front panel

A hobbyist compares vertical bifacial solar panels against south-facing angled panels using winter production results. It tests whether the usual mounting approach is actually best.

MC Frontalot's nerdcore rap about the text adventure Zork, made for Jason Scott's Get Lamp documentary and featuring a cameo by Steve Meretzky. It was filmed over an evening in a basement.

A FRONTLINE documentary on whether efforts to fix plastic pollution made it worse. It looks at the battle over plastics and recycling and how little plastic is actually recycled.

The full, long-form FRONTLINE interview with Steve Bannon, recorded in 2019 for the documentary series on the Obama-to-Trump era. He discusses his populist politics, the Trump campaign and White House, and his view of the establishment.

A full FRONTLINE interview with journalist Julia Ioffe on Putin and alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

A demonstration of loading Altair 4K BASIC on an Altair 8800 clone, using a front-panel bootloader and an ASR-33 Teletype. It shows the full sequence of entering boot code, loading BASIC and running a program.

A roughly two and a half hour Noonautics panel on DMT research moderated by Graham Hancock with Andrew Gallimore and Rick Strassman. It discusses planned DMTx experiments and reported DMT experiences.

Steve Mould shows that LEDs and solar panels are both diodes made from semiconductors, so a solar panel can emit light and an LED can generate electricity. He demonstrates a small solar panel lighting up.

A panel from the Lang NEXT 2014 conference on systems programming in 2014 and beyond. Language designers including Bjarne Stroustrup and Rob Pike discuss the topic, including C++ header compile times.

A short Bookeen R&D demo showing real-time web page scrolling on an eInk panel, far faster than typical e-readers. It was a prototype for the next generation of Cybook readers.

A local TV news investigation showing that many SUVs and trucks have a large blind zone directly in front, hiding children from the driver. It includes a demonstration lining kids up in front of a vehicle.

MC Frontalot's nerdcore song "Secrets From The Future" (2007), about secrets not staying hidden once future technology can break today's encryption.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2022 talk on whether C++ can become ten times simpler and safer. He introduces his experimental Cpp2 syntax and the cppfront transpiler, explaining the limits on incremental improvement.

A 29C3 panel with whistleblowers Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake and William Binney. They talk about what happens when exposing secret government power becomes a crime, and about surveillance abuses.

A panel with Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong and Carl Hewitt, hosted by Francesco Cesarini, on the history and future of concurrency. The three creators of CSP, Erlang and the actor model discuss their differing approaches.

A Google Tech Talk on Yahoo's 14 rules for faster web pages and the YSlow tool. It covers front-end practices like avoiding @import and fixing ETags, with live analysis of popular sites.

A Computer History Museum oral history panel with four 3dfx founders on the company's rise with Voodoo Graphics and Glide, and its fall into bankruptcy. It runs about two and a half hours.

A 2001 panel with Paul Graham, John Maeda, Jonathan Rees and Guy Steele on programming language design, part of the Dynamic Languages Wizards Series.

A Welch Labs explainer on neural scaling laws and the compute-efficient frontier, asking why model loss seems to hit a line it cannot cross. It draws an analogy to an ideal gas law for AI.

Cody's Lab builds a prototype algae growing panel as an experiment before making more. The channel also shows growing algae for consumption.

Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo discusses architecture for large, modular JavaScript web applications. He lays out the theory behind building front ends that scale in complexity.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build cheap, high-performance flat-panel speakers using audio exciters on sheet materials such as foam-core board. It explains how distributed-mode speakers work and walks through experiments to find good designs.

A clip from the 2015 film The Big Short in which FrontPoint Partners investigate mortgage lending in Florida and place their first trade. It shows brokers and a stripper-adjacent loan scene illustrating subprime lending to unverified borrowers.

An IIHS crash test pitting a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air against a 2009 Malibu in a frontal offset collision for the institute's 50th anniversary. The old car's occupant space collapses while the modern car's protects its driver.

JJRicks rides in Waymo's fully driverless Level 4 cars in Phoenix with nobody in the front seats, across two long rides. It is the first in a series of such ride videos.

The 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which a panel of physicists and philosophers debates whether the universe is a simulation. Participants include David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi and James Gates.

A short Bookeen R&D demo showing smooth H.264 video playback on a Pearl E Ink panel, driven by a TI OMAP3621 chip and custom controller software.

A classic Clarke and Dawe sketch from 1991 in which an Australian senator evasively discusses an oil spill, famously saying the front fell off.

Music YouTuber Rick Beato describes confronting the people behind copyright blocks on one of his videos. The video is a rant about how takedowns and demonetization hit music education channels.

The People's Front of Judea scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian, a sketch about rival revolutionary groups.

The People's Front of Judea scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian, a satire of squabbling revolutionary factions.

A five-minute clip from The Big Short (2015) in which FrontPoint Partners confront Morgan Stanley risk assessors and an S&P ratings representative about inflated mortgage bond ratings.

IIHS frontal crash test footage showing what happens to an unbelted rear-seat passenger. It illustrates that buckling up in the back matters for the passenger and for front occupants.

Svelte creator Rich Harris explains moving reactivity into the compiler and language rather than tracking state at runtime, with a history of spreadsheets as reactive systems and comparisons to React.

Cheng Lou's react-europe 2016 talk lays out a mental framework for thinking about abstraction levels in JavaScript tooling, from Angular and Grunt to Webpack and React. It uses that framework to reason about the cost of abstractions and how to choose between competing solutions.

David Crane, designer of Pitfall for the Atari 2600, gives a GDC 2011 postmortem on the game's design challenges. He covers how he fit a large world into the console's tiny memory. The session ends with Q&A.

Wes Bos breaks down the techniques behind the McMaster-Carr website's speed: server-rendered HTML, prefetching, CDN and service worker caching, preloading, critical CSS and fixed-size images. He also notes its old-school jQuery and YUI JavaScript.

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

Technology Connections explains that US household power is split-phase, with two 120V legs that combine to 240V for large appliances. It covers the breaker panel and how the system works.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build flat panel speakers from exciters and foam board, with construction guidelines, measured SPL comparisons and a complete system playing music.