u/snacktivism

Guessing the marketing team were having a day off when these guys were named.

Just installed my own home energy reactor. Shouldn’t have any issue getting my car up to 88 miles an hour, though 1.21 gigawatts might be a bit of a stretch.

Can’t find where to put the beer can or banana peels though. 🤔

Shut up and take my money…

Made this last night but didn’t get to eat any, so I’m making up for lost time tonight. Extremely filling, even without the bread.

Had a lady over last night who I wanted to impress, so I set the table and made her a proper three course Italian meal.

- Bruschetta.
- Beef cheek ragú with egg pappardelle.
- Affogato with Fratello liqueur.

Everything turned out fantastically… The best thing is that the ragú had been slow cooking for a bit over two hours when she arrived, so the house smelled incredible, and I had enough prepped otherwise that it only took about ten minutes of work to get each dish from the kitchen to the table when we wanted to eat.

Would absolutely do this again!

Finally got around to getting this gorgeous first-gen player on the workbench for a good going over. Plays like a champ now, and sounds absolutely fantastic.

Posted 2 long form videos in 2018, got about 220 subscribers off 15k views between the two.

Life got in the way, and I finally returned to YouTube about a month ago, just posting shorts while I finish setting up my studio space and get back to making long form content, which should be only a couple of weeks away.

Have had 7 shorts published in the last 28 days, with numbers in the third picture.

I've been posting shorts to "wake up" the channel and get it back into the algorithm, and while I'm getting views and a bit of engagment, it's... A little less than I expected based on what I'd read. Shorts aren't my long term goal for the channel, it'll be almost entirely long form once I'm ready, but the shorts I'm posting are directly related to the long form content I'll be posting, so I figure any audience I gain now will carry over.

About half of my videos are have view counts that are trending upwards, but they aren't big trends, only a couple of hundred views a day max.

I don't use AI at all for any of my content (it's all recorded and edited by hand), and my niche is apparently not oversaturated, but I feel I could be doing better.

Is there something I should be doing differently, or do I just need to keep grinding?

There is nothing quite like the tactile experience of using these older players.

They're big and they're heavy, but using them is like operating a piece of machinery, not like using home entertainment equipment nowadays.

(Also, that demo is so 1970s, it smells of cigarette smoke and wears bell-bottom jeans.)

I adopted Gimli from a shelter almost 3 months ago, and this is the exact face he made the very first time he walked up to me and put his head on my leg.

He stole my heart then, and he’s still stealing my heart now… It’s not my house anymore, it’s our house. 😌

Watched Morgan’s video last night where she showed off her recipe for a vanilla syrup and her method for making an iced vanilla latte.

Realised I had all the ingredients (and a handheld frother), so this morning, I got up, warmed up the espresso machine, made the syrup, and assembled the latte.

Absolutely great if you're a fan of flavoured coffees. I like flavor, but not crippling sweetness, so I dialed back the syrup a little, and the result was perfect.

I'll be keeping the syrup on hand from now on.

Magnavox VH8000 and Pioneer VP-1000, released 1978 and 1980 respectively.

Heroes with Helium-Neon laser tubes.

Getting the Pioneer running was easy, I just had to unjam the laser sled after a previous tech put the wrong screw in the wrong place. It's built like the proverbial tank.

The Magnavox has been an odyssey, pun fully intended. This thing, unlike the Pioneer, would make Rube Goldberg proud.

About 20 hours of work so far, including modelling and 3D printing replacement gears for the laser sled, replacing blown transistors in the high voltage power supply, replacing the capacitors in the rest of the power supply (look ma, no ripple anymore!), replacing all the tantalum capacitors on the main board, fixing the radial and tangential mirror magnets, reattaching the magnet on to the spindle, and a giving it very deep clean. It has gone from almost dead to doing basically what it should, save for actually reading the disc.

My biggest fear was that this player would show up with a broken HeNe tube, because that's about the only the thing in here I can't repair. I feared the worst when I unboxed it and the laser sled was just sliding around freely for the whole international trip over to me, I was relieved when I took the cover off and saw the tube was intact, and absolutely ecstatic when I fixed the HV power supply and the laser fired up for the first time.

Next step is to build a service stand so I can do a complete optical alignment, and after that, it should pretty much work as well as it ever has. Right now all the pieces are there, I just have to assemble the puzzle.

It’s amazing contrasting the quality of these early MCA made discs with those made even a few years later, after Pioneer became the de facto custodian of the format.

This disc was released in 1980, has analog audio without CX noise reduction, the picture is okay if a bit soft considering most of the clips are videotape transfers (probably from either Umatic or 1” Type C masters) but the audio is absolutely terrible.

It’d be a step above TV broadcasts of the time, but was probably outclassed by a decent FM tuner. It sounds flat and compressed, and is prone to sibilance during dynamic peaks.

In comparison, I have a Japanese Pioneer pressing of Motown Returns to the Apollo from 1985, which still only has analog audio, but with CX encoding, and mastered to take advantage of the full dynamic range the format offers.

It sounds absolutely incredible in comparison.

For some reason my modern(ish) Denon player is unaware of the chapter stops on this disc. The only way to skip tracks is to manually scan through. I’ll have to put this disc in my Pioneer VP-1000 and see if it can read them.

Either way, I’m quite enjoying exploring the genesis of one of my favorite formats. We all have to start somewhere, and Pioneers adoption of LD in late 1981 turned it from a niche product to something considerably more mainstream.

Got my hands on a Pioneer VP-1000, with all the trimmings. It was reassembled improperly at some point (pro tip: remember which screws are short and which are long), and when the seller installed the transport lock, it misaligned the laser sled and caused it to jam.

Took about an hour to pull it apart, take one side of the rails off, free up the sled, realign it, and put it back together.

Plays like a champion now, happily running off a 120V stepdown transformer and not worried about our 50Hz line frequency.

One more Helium-Neon hero saved from the scrap heap.

Next up is the Magnavox VH-8000 currently on its way to me… An early one with a VLP logo instead of LaserVision. Fingers crossed it shows up with an intact HeNe tube.

“Smile buddy, big smile! That’s it!”

This is one v. happy rescued dude. Our couple of months together have just been the start of his forever.

Even though he’s a typical teenager (currently ten months old) he’s still a wonderful loving doggo who wants to be involved in everything I do, and has to sleep next to me every night.

Zero regrets adopting him.

This is a list of some of the 55 posts that DJT posted on Truth Social in a 3 hour period overnight.

Low effort? I don't like the sound of that.