Dan Q - The Podcast Dan Q

Based on an original blog post at: https://danq.me/2024/07/21/ascii/ASCII, a standard whose legacy defines to this day how most of the letters and numbers in your computer get encoded into ones and zeroes, is elegant and beautiful. Via lessons in computer history, punched tape, and typewriters, I'd love to share some of its logic with you.00:00 Introduction

00:23 The Elegance of the ASCII Table

02:03 History of ASCII

03:36 ASCII Table Layouts

03:54 Control Codes

08:27 Space

09:37 Numbers

10:44 Shifted Numbers

11:54 Uppercase Letters

12:55 Lowercase Letters

14:02 The Beauty of the ASCII Table

14:53 Outro

Based on an original blog post at: https://danq.me/2024/07/09/tea-pressure/I'm told that black tea brewed at 90℃ is bad, but brewed at 100℃ is good. What if we built a specialised pressure cooker that released tea into superheated water at, say, 110℃? Could that be... even better?00:00 Intro

00:23 A Pressure Cooker... for Tea

00:52 The importance of water temperature

02:13 Let's invent something!

03:09 It's not just for high-altitude tea

03:32 What IS the ideal temperature for brewing black tea?

04:52 Outro

Based on an original blog post at: https://danq.me/2024/06/28/elephant-joke/It was too hot to sleep, so I learned about how to differentiate species' of elephant from one another instead. And then I thought of a really, really stupid joke, which you now get to experience too...

Based on an original blog post at: https://danq.me/2024/06/20/special-roads/Today I learned why some British roads have seemingly-unnecessary speed limit signs, e.g. "70" signs on something that appears to be a motorway.

Based on an original blog post at: https://danq.me/2024/04/28/window-tax/Britain and the Netherlands both had window taxes at various times. But the social and architectural effects were quite different.

Based on an original blog post at: https://danq.me/2022/12/01/automation/A friend of mine used to do railway station announcements and was so good that he could do it from memory. That job now belongs to a computer. And that's fine.