Hackaday Podcast 176: Freezing Warm Water, Hacking Lenses, Hearing Data, And Watching YouTube On A PET

It’s podcast time again, and this week Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams sat down with Staff Writer Dan Maloney to review the best hacks on the planet, and a few from off. We’ll find out how best to capture lightning, debate the merits of freezing water — or ice cream — when it’s warm, and see if we can find out what R2D2 was really talking about with all those bleeps and bloops. Once we decode that, it’ll be time to find out what Tom Nardi was up to while the boss was away with his hidden message in episode 174, and how analog-encoded digital data survives the podcast production and publication chain. But surely you can’t watch a YouTube video on a Commodore PET, can you? As it turns out, that’s not a problem, and neither apparently is 3D printing a new ear.

The meat of Elliot’s “super secret mastering script”?  Use it on your videos too!

ffmpeg -i $infile.wav -c:v copy -af loudnorm=I=-17:LRA=5:tp=-1.5 -ar 44100 $outfile.flac

Direct download, record it to tape, and play it on your boombox.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Episode 176 Show Notes:

News

What’s that Sound?

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

Quick Hacks:

Can’t-Miss Articles:

3 thoughts on “Hackaday Podcast 176: Freezing Warm Water, Hacking Lenses, Hearing Data, And Watching YouTube On A PET

  1. For the Mpemba effect, the problem is in the premise: what is your definition for “freezing”?

    If freezing means forming ice crystals, then the non-equilibrium answers may have a point. If it means having a solid block of ice with all the water frozen, then the Mpemba effect is only possible by not accounting for other effects such as losing water by evaporation.

    The point is that if the amount of water (and energy) is maintained, it’s like Zeno’s paradox: the hotter water should first reach the temperature of the cooler water. Even if it does, there’s no physical reason why it should keep cooling any faster, so the hot water always starts from behind and cannot overtake without violating some basic rule of physics or even logic itself. That’s also why the continued debate over the Mpemba effect is greatly appreciated by cranks and charlatans, and why it keeps popping up every now and again. People just want to “show” thermodynamics wrong to sell their brand of snake oil.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.