I've got a Casio QV-10A[1] somewhere that almost certainly counts? Can't beat the constant fear that you could brick it if the batteries ran out at the wrong time.
I remember a Kodak dc210 whose main feature was 1 megapixel resolution, meaning one could get a 4x6” print that wouldn’t look pixelated. It had zero control (no aperture/shutter speed settings and only crappy slow fixed focus) and took ages to take a picture, meaning it was unusable for moving subject photography. It was still better than other cameras of the time which only achieved vga resolution.
Apple QuickTake 100! I remember using it in 8th grade and was pretty amazed with its 640x480 goodness when the alternative was waiting a week to finish a roll of film, drop it off at the grocery store photo counter, and pick it up the next day or two (no way would my parents pay the extra $2 surcharge for 1 hour processing).
Funny little idea. Not sure how much traction it’ll get :-) but the creator likes to fiddle with some cool nerdy things it seems [1]. Made me think it’d be interesting to have an Instagram clone that downsamples the media and maybe makes it monochrome (or colors more monotone at least) and removes some of the most offensive ML smart rankings, just to have a more calmer less addictive media consumption site?
The real shame is why the linked page even gets referral information at all (and why we cannot disable it on a browser)...
I'd love to have a browser setting to just completely disable "Referer:" headers and blank out `document.referrer`. Like, clearly hosts can control referral information to high granularity (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...) but why can't users... (actually apparently you can set this for Firefox)
Useful how? Within a domain/origin you can already track/control this stuff with a plethora of things: cookies, URL params, localStorage, JS access of history to implement fancy back behavior...
No, the other forms require sites to opt-in whereas this just sends the information whether the site wants/needs it or not.
There is plenty of harm in just this fact alone, because tracking via the other methods is transparent: you know sites are doing internal tracking if you see them being used. With referral information sent by default you have no idea whether the site uses the information or just ignores it.
Either way the important thing shouldn't be how much referral information should be sent (because clearly people disagree on that). Rather all browsers should let you customize this if you want to.
"So anyway, I updated my blog so all referrers from the orange website are redirected elsewhere.
Because fuck those tech bros, and doubly fuck the mods for not just banning these fucks.
They didn't ban them in the beginning, so now it's all full of crypto nazis."
How is this site full of crypto nazis exactly? Like seriously dude, how does this "accurately" describe the content on hn?
It does. What I like about HN is they are very conservative about making changes. They have done some work in the past to make it more mobile friendly, but clearly they kept the table layout.
The upside to this is the familiarity - which is something I love. I am not keen on redesigns unless the original design was really really bad. If I am even using your thing, it isn't that bad!
Too many companies redesign their sites, for almost no advantage to the user. This also applies to all software. For example look at Windows. Horrendous multiple levels of dialog style and behavior of various vintages. This leads to very hard discoverability in Win11. Ubuntu is so much nicer and hasn't changed much over the years from what I can tell.
The "old frowned upon thing" + "familiarity" can trump "keeping up with so called best practice" + "great I have to relearn this thing I was familiar with".
Brian Eno once said: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided."
So, Instagram emulated cheap, plastic film cameras and now we've finally moved on to OG digital cameras...
While its true that dithering changes the original signal, dithering is a necessarily evil that prevents quantization errors as a result of downsampling 24-bit+ source material due to CDs being 16-bit. It’s a choice between some barely audible noise, or some weird spectral artifacts..
Dithering modulates the least significant bit of the audio signal, so at normal listening levels it should be inaudible. Of course, one can amplify the silence by 120dB or so and hear the noise.
I often wondered about the noise I was hearing from my Discman with headphones. You'd hear this hiss when you pressed play, even before the CD loaded, so it was probably the cheap consumer audio hardware rather than the CD format itself.
I think an additional layer of hiss would show up when it actually started playing.
Indeed, no inexpensive portable digital electronics was going to give you perceptible-noise-free 16-bit audio.
Depending on how the original audio was mastered, it could also have it's own hiss in the sound data if the CD itself. You can tell if you load the raw CD data into a wave editor and see low amplitude noise where you'd expect silence.
This can be a contentious area as a lot of different sources will throw different figures for the noise floor of a CD. I recall anywhere from -98 to -130dB. Either value, at the minimum level, is something like 4.6dB. Which is completely inaudible in normal listening conditions.
Your comment has strong “well, actually …” energy. We’re talking about faulty blocks from physical abrasions and the two common error mechanisms (skipping or repeating). They were both “weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty.”
I recall reading a music artist (Akufen, maybe?) would scribble over CDs with a marker to get them to skip, then use the resulting sounds to make music.
When I first used CD music it was ugly to my ears. It was full of high frequency sound compared to the hissy tape. I got used to it and all this digital sound DSP was available to change the sound to your liking.
In theory yes, but in reality it has a plenty of distortion from various sources.
For instance the jitter - the early CDs didn't have a super stable clocks that governed the conversion, so the slight changes of the pace when D/A conversion takes place would create slight distortion and it would also affect intersample peaks making it more apparent. Then you have the non-linearity of D/A converters themselves that were essentially acting like waveshapers.
Neil Young once said: Did you ever go in a shower and turn it on and have it come out tiny little ice cubes? That's the difference between CDs and the real thing – water and ice. It's like gettin' hit with somethin' instead of havin' it flow over ya.
I'd argue that in some cases, the live show is not the "reference form" of the a sing. It might be the product of multiple sessions mixed, or a pair-up they can't do at the live show.
The only things missing are the diagonal pinstripe background, drop shadows & glass borders round the thumbnails, and glossy reflections & lens flare on the images.
77 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] thread[1] https://cameralegend.com/tag/qv-10a/
I remember a Kodak dc210 whose main feature was 1 megapixel resolution, meaning one could get a 4x6” print that wouldn’t look pixelated. It had zero control (no aperture/shutter speed settings and only crappy slow fixed focus) and took ages to take a picture, meaning it was unusable for moving subject photography. It was still better than other cameras of the time which only achieved vga resolution.
[1]: https://bbenchoff.github.io/
[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/violenceworks/status/148712570863...
I'd love to have a browser setting to just completely disable "Referer:" headers and blank out `document.referrer`. Like, clearly hosts can control referral information to high granularity (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...) but why can't users... (actually apparently you can set this for Firefox)
0 - no restrictions (default), 1 - base domain match, 2 - fqdn match
There is plenty of harm in just this fact alone, because tracking via the other methods is transparent: you know sites are doing internal tracking if you see them being used. With referral information sent by default you have no idea whether the site uses the information or just ignores it.
Either way the important thing shouldn't be how much referral information should be sent (because clearly people disagree on that). Rather all browsers should let you customize this if you want to.
(there's still good content here of course, but I'm sure the tech-crypto-bros are the ones most likely to cause trouble on his site)
How is this site full of crypto nazis exactly? Like seriously dude, how does this "accurately" describe the content on hn?
Just like God told him it has to be.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
Consider using a css grid instead of a table too.
*: Not actually good.
The upside to this is the familiarity - which is something I love. I am not keen on redesigns unless the original design was really really bad. If I am even using your thing, it isn't that bad!
Too many companies redesign their sites, for almost no advantage to the user. This also applies to all software. For example look at Windows. Horrendous multiple levels of dialog style and behavior of various vintages. This leads to very hard discoverability in Win11. Ubuntu is so much nicer and hasn't changed much over the years from what I can tell.
The "old frowned upon thing" + "familiarity" can trump "keeping up with so called best practice" + "great I have to relearn this thing I was familiar with".
That would not be vintage.
So, Instagram emulated cheap, plastic film cameras and now we've finally moved on to OG digital cameras...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither
Sources: http://www.dspguide.com/ch3/1.htm
https://www.bruce.audio/post/2022/05/26/dithering/
I think an additional layer of hiss would show up when it actually started playing.
Depending on how the original audio was mastered, it could also have it's own hiss in the sound data if the CD itself. You can tell if you load the raw CD data into a wave editor and see low amplitude noise where you'd expect silence.
For instance the jitter - the early CDs didn't have a super stable clocks that governed the conversion, so the slight changes of the pace when D/A conversion takes place would create slight distortion and it would also affect intersample peaks making it more apparent. Then you have the non-linearity of D/A converters themselves that were essentially acting like waveshapers.
What is "the real thing?" Vinyl? The other day the audiophiles were aghast when they found out their vinyls had digital intermediate steps. Yawn.
The hiss and popping of vinyl definitely has a nostalgia aspect, but digital is much better. Get a good digital source though
They were basically Polaroids for nerds. Nobody else took them seriously.