PeerTube of Jigme Datse

My IBM Portable PC has been in storage since 2019. Let's give it a once-over, perform some proactive maintenance, fix some bad modifications I made in years prior, and give it some hardware upgrades.

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🎵 Title: 1-88-TAXIDERM

One year ago I bought my 2024 Mazda CX-5, the second car and first new car I've ever owned. Here is how my ownership experience has been.

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A little edit I made with YouCut, showing an AI-edited image, based on an original picture of Arwen.

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In 2019 I made a few videos about vintage incandescent Christmas lights I procured and installed in my home. 5 years and a new apartment later, here's this year's installation, and my thoughts about what I plan to do as I begin to run out of spare bulbs and as some strings fail.

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Built-in modems were more-or-less standard equipment on home computers sold from the late 1990s to the late 2000s. On desktop PCs, these modems usually took the form of ISA or PCI expansion cards. These modems were made in a rainbow of forms, ranging from fully hardware-based modems similar in function to serial modems, to softmodems that depend on a Windows driver and the host computer's processing power to function, sometimes to the detriment of reliability and quality.

I've had twenty-two such modems, manufactured from 1994 to 2007, sitting in a box for a few years. In this video we will look at each one, and fully test it by calling other modems within my internal telephone network, including a Bell 103-compatible modem to test each modem's capability of talking to ancient devices, as well as calling a BBS over a VoIP telephone line, to test each modem's capability to establish and sustain a connection over challenging line conditions. For the 56K modems, I will call a 56K-capable dial-up access gateway to test the same for 56K connections. The results seen herein show a vast range of quality from one modem to the next, with some surprising things learned along the way.

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This smoke alarm sat in a basement that's partially open to the outdoors for who knows how long. Let's put a battery in it and see if it still works.

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An in-depth look and demonstration of a very late serial modem. Includes a field guide to 56k connectivity today (and why two ordinary modems will never establish a 56k connection), and the register settings to make this particular modem emulate any kind of older modem standard.

Collection of V.90/V.92 handshakes with Digital Impairment Learning (DIL) sounds:

Free-to-use V.34 dial-up ISP by viewer Mike Dank:

2600 Network (56k-capable BBS gateway):

List of dial-up BBSs:

My Northern Telecom Norstar 6x16 key telephone system is for sale:

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VWestlife found something I needed in a thrift store, and then decided to send some other interesting (and humorous) items along with it. Let's see what he sent.

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In the mid-1980s, Canadian broadcast equipment manufacturer Leitch Video was developing a master clock driver which could set itself by making a telephone call to another unit using its built-in modem. At the same time, the National Research Council of Canada was devising plans of a network of clocks which could synchronize each other and disseminate time via the telephone network. The two entities teamed up to create the Leitch CSD-5300, an intersection of timekeeping, broadcast video, and telephony that I think is rather beautiful. This is the history and a demonstration of said system.

As mentioned in the video (beginning at 1:37:23), I am making this CSD-5300 available to call, realizing, in my own little way, the NRC's original goal of a nationwide network of CSDs that could provide time at local numbers. There are two numbers, the first based in Michigan, USA at (989) CSD-TIME ((989) 273-8463), and the second based in New Brunswick, Canada at (506) 408-0067. If you call using a Leitch CSD-5300 or CSD-3901, your unit will grab the time from my unit. My unit will serve the time in Atlantic Time, so the proper offset will need to be set. If you call using a terminal or computer connected to a modem, you can interact with the unit (demonstrated beginning at 1:11:46). If you call and then not interact with the unit, it will wait for 20 seconds, send the time three times, and then hang up.

I would love to know if you call the unit, whether you called with another CSD or a terminal/computer, and how the call worked out.

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