lamp posts

Technology Connections explains how touch lamps work and traces them back through patents to the 1950s, far earlier than most people assume.

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.

Leslie Lamport argues that programmers, like architects, should write rigorous specifications before coding, especially for concurrent and distributed systems. The talk introduces the case for writing specs (the TLA+ mindset) as a way of thinking above the code.

Big Clive tears down the Dubai lamp, a Philips LED bulb developed with Dubai's ruler for maximum efficiency and long life. He examines its construction and circuitry, including underrun LEDs and many filament strips.

Tom Scott visits Cloudflare's San Francisco office to show the wall of lava lamps whose camera feed is used as a source of entropy for random number generation. It is a short explainer on how this helps secure internet encryption.

BigClive tears down and tests a germicidal UVC lamp from eBay that floods a room with narrow-band ultraviolet and ozone. He warns of the eye and skin hazards.

A short clip from an ACM and Computer History Museum interview in which Leslie Lamport discusses writing his paper on time, clocks and the ordering of events. He explains its link to special relativity.

Jason Scott discusses making his documentary GET LAMP at a Google Tech Talk and screens part of the film. It covers the history of text adventures and interactive fiction, with interviews of Infocom developers and others.

A short Newsweek clip of White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying the administration is flagging problematic posts to Facebook that spread COVID-19 and vaccine disinformation.

Apple's 2002 television ad for the iMac G4 "Lamp", showing the adjustable-arm design in a playful way.

ElectroBOOM's Mehdi Sadaghdar responds to Veritasium's lamp-and-long-wire puzzle, analysing it as an electrical engineer. He covers where the original framing misleads and the role of stray capacitance.

A one-minute clip from Who Framed Roger Rabbit in which a swinging pendant lamp is bumped and keeps flailing, showing animators' attention to detail.

A Spike Jonze-directed Ikea commercial in which a discarded lamp is treated sympathetically, until a twist undercuts the sentiment. It is a short, well-known piece of advertising.

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 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.

A Technology Connections video weighing LED streetlights against high pressure sodium lamps, covering efficiency, color, cost and light pollution. It is a follow-up to his earlier explanation of why street lights are orange.

A short comedy sketch by Kai Lentit lampooning an interview with a 'senior Rust developer' and Rust community stereotypes.

A three-minute parody of Adam Curtis's documentary style, assembled from archive footage with his typical narration and leaps of logic.

DIY Perks builds a realistic artificial sun for dark winters, using a powerful water-cooled LED, a satellite dish reflector for near-parallel rays, and a scattering layer to mimic the blue sky. The video explains the optics behind why most lamps do not look like sunlight and shows the build and its results.

Fredrik Knudsen's 86-minute documentary on Terry A. Davis, creator of TempleOS, tracing his work, his schizophrenia and his decline. It is a chronological video essay built on his public posts and videos.

Will Wilson explains autonomous testing: using deterministic simulation and fuzzing, building on FoundationDB's approach, to test software continuously. It sets out the ideas behind his later company Antithesis.

A short satirical segment from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe that lampoons the formulaic conventions of television news reporting, from stock shots to filler street interviews and news-speak.

Innuendo Studios' video from the Alt-Right Playbook series on how bad-faith actors control the conversation through debate tactics and moving goalposts.

A four-minute Onion Talks parody in which a social media consultant pitches never putting any effort into social marketing. It lampoons TED-style talks and marketing consultants.

Jon Stewart appears on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and discusses the pandemic, vaccine science and the Wuhan lab origin theory. He jokes that the disease shares its name with the lab.

A KRAZAM satirical sketch about hustle culture and productivity obsession in tech.

A short Yes Minister clip in which the civil servant explains why Britain joined the European Union, delivered as satire of British foreign policy.

SoundHound's CEO demos Hound, a voice assistant, handling fast compound natural language queries with context and detailed criteria. The video leaked before the product's official launch.

A 2006 Saturday Night Live fake infomercial with Steve Martin and Amy Poehler selling the sure-fire way out of debt: don't buy stuff.

Kai Lentit's comedy sketch parodying an interview with an agile coach, lampooning scrum, sprints and kanban jargon. It is a few minutes of programmer humor.

A cappella parody song by The Richter Scales, set to Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire', lampooning the Web 2.0 startup bubble. It won a Webby for viral video in 2007.

A short satirical sketch in which a Q&A about web servers turns into a profane rant about threads, blocking and non-blocking I/O. It lampoons the hype around Node.js and async programming.

John Bird and John Fortune satirize the investment banking mindset in a mock interview about the subprime mortgage crisis. The sketch lampoons structured credit products and the banks' reassurances shortly before the crash.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, with an introduction, in a short clip posted for the Apollo 11 anniversary. It lampoons von Braun's moral flexibility.

A long interview with former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov describing what he calls ideological subversion, a process of demoralizing a nation. He claims it works by influencing academia and media over years.

A two-minute clip from The Wire season 1 in which D'Angelo explains, using the McNugget, that having an idea does not get you paid. It is a short monologue about who profits from inventing something.

Drive.ai shows its car driving fully autonomously on a rainy night in Mountain View, with heavy downpour, glare, a four-way stop and a broken traffic light.

The Monty Python sketch in which four wealthy Yorkshiremen try to outdo each other with exaggerated tales of childhood poverty.

A song by Pig With The Face Of A Boy that narrates the history of the Soviet Union from a worker's view, set to the Tetris melody.

A BBC comedy sketch from The One Ronnie starring Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield, built around a word-play misunderstanding about a broken BlackBerry. It is about three minutes long.