The Belt Onion club
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@HardwareGeek BTW, 7 was the maximum number of VHF channels that could be allocated in any geographic area. Adjacent channels would (or at least might, given the reliability of consumer electronics of the era) interfere with each other, so only every other channel could be used. If a big city used 2, 4, 5 (4 and 5 are consecutive numbers, obviously, but there was a gap in the frequencies, so both could be used), 7, 9, 11, and 13 (14 and up were UHF), 7 channels were possible. The next city might be allocated 3, 6, 8, 10, and 12, so it would have only 5 channels available.
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@jinpa said in The Belt Onion club:
@HardwareGeek I don't think that's quite right. I'm pretty sure we had both channels 4 and 5.
Yes, that's what I said.
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@HardwareGeek If I remember, I think we had 2,4,5,7,11,13. Can't remember what UHF channels we had - not many (2 or 3?).
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@dcon the only UHF channel I remember was 28, which was the local PBS station. I think there was something else but I don't remember watching them...probably PBS stations from farther away that didn't come in clearly.
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@boomzilla Even 28 didn't come in clearly. Where I lived, you could kinda see a picture, sometimes. (At least with the TV's built-in antenna; I assume it would have been at least somewhat better with a rooftop antenna.) Anything else wasn't even detectable.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Belt Onion club:
@boomzilla Even 28 didn't come in clearly. Where I lived, you could kinda see a picture, sometimes. (At least with the TV's built-in antenna; I assume it would have been at least somewhat better with a rooftop antenna.) Anything else wasn't even detectable.
Imagine living somewhere that you could even get channels with the built-in antenna
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@pcooper said in The Belt Onion club:
@boomzilla There was originally a 1, and then they reallocated frequencies and didn't want to renumber everything.
In Europe, they didn’t broadcast on preset frequencies baked into the TV. Instead, at first (before my time) you tuned into the station you wanted in the same way as on a radio, and then TVs got presets that you tuned to the station you wanted under them yourself. The first TV I can remember my family owning had four presets (and a remote with four numbered buttons for them)! Which was enough, because all we could receive over the air was Netherlands 1 and 2 and Belgium 1 and 2.
Only when digital cable TV became a thing here did channels suddenly get fixed numbers, decided on by the cable company. Which, IMHO, is stupid — why won’t they let me order the channels the way I want them to? Like stick all the bullshit ones I can’t throw out of my subscription at the end and the ones I do watch, at the beginning.
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@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
@pcooper said in The Belt Onion club:
@boomzilla There was originally a 1, and then they reallocated frequencies and didn't want to renumber everything.
In Europe, they didn’t broadcast on preset frequencies baked into the TV. Instead, at first (before my time) you tuned into the station you wanted in the same way as on a radio, and then TVs got presets that you tuned to the station you wanted under them yourself. The first TV I can remember my family owning had four presets (and a remote with four numbered buttons for them)! Which was enough, because all we could receive over the air was Netherlands 1 and 2 and Belgium 1 and 2.
Only when digital cable TV became a thing here did channels suddenly get fixed numbers, decided on by the cable company. Which, IMHO, is stupid — why won’t they let me order the channels the way I want them to? Like stick all the bullshit ones I can’t throw out of my subscription at the end and the ones I do watch, at the beginning.
I do recall my mum having a portable set which had one knob with 12 positions for specific channels, and a rotary dial for another 40 or so which also allowed intermediate positions. I do not recall how many channels were on either knob, though I do recall there being significantly more channels on the same two dials when using cable, and I'm pretty sure adjacent channels were used in that case.
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@PleegWat Didn’t the TV have a manual tuning thing, probably a knob or screw behind a panel that closed, with which to manually dial into the station for each channel?
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@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
all we could receive over the air was Netherlands 1 and 2 and Belgium 1 and 2.
Ok, you win the deprived childhood prize.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Belt Onion club:
Ok, you win the deprived childhood prize.
Hey, I have fond memories of the test screen that Belgium 2 showed half the time!
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@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
@PleegWat Didn’t the TV have a manual tuning thing, probably a knob or screw behind a panel that closed, with which to manually dial into the station for each channel?
No, the channels on the knob corresponded directly to the channel lists published by the cable company.
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@PleegWat Of course, a proper had a TV which only showed one channel, and later had to purchase a set-top box once the second channel was introduced. My dad's story, IIRC.
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@boomzilla said in The Belt Onion club:
@dcon the only UHF channel I remember was 28, which was the local PBS station. I think there was something else but I don't remember watching them...probably PBS stations from farther away that didn't come in clearly.
We had 38 and 50, which included hockey games and The Three Stooges, which, now that I think about it, are not unrelated.
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@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
@PleegWat Didn’t the TV have a manual tuning thing, probably a knob or screw behind a panel that closed, with which to manually dial into the station for each channel?
It did, but that was more for UHF than VHF.
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@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
The first TV I can remember my family owning had four presets (and a remote with four numbered buttons for them)! Which was enough, because all we could receive over the air was Netherlands 1 and 2 and Belgium 1 and 2.
You had a remote? Oh, the luxury!
We had a black and white -without remote - until 1988 of 1989 if memory serves well. Or actually, my parents did, because when they finally got colour, I had already moved out (university), enjoying my luxurious second-hand 37 cm colour tv, still without remote.We did have more channels than your 4 though, apart from Netherlands 1 and 2, we had no less than 4 German channels: ARD, ZDF, WDR and N3.
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@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
Hey, I have fond memories of the test screen that Belgium 2 showed half the time!
It only aired few hours during the evening. There was a notorious lack of kids shows or anything cartoony on Belgium/Flemish television. We watched either Dutch (already a whopping 3 channels at that time) or one of the French channels. You didn't understand anything but that generally didn't matter to the Anime dubbed in French.
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@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
why won’t they let me order the channels the way I want them to
uh? has been possible for as long as I remember going from the original coax cable, over the first generation decoders until the pure digital boxes of today. There is always a way to configure the presets/channel ordering. It generally is a pain in the butt.
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@PleegWat said in The Belt Onion club:
the channels on the knob corresponded directly to the channel lists published by the cable company.
Ah, yes, OK. Then it will work, sure. It would probably not have been much use with an antenna plugged into it, though, if you couldn’t manually tune it.
@Luhmann said in The Belt Onion club:
It only aired few hours during the evening.
Later on, yes. But in the early–mid 80s, BRT 2 as often as not had a test screen for the entire evening.
There was a notorious lack of kids shows or anything cartoony on Belgium/Flemish television.
You had Doctor Who, though. That was never shown on Dutch TV, but when the revamped series started almost 20 years ago, I watched that and suddenly realised I had seen earlier episodes of it when I was young.
@Luhmann said in The Belt Onion club:
There is always a way to configure the presets/channel ordering. It generally is a pain in the butt.
I don’t think my current TV (a Sony) allows doing that, and in any case, when I looked into it for the set-top box (actually under-set in practice) I had before, it was indeed a pain in the arse and would have to be done again if the cable company changed things, as they’re apt to do without warning.
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INB4 muh ad blocker
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@boomzilla Also applicable to boot times.
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@boomzilla With the key difference being that YouTube obnoxiously interrupts whenever it feels like, often again and again if I just skip ahead a bit.
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@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
@PleegWat Didn’t the TV have a manual tuning thing, probably a knob or screw behind a panel that closed, with which to manually dial into the station for each channel?
I got one from recycling in the early 90s that had about a dozen station buttons and by pressing on the whole button assembly you could flip it out and reveal a little VHF/UHF switch and a thumbscrew for a geared potentiometer for each one. I don't think it had any other channel selector, but the again 12 channels Should be Enough for Everybody!
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Belt Onion club:
@boomzilla With the key difference being that YouTube obnoxiously interrupts whenever it feels like, often again and again if I just skip ahead a bit.
That's exactly why I have a very specific browser extension for YouTube. I don't mind ads at the side, or even between videos (well, don't mind very much) but shoving them in the middle of things merits putting some idiots in charge at YouTube in a pillory. And then setting them on fire. And then throwing bottles of battery acid at them while they are restrained and on fire. And all with me laughing loudly and toasting marshmallows.
Sorry, got distracted by happy thoughts.
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@LaoC said in The Belt Onion club:
I got one from recycling in the early 90s that had about a dozen station buttons and by pressing on the whole button assembly you could flip it out and reveal a little VHF/UHF switch and a thumbscrew for a geared potentiometer for each one.
That how our TV(s) in the 80's worked. The potentiometers were recessed into the set and the plastic panel that you could flip housed a small plastic screwdriver to fit.
One (black & white) set developed an amusing fault. When you watched a channel for a long time (initially it only happened when e.g. watching a movie but as the problem worsened it happened after a few minutes only), there seemed to be some sort of "drift" where the picture became noisier and noisier. While I imagine this was a problem with the tube, this looked exactly as if the tuning was drifting. Then someone had to get up, walk to set and apply percussive maintenance (i.e. slap the top of the set), which would reset to normal condition and another cycle started.
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@nerd4sale said in The Belt Onion club:
You had a remote? Oh, the luxury!
The big problem with having a TV changing remote back in that day was when they became teenagers.
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@izzion said in The Belt Onion club:
@nerd4sale said in The Belt Onion club:
You had a remote? Oh, the luxury!
The big problem with having a TV changing remote back in that day was when they became teenagers.
Yes, in the 70s and early 80s I was the remote.
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@nerd4sale said in The Belt Onion club:
You had a remote?
Before the era of infrared remotes, there were TVs which had a wired remote.
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@nerd4sale said in The Belt Onion club:
Yes, in the 70s and early 80s I was the remote.
That's proof that remote working is older than most people think.
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@nerd4sale said in The Belt Onion club:
You had a remote?
Of course. And it had a name! (Actually multiple names, since there were 4 kids in the family)
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@PleegWat said in The Belt Onion club:
Before the era of infrared remotes, there were TVs which had a wired remote.
There’s an episode of Man About the House (IIRC) where they have that, and even in the 1980s when I saw it, that looked so comical to me.
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@remi said in The Belt Onion club:
That how our TV(s) in the 80's worked. The potentiometers were recessed into the set and the plastic panel that you could flip housed a small plastic screwdriver to fit.
Exactly. Because my parents had a camper van, and that had a small TV in it, I became very familiar with how that worked. Certainly every time we crossed a border in it, and often even when going to a different part of the same country, pretty much every night we’d have to hunt for the local TV channels. Especially fun in France, because if you had a normal TV, you could tune into either picture or sound, but not both at the same time.
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@dcon said in The Belt Onion club:
@nerd4sale said in The Belt Onion club:
You had a remote?
Of course. And it had a name! (Actually multiple names, since there were 4 kids in the family)
Hey, my mum's dishwasher had 4 names as well! (Only three kids, but add my dad).
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@PleegWat said in The Belt Onion club:
@dcon said in The Belt Onion club:
@nerd4sale said in The Belt Onion club:
You had a remote?
Of course. And it had a name! (Actually multiple names, since there were 4 kids in the family)
Hey, my mum's dishwasher had 4 names as well! (Only three kids, but add my dad).
My dishwasher is named "Frigidaire", but the robot that loads it is
self.child[1].name()
.
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@Gurth said in The Belt Onion club:
Especially fun in France, because if you had a normal TV, you could tune into either picture or sound, but not both at the same time.
TIL, I had no idea about that.
Of course living in France, this was not an issue for us, and since we were not moving the set around, tuning happened basically only once. But I do remember that I sometimes spent time scanning all the possible frequencies and noting how you could sometimes get "echoes" of a channel, or just the sound or just the picture. Of course most of those were probably just transmitters further away.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Belt Onion club:
My dishwasher is named "Frigidaire"
Not sure in the US, but in France "frigidaire" has become a common name for a fridge.
Not quite common-enough to be used as such by other businesses (e.g. a white goods shop will have a section labelled "réfrigérateurs" not "frigidaires"), but common-enough that everyone will understand what you mean, and e.g. a search for "frigidaire" will mostly return results for fridges (of any brands).
We also use "frigo" which is short for, you guessed it, "frigidaire" and this one isn't a brand name, so it is used freely by businesses (though it's a bit familiar, so it won't be used in formal documents).
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I randomly thought of something from (what I thought was) a fairly recent South Park episode. I looked it up and
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@boomzilla if it’s only ibuprofen flavoured, does it even contain any actual ingredients?
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@Arantor said in The Belt Onion club:
@boomzilla if it’s only ibuprofen flavoured, does it even contain any actual ingredients?
About the same amount as any other kind.
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@Arantor said in The Belt Onion club:
does it even contain any actual ingredients?
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Nice try, but I won't pay extra for it. Regular Lay's chips are just as homeopathic
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@Zerosquare diluted in air 30 times.
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@boomzilla said in The Belt Onion club:
Pay other people to do this crap for me is the setting I always use.
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@MrL said in The Belt Onion club:
@boomzilla said in The Belt Onion club:
Pay other people to do this crap for me is the setting I always use.
When I say that about changing my car's tires, y'all laugh at me.
INB4 not because of that
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