In reply to tfb.

If Philadelphians are to be believed, the only way to exchange voice via a modern cellular phone is to set it on speaker, max volume of course, and then hold it gingerly sideways while yelling into the thin end.
🤷

I love the still at 1:27.  Looks like a screen test for Ghostbusters. Boilersuits, thick gloves, big quiffs, and weird looking guns.

the sounds of of those two mechanical connections at 8:20 ... that's some high grade ohohoho-here-come-the-jollies anticipation noise ...

In reply to jwz.

Clicking links is so passé.  In the modern day the hip internetter will instead ask an amusingly-named robot to click the links for them which it will pretend to do, but actually just invent a story.  The truly hip will do this by talking to their phone.  On speaker.  In a cinema.

In reply to jwz.

Finding out that that guy is still doing his thing has been by far the best part of my day.

In reply to Nate.

Before you admonish me further, I'd like to demonstrate that I still am able to navigate a website to find a renamed link: https://www.asklabs.com/lightningdreams

In reply to jwz.

> The video documentary "Electrum" by Alberta Chu is available here.

404 *cries*

In reply to thielges.

Guys, it's not like you have to do a lot of speculation or detective work on this, just click the links. The guy in the video is Greg Leyh, lod.org, and yes he was part of SRL, and built Electrum, the 40' tall Tesla coil now installed on a sheep farm in New Zealand that a lucky few of us got to see demo'd in Hunter's Point in the late 90s.

In reply to Nate.

Not sure about the narrator, but Hunters Point is close to Survival Research Lab's former workshop on San Bruno Ave. in San Francisco.  So it might have been SRL.  I noticed some SRL folks mentioned in the closing credits: Mark Pauline, Diana Coopersmith, and Tim Lindholm for example.  

In reply to Nate.

Same guy. I was also at that exhibition. It was amazing.

It would've been 1998 or thereabouts, but there was a team that built the (then?) world's biggest Tesla coil at a site in Hunter's Point, I think adjacent to a garage where old train cars were being refurbed for use on Muni. They fired it up a few nights before disassembling and shipping off to the guy in New Zealand (I think?) who had commissioned it. It was big enough for a guy to crawl up inside while it was operating to demonstrate the idea of a Faraday cage. It remains one of the top 5 things I've experienced in person.

Was this guy part of the team?

How do I rent time on this LAAS module. I have some shit I need to blow up.

“As we can see, doubling the boosted energy provided adequate margin for this evaluation.”

And slightly less deadpan, but making him even more the sort of person I'd like to hang out with:

“Now, 24,000 volts is the maximum working voltage for this pulse forming network. However, the temptation here is arguably overwhelming.” <cranks it up to 30,000V>

And the award for Best Deadpan Delivery goes to…

Beaker and Bunsen vibes & voice ⚡

Amazing stuff, made me feel as giddy as the time I found out about battle bots.

Thanks for making me one of today's lucky 10'000. I'll have to share the 2kW PoE one with my sysadmin colleagues.

I'm just looking at pulse-forming networks and thinking 'half an EMP device'.  I can think of ... certain uses ... for a van-deliverable EMP device near some of those large sheds full of noisy electronics that plutocrat techbros are so keen on.

In reply to jon ellis.

Dream job for sure.

feels like a dignified way to empirically spend one's free time.