tv pickup

A 1983 interview clip in which David Bowie questions MTV VJ Mark Goodman about why the channel played so few videos by black artists.

A clip from the BBC series Britain from Above showing UK peak power demand. It shows a grid engineer preparing for the surge as millions put the kettle on when a popular show ends.

Linus Tech Tips warns against cheap Android TV boxes, many of which ship with preinstalled malware. It looks at several boxes and suggests safer alternatives such as Chromecast and Nvidia Shield.

Simone Giertz presents Truckla, a homemade pickup truck conversion of a Tesla Model 3, shown in a short humorous promo.

A clip from Charlie Brooker's BBC show Screenwipe showing how reality TV uses editing to manufacture emotion and narrative. It demonstrates how the same footage can be cut to give very different impressions.

Tantacrul analyzes how stock music in reality TV uses blunt, repeated tropes to manipulate viewers, comparing it to nature documentaries. He ties it to ideas of reification and cultural homogenization.

A 2017 Apple TV commercial for the iPad Pro in which a kid asks "What's a computer?" while using the tablet. It pitches the all-screen iPad Pro as something that goes beyond what people think of as a computer.

An overview of the PTVS 2.0 beta feature for debugging Python and C/C++ together in one session in Visual Studio.

Technology Connections explains the early history of analog color television, from the 1954 start of modern color broadcasting, and how shadow masks work in CRTs. It is the first in a series on how analog color TV works.

Jeff Geerling looks at a Sharp NEC commercial display with a slot for a Raspberry Pi Compute Module. It is a large screen without built-in smart TV features or tracking.

A one-minute NCIS scene in which two characters type on the same keyboard to fight off a hacker. It is widely mocked as absurd TV hacking.

Matt Parker explains the history behind NTSC television running at 29.97 frames per second rather than 30, tracing it to the backward-compatible addition of color. He walks through the arithmetic behind the odd ratio.

A one-minute 2012 Microsoft television commercial for Internet Explorer 9, set to Alex Clare's 'Too Close'. It pitches a 'more beautiful web' with fast one-click access to favorite sites.

The opening credit sequence of the 1960s British spy series The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan. It is a short intro to a cult TV show.

Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind gives a public lecture on the holographic principle, the indestructibility of information and the nature of black holes. It asks whether the world could be a hologram.

An Adam Ruins Everything comedy segment on why US hospitals are so expensive, covering opaque price lists, surprise bills and penalties for the uninsured.

An Onion News Network sketch in which two teenage girls appear on TV to plead for their kidnapped friend's release, then start gossiping about classmates. It is a satirical parody of teen behavior and sensational news.

Moishe Lettvin, a former Google engineer, shares lessons from 250 interviews and his time on the hiring committee. He tells how the committee given anonymized packets, including its own, would hire almost none of them.

DIY Perks shows how to turn old or smashed TVs and monitors into realistic artificial window lights, using the backlight and Fresnel lens to simulate distant daylight.

Channel 4's George Clarke visits a council estate in Vienna and is surprised by amenities such as swimming pools and private TV channels. It showcases Vienna's high-quality social housing.

Hartverdrahtet by Akronyme Analogiker, the winning PC 4k intro at Revision 2012. It is a realtime demo with music and fractal visuals in 4096 bytes.

The Slow Mo Guys film a TV and screens with a high-speed camera to show how displays build an image. The footage includes CRT-style scanning and how pixels light up over time.

The BBC TV version of the Babel Fish passage from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with Ford and Arthur aboard a Vogon ship, narrated over the show's hand-drawn animated Guide entry.

An ABC7 News Bay Area reporter rides in a driverless Waymo robotaxi through San Francisco and documents the trip, including a couple of awkward moments. It is a short TV news segment showing what a robotaxi ride is actually like.

Kevin Spacey, giving the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, urges TV channels to give viewers control. He points to Netflix's House of Cards release as evidence that audiences want to watch on their own terms.

Technology Connections explains how analog television produced moving images without computers, covering scanning, CRTs and standards like NTSC and PAL. It is part of a series on analog TV.

A two-minute clip from Silicon Valley season 1, episode 7 featuring the human heater idea that is rejected in a startup competition scene.

A short clip of a young Steve Jobs preparing for an early TV appearance, amazed to see himself on a nearby monitor. It includes the moment when a large white earpiece is put in his ear.

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 TiVo-captured clip of the notoriously repetitive 2006 Head On headache remedy commercial, with its 'apply directly to the forehead' jingle.

A two-minute clip from The Wire in which characters work through the meaning of the word evacuate, an exchange that has become a meme.

A clip from Battlestar Galactica season 4 in which a character declares 'I'm a machine' and laments the limits of human senses.

Former CIA Chief of Disguise Jonna Mendez reviews spy scenes from film and TV and explains how realistic they are, including disguise techniques and masks.

A three-minute clip from The Wire season 3 in which Stringer Bell chairs a drug-crew business meeting using Robert's Rules of Order. The scene plays the formal procedure against the criminal setting.

A two-minute clip from The Wire in which characters speculate about who invented Chicken McNuggets.

A Community clip in which Dean Pelton explores a virtual reality environment, including a blooper moment.

An episode of Tim Hunkin's The Secret Life of Machines that explains how a washing machine works, using models, cut-aways and animations. It was first aired in 1988.

A compilation of molecular animations of DNA replication and gene transcription by Drew Berry and Etsuko Uno at WEHI, made with no narration. It shows molecular machinery at work inside cells.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of US local TV stations, and how it injects political content and scripted must-run segments into local news.

CGP Grey explains the Single Transferable Vote, a proportional ranked-ballot system, and why politicians have little incentive to adopt it. It is a short animated explainer of how multi-winner ranked voting works.