cable cutters

Adam Savage and engineer Zach Radding examine Lumafield CT scans of Apple's $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable alongside cheaper USB-C cables. They explain the internal components that distinguish Thunderbolt from ordinary USB-C.

Linus Tech Tips tests a large batch of DisplayPort cables with a Total Phase cable tester, checking bandwidth and signal quality. Many cables did not meet their claimed specs.

A documentary on how Cornwall became a hub for the world's communications, from the first transatlantic radio signal to modern undersea fibre cables. It describes how cable landing stations and the systems are put together.

LockPickingLawyer cuts through a LiteLok flexible bike lock with cable cutters in about 16 seconds, one of several videos defeating the product.

A fan-made video of the Simpsons Stonecutters Song, in which a secret society takes credit for controlling world affairs, with lyrics and stills from the show.

Kurzgesagt explains the skyhook, a rotating cable with a counterweight that could catapult spacecraft from Earth orbit toward deep space. It covers why it would make space travel cheaper and more efficient.

A Just Have a Think video on the proposed 16 billion pound Xlinks project to build solar, wind and battery capacity in southern Morocco. It would send around 3.6GW to the UK by subsea HVDC cable as near-baseload power.

A 1984 AT&T film showing the live cutover of a Glendale, California central office from step-by-step switching to an electronic switching system. Installers prepare the site and then cut cables in a coordinated operation.

Linus Tech Tips tests whether chaining many PCIe riser extensions causes loss of GPU performance. They keep adding extensions to see how far the signal will go.

A Vox Strikethrough video arguing that CNN models its political coverage on sports shows like First Take, pitting pundits against each other. It claims this favors drama over truth and degrades public understanding.

A full performance by cellist Mischa Maisky of Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G, from a 1993 Unitel recording, with all six movements.

Rick Hartley's AltiumLive keynote on differential pairs in PC boards. He argues the rules from cables and twisted pairs do not carry over, and covers which pair geometry gives the best impedance control, the right spacing, routing practice and how much skew is acceptable.

John Oliver's 13-minute Last Week Tonight segment explains the 2014 net neutrality fight over cable companies creating unequal internet speeds. It uses comedy to make a dull regulatory topic engaging and tells viewers how to comment to the FCC.

Mark Rober visits Zipline and looks at its autonomous delivery drones, including medical and blood deliveries in Rwanda. He demonstrates how the drones' propeller design and cable-lowered delivery pod make them quiet and precise.

Ben Felix explains how to compare renting and buying a home by looking at unrecoverable costs, and distills it into the 5% rule of thumb. It is framed for a Canadian audience but broadly applicable.

Stuart Halloway's satirical talk describes how to protect yourself from industry change by spreading complexity through systems while following idiomatic practice. It uses this inversion to catalog software design anti-patterns.

Technology Connections explains that the so-called EV charger in an electric car's charging cable or wall unit is really an EVSE, a smart switch that safely delivers AC power. The actual charger is inside the car. The video covers the safety signaling and mechanisms involved.

Guy Steele presents a small geometric problem and compares four computational approaches: a classic sequential solution and three parallel-friendly ones. Each is illustrated pictorially and with working code, weighing total work against time to solution.

A neural-network upscaled 4K, 60 fps version of the 1906 film of a trip down Market Street in San Francisco, shot four days before the earthquake. It shows cable cars, horse carriages, early automobiles and pedestrians sharing the street.

DHH's opening keynote at Rails World 2024 in Toronto, where Rails 8 beta shipped. It covers built-in authentication, Propshaft, Solid Cache, Solid Queue, Solid Cable, Kamal 2 and Thruster, pitching the One Person Framework that needs no PaaS.

Veritasium explores how electrical energy actually travels in a circuit, arguing that it flows through electromagnetic fields around the wires rather than through the electrons. It builds a long-cable experiment with Caltech to test when a distant bulb lights.

Part one of an American Airlines training video presented by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on automation dependency. It grew out of a program on wake turbulence avoidance, and this restored version has the audio cleaned up.

A sound-designed restoration of the Miles brothers' 1906 film shot from a cable car down Market Street in San Francisco, four days before the earthquake. It shows streetcars, horse carts, cars and pedestrians mixing freely.

A short Adam Curtis clip on what he calls oh dearism, the habit of news reporting that presents events as a stream of sad, inexplicable happenings. He argues this leaves viewers passive and unable to imagine action.

Tom Scott investigates moire-effect beacons, called Inogon leading marks, a Swedish invention from the 1980s that shows different patterns depending on the viewer's position. He visits one used to mark an undersea cable and tracks down its history.

A short clip of a TiVo paid-programming broadcast from the early 2000s, which TiVo used to send guide data and service updates to DVRs over cable TV before broadband was common.

A four-minute demo of the greenhouse effect showing how increased carbon dioxide raises temperature. It uses a simple setup that is dramatic and easy to understand.

A Fully Charged episode on Ubitricity, a German company that turns ordinary street lamp posts into roughly 5 kW overnight EV charge points, with a locking cable and managed billing.