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.

Yeah, we used to do something similar with failed laptops. Stopped doing it after a while because the fix often only lasted a few months. Told people to claim on their consumer rights due to a design defect. The local PC World got quite upset with us.

Sodium cooled reactors have been tried before, and they always catch fire. The sodium becomes radioactive because it is a weak neutron absorber, and when it is hot it is extremely volatile. It corrodes the pipework, and ignites upon contact with air. You can't use water to put the fire out, because water and sodium produces sodium hydroxide and hydrogen, and the hydrogen also catches fire.

All that gets worse as you scale the design up. Containment buildings are one of the major costs of build a reactor, especially post-Fukushima where it turned out that the ones they did build were not adequate to contain the hydrogen explosions or melting down reactors. Naturally, those costs increase dramatically when the coolant itself is highly flammable and liable to produce explosions.

There are a lot of people who live in places that are unsuitable for nuclear power too, either for geographic or for political reasons. And of course there is the cost. Places that don't get much sun often have decent wind resources.

I have a feeling that China will end up abandoning or mothballing a lot of the ones it has planned or under construction. That's what happened with a lot of the coal plants they built, because renewables displaced them before they even came online.

Of course they need some nuclear plants to produce medical isotopes and weapons, but cost will always be the driving factor for consumer demand.

Japan had one too, which also caught fire. The Soviets built one, and it caught fire at least 14 times.

The problem with sodium as a coolant is that if it comes into contact with air, it ignites. If it comes into contact with water, it produces hydrogen, and then ignites. It becomes radioactive too, although the half life is 15 hours, but still enough to make fighting the inevitable fire a much more difficult and dangerous process.

I find YouTube is far better than any of the linear TV available in the UK. More stuff that is relevant to my interests. I don't have an antenna now.

It was a flaw that affected a lot of laptops as well, including pretty much every HP manufactured for a few years. The GPU got so hot that the repeated heating and cooling cycles eventually caused the motherboard and/or chip to flex, and the BGA interface to fail. A temporary fix was to apply some pressure to the chip when it was cold, or more permanently you could reball it.

Microsoft got shafted by Nvidia. The high failure rate of the Xbox 360 was mostly Nvidia's fault.

The PS2 was the best selling console for a long time. The Xbox didn't gain much traction in Japan, so as well as missing out on that market, if you like Japanese games it's not a great platform.

All engineering is influenced by other engineering. Most aircraft look more or less the same because that's the state of the art most efficient shape.

This company got the first methane powered rocket to orbit.

For manual labour perhaps, but for clerical work, and especially for complex work like engineering, 36h/week of high productivity would be exceptional.

Around here the police usually won't come out to surveillance alerts, unless a human has manually reviewed them first.

It's how the cops use every new bit of tech. When DNA came in, they were arresting people on very flimsy DNA evidence that later turned out to either be flawed or easily and obviously explained away.

Happened when IP addresses became their new toy. Still happens with fingerprints, which, despite what CSI may tell you, rarely present an exact match.

I do think disappearing people is wrong, obviously, although I'm not sure that's exactly what happened to Ma. Keeping in mind the damage it would have done to him to be publicly arrested or rebuked, and the fact that later the Chinese premier convinced him to move back to China, and then he attended various events including one with Xi... Well, it's not quite how it was portrayed in the Western media. Not good, but we don't really know what happened.

There has to be a balance somewhere between that and the EU's not-quite-strong-enough regulation of tech companies.