketing towards middle class liberals who don't buy Israeli products, because why else would you not get a Soda Stream?
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Oct 26, 2015 12:21
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Athenry posted:I remember using this. My old Performa 6115 couldn't handle anything else while encoding. It also only had a 600MB hard drive, so I kept MP3s on many many zip disks. I've never seen that one before. We had a windows MP3 encoder at some point, which was a lovely speed boost from l3enc.exe - a DOS based MP3 encoder that we were using for a while before. It was amazing to see MP3 compression the first time - it was met with disbelief and calls that it was a trick. How can you squash a 60MB .wav file into a mere frew megs?!!?
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Oct 26, 2015 12:52
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spog posted:My friend uses one to make fizzy water for guests and I can see the appeal of having fizzy water on tap, without having to lug big bottles from the supermarket to your home, or filling up your store room with them. We do this, and it works out as cheaper than buying carbonated water - but this is in Norway; wages and overhead add up to water bottles being more expensive here. Also, not having to lug several kg of water home is kind of nice.
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Oct 26, 2015 12:54
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chitoryu12 posted:I'm just impressed that Keurig managed to make a product that is less useful than a Soda Stream. They seriously tried to market what's basically "Soda Stream but more expensive and difficult to use" as if it would be a great idea. Same here. It seems they went to "this does the job of your refrigerator as well" route. That's hilarious. While there is a market for an all in one device for the extremely lazy or for people/workplaces without refrigerators (maybe), it seems their's is not very good also at cooling. Fo3 has a new favorite as of 13:14 on Oct 26, 2015 |
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Oct 26, 2015 13:10
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Squish posted:How can you squash a 60MB .wav file into a mere few megs?!!? How the compression works is pretty fascinating - it basically takes into account the signal to noise ratio our brain and ears have and then strips out enough information so that what is left is still audible. The song Tom's Diner was used to stress test the algorithm along with stuff like fireworks so at the end of the day almost anything could get put through compression sounding ok. A nice little paper that goes into this a bit and looks at "ghosts" where they play back the bits of a song that are lost via compression. The rest of the book covers the general history of Mp3 based file sharing from the point of view of the scene, namely Dell Glover who worked at a disc manufacturing plant. Somewhat amusingly by the time he gets caught the raids ignore the bag of stolen factory CDs.
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Oct 26, 2015 13:20
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If a host offered me carbonated water that wasn't Hartwall Vichy Original or Olvi Vichy I'd just leave and sever all ties. Just give me tap water if you don't have the proper stuff. (My favourite almost obsolete technology: mineral water that actually has salt in it.)
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Oct 26, 2015 14:13
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I've been playing around with some German late-70s stereo equipment and their obsolete audio connectors, namely DIN plugs. The DIN speaker connector was never particularly well-liked. The sockets tended to wear out and cause loose connections if you were in the habit of switching out speakers often. It's a nice design from an easy-of-use perspective, since there is basically no way to plug it in wrong, which avoided issues where one speaker was out of phase. However, the durability issues with the socket doomed the connector, since you were wearing out a hard-to-replace board component on your amplifier rather than an easily-replaceable plug and cable.  But for the line-level connectors, I think it's a shame that the 5-pin DIN connector fell out of use in favor of the RCA plug. It's a simple durable design that makes good connection since the sockets are designed with sharp points inside that ensure a good connection to the pins in the plug. And more importantly, it allows for bi-directional stereo audio, which was totally awesome for hooking up tape recorders etc. to your stereo.  This adapter shows how space saving a single DIN plug is versus four RCA plugs. And of course a DIN<->DIN won't tear apart into separate cables and turn into a real rat's nest like their RCA counterparts can.  The DIN connectors were widely used on European consumer audio equipment, mostly from Germany (Deutsches Institut für Normung). Bang & Olufsen also used DIN plugs for a long time, but as they went to a 100% active speaker lineup, the speaker connector was obviously dropped. The DIN connector lives on in the active speakers as the 7-pin B&O Powerlink connector, which is simply a 5-pin DIN audio connector with 2 controlling pins, used for turning the speakers on and off, and adjusting volume etc. Outside of audio, the venerable 5-pin DIN connector is probably best known as the AT keyboard connector, which was of course later replaced with the 6-pin PS/2 mini-DIN connector. S-video also uses a 4-pin mini-DIN connector. DIN connectors: Maybe not failed, but certainly obsolete. KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 15:51 on Oct 26, 2015 |
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Oct 26, 2015 15:48
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KozmoNaut posted:I've been playing around with some German late-70s stereo equipment and their obsolete audio connectors, namely DIN plugs. You mean best known as the 1541 connector.
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Oct 26, 2015 15:56
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Also that, and a ton of other random data connections. DIN connectors were everywhere and then they just kinda disappeared.
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Oct 26, 2015 16:03
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BattleMaster posted:I drink way too much soda and I don't even understand the things. Aside from being too expensive there's no way it can beat the quality of of brand name soda. By all accounts, they don't. The economics were broken down and found that you'd need to spend nearly 2.5 years straight drinking 20 ounces of soda from it per day to actually break even on the cost. And the taste is little to no better than generic store brand.
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Oct 26, 2015 17:19
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chitoryu12 posted:The best way to not get burglarized is generally to not be a good burglary target in the first place. Make it difficult to get in, yeah, but also have poo poo like visible cameras and bright lights or even leave TVs or lights on when asleep or gone to make it look like the house is occupied by awake people (not a lot of burglars are willing to bust into an occupied house if they're only out for theft). You can deter crime by just making it too much effort or risk to go through with it, which means only leaving yourself victimized by the guys who are determined enough to get past or not care about your security efforts in the first place. I can't remember if this was mentioned or not in the thread already, but there was a home security album you could buy years ago that if you were gone you'd put on your record player and it would be the sound of a couple of people having a conversation. I can't find it, but I find this: http://www.discogs.com/Sebastian-Sebastian-Speaks-Your-Watchdog-On-A-Disc/release/2688188 A barking dog LP.
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Oct 26, 2015 17:54
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Phanatic posted:I use it for making my own tonic water, making my own flavored club soda, etc. This is why I have one. All of the grocery stores in my area only sell 1 liter bottles of soda water and charge $1 per bottle. Even paying the $10 exchange for the official soda stream CO2 bottle is cheaper, and it becomes even more economical when using a 16 oz paintball tank that costs a few dollars to refill.
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Oct 26, 2015 18:02
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chitoryu12 posted:I'm just impressed that Keurig managed to make a product that is less useful than a Soda Stream. They seriously tried to market what's basically "Soda Stream but more expensive and difficult to use" as if it would be a great idea. If you could get the price and size down I could see it being nice if you want to have a wide variety of flavors on hand, like for a workplace breakroom. I suspect Coca-Cola actually invested in it for co-development with their 'Freestyle' machines or something like that, and those things are cool as hell. KozmoNaut posted:Also that, and a ton of other random data connections. DIN connectors were everywhere and then they just kinda disappeared. DIN connecters were kind of huge in their original form, too big for most digital signal use, but mini-DIN was nice. Easy to plug in blind, too, you get alignment easy and then turn with gentle pressure until it catches. Keiya has a new favorite as of 18:38 on Oct 26, 2015 |
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Oct 26, 2015 18:31
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I don't understand why you'd need a Sodastream or whatever in the first place. Then again I almost never drink soda so maybe I'm just not the target market. My cousin and her husband are your stereotypical gamer geeks who subsist on nothing but microwaveable foods and soda. She's already got dentures at age 30 due to said diet. She got a Sodastream for Christmas a couple years ago and excitedly remarked how that thing was going to save her around $60.00 per month. Uhh.. wow.
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Oct 26, 2015 18:32
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BattleMaster posted:I drink way too much soda and I don't even understand the things. Aside from being too expensive there's no way it can beat the quality of of brand name soda. When a group of friends and I moved off campus a few years ago we debated skipping over the SodaStream and getting a full fountain drink setup with syrup and everything. Did calculations to see how much we would have to drink before we would pay it off. Just getting it installed was around $3,000. Even if we all drank till we couldn't drink any more, we still would have been paying it off, and there were 5 of us.
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Oct 26, 2015 18:35
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KozmoNaut posted:Also that, and a ton of other random data connections. DIN connectors were everywhere and then they just kinda disappeared. They were replaced by ps2 and serial connectors according to Wikipedia. Those were then replaced with the cable we know and love
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Oct 26, 2015 18:37
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Keiya posted:If you could get the price and size down I could see it being nice if you want to have a wide variety of flavors on hand, like for a workplace breakroom. I don't really like the freestyles that much. You have to touch the greasy screen that everyone else in the store has used, it takes longer to get it to dispense drinks even when the person in front of you knows how to use it, and it just doesn't taste as good either.
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Oct 26, 2015 18:43
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JediTalentAgent posted:I can't remember if this was mentioned or not in the thread already, but there was a home security album you could buy years ago that if you were gone you'd put on your record player and it would be the sound of a couple of people having a conversation. There's a whole industry dedicated to this: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26904-new-urbanist-the-ghosts-that-keep-your-house-safe/?full=true
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Oct 26, 2015 18:43
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JediTalentAgent posted:I can't remember if this was mentioned or not in the thread already, but there was a home security album you could buy years ago that if you were gone you'd put on your record player and it would be the sound of a couple of people having a conversation. Normally I leave my computer monitor on (it's a 1920x1080 so at normal brightness it really lights up a dark room through the blinds) and one light on.
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Oct 26, 2015 18:43
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Geoj posted:I see you haven't heard about paintball CO2 tank adapters for sodastream. Uhhhh...don't paintball CO2 cartridges have, like, oil and poo poo in them? Or is that only the tiny disposable ones and not the larger refillable ones?
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Oct 26, 2015 19:27
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DrBouvenstein posted:Uhhhh...don't paintball CO2 cartridges have, like, oil and poo poo in them? Or is that only the tiny disposable ones and not the larger refillable ones? Not as far as I know. I use CO2 magazines for some airsoft guns and it's recommended that you dab some silicone oil on the top of the cartridge before inserting it to help seal it. However, "green gas" used for airsoft guns is just propane with a new scent and some oil added to make it self-lubricating.
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Oct 26, 2015 19:32
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