Technology Connections is a series of YouTube videos that explores numerous aspects of technological history, including how things work, the way things developed, and anything in between. There is no limit to what kinds of tech could be covered — one minute you may be learning about how electron guns draw pictures on an analog television, and the next you might be discovering that your modern toaster is a piece of junk.

While the channel officially started back in 2015, host Alec Watson's forays into YouTube go somewhat farther back than that, at least to 2013. However, at that time, he was a much smaller-known YouTube channel with much lower production values and is something of an Old Shame for him. The Technology Connections channel proper also first experienced its major surge in popularity with his video on VCRs in 2017, and further experienced another bump with the VHS vs. Beta format war series. Since then, it has become a fairly well-known series of videos among tech focused YouTube users, in particular because of the aforementioned variety of content and its uniqueness.

Alec also has a second channel, aptly named Technology Connextras, where he typically covers a topic already covered on his main channel but digs into further detail about the topic in an unscripted fashion.

This series provides examples of:

• Aborted Arc: In "Closed Captioning: More Ingenious Than You Know", Alec said he would do a video on Teletext in the future. Four years later, in a No-Effort November video on the TV Guardian and its use of closed captioning to mute profanity, Alec admitted he couldn't get motivated to do a video on Teletext since it was never implemented in the United States and he had no personal connection to it.
• AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle: Happens in a Hilarious Outtake at the end of "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD".
  Alec: The best videotape... yeah no no no. The emPHAsis is all wrong.
• Added Alliterative Appeal:
  • Happens in "LED Color Experiments 2019; Beyond the Sharpie":
  Alec: Yes, I'm a sucker for Christmas lights, I just love how festive everything becomes when we waste just that extra bit of energy lighting up the neighborhood with frankly silly sums of small, shimmering string-suspended shiny sources of sparkling light. Since striving for savings seems sensible sometimes, scores of stores sell some super slick se... uh, okay that's... that's enough of that!
  • Also used in repeatedly "What's the deal with the popcorn button?", where Alec strings together words beginning with "P", with popcorn always being one of them.
  • From his episode on lava lamps:
  Alec: Anyway, a fun, frequent phenomenon found in flava flamps when they warm up...
• Aspect Ratio Switch: Alec's videos are all in 16:9, but will will occasionally Letterbox video from analog video sources, the most accessible ones being 4:3.
  • "DVD: The Death Knell of LaserDisc" also switches aspect ratios to demonstrate how DVDs achieved widescreen in a way superior to LaserDisc.^How?By squishing a 16:9 frame into a 4:3 frame and unsquishing it for playback, similar to Anamorphic celluloid film. This means more pixels go to the movie frame, while fewer pixels are wasted in the Letterbox. Although DVD has a constant resolution of 720x480, which would be 3:2 with square pixels. It is squished for 4:3 and stretched to 16:9. LaserDisc used the the same 16:9 technique with Squeeze LD, but Squeeze LDs are rare and look squished on standard players and TVs.
• Astonishingly Appropriate Interruption:
  • Near the end of "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD".
    Alec: But of course, here in the 21st Century, we have the luxury of digital video, which is always perfect!
    Camera: *Stops recording*
    Alec: *laughs*
  • At the end of "Automatic Record Changers: We used to like them", the Automatic Record Changer drops the record when Alec says "drop".
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • In CED Part 4, Alec describes some of RCA's inventions that came out of a wacky design process to make some sort of home video system work. Ultimately, the CED system proven to be the most practical, with competing magnetic tape systems proving even more practical in years to come.
    • PhotoPix discs would store tiny physical pictures on a disc, and have a vidicon tube^note The earliest form of camera sensors for television. An lens projects an image onto light sensitive phosphors, then an electron beam scans a raster pattern like a CRT. A pickup measures how much of the energy is reflected back from the phosphors, thus making an analog television signal. read it. Alec describes it as "a microscope with a television camera attached to it, and this was somehow going to be feasible for a consumer product in 1964". This would be turned into a tape form factor to get more surface area, essentially making it a film strip. But RCA still couldn't shrink a vidicon tube to make that work.
    • HoloPix (later HoloTape for similar reasons above) used lasers to stimulate holograms, which would be picked up with a vidicon tube and transmitted to a television. However, Alec says that when it was first demonstrated, "It was a bit of a disaster. It worked, that much is true, but the pictures were not great, there was no sound, it was still extraordinarily complicated, and (let's not kid ourselves), magnetic tape was kinda becoming viable."
  • Discussed in the episode on the Fisher DAC-145, a CD changer that also had a turntable for playing vinyl records. While conceivably it could be used for people with limited space, people looking to upgrade to CDs from vinyl likely already had a turntable. "Just because an idea is clever or cool doesn't mean it's useful or even good," Alec says.
  • During his episode on the klaxon, he notes that while it could be silly and fun to install one in your car as a horn replacement, you would very likely destroy the car's horn circuits and even if you got it to work, all you would do is give everyone in the area a scare due to how loud a klaxon horn sounds.
• Bad to the Last Drop: In his video discussing coffee percolators, Alec drinks coffee made on a stovetop percolator and an electric percolator. He finds the taste from both to be pretty bad, but he finds the coffee made on the electric percolator isn't too terrible after getting used to the taste (his only major complaint was the coffee smelling bad). In comparison, Alec finds the coffee made on the stovetop percolator completely awful and points out how it tastes very burnt due to how the coffee grinds are recirculated in the water while the pot is being heated.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Alec does this in CED Part 1
  Alec: Through World War 1, radio was used almost exclusively for wireless telegraphy. That's the classic dots and dashes that make up the world famous, say it with me now character encoding schemes of which Morse Code is one.
  • He also does this in his video about retroreflectors. After he describes a retroreflector, he says it is like the eyes of a cat. When he says he's going to take a look at one, he brings out his cat, per Captain Obvious.
• Banana Peel: Conversed in "Why Sony's Beta Videotape System Failed--Part 2".
  Alec: The history of the videotape format war is interesting, but in my view, hilariously one-sided. Sure, Sony was first to market, but they just kept screwing up! It's like watching a cartoon where the protagonist repeatedly slips on a banana peel.
• Berserk Button: In his video on humidifiers, the video is going along as usual until he turns on the large unit and reacts with horror when he sees it has a blue LED display. He then proceeds to go on a rant about the blue LED trend and how he considers it a textbook case of style over substance. And just when it appears he's about to get back on track, he then proceeds to make a few more jabs at it before finally resuming the video.
  • People who still say Betamax was better than VHS. It's something of a recurring topic, showing up in videos about Betamax istelf, the CED, and Betacam. In the last, he points out the whole thing has been pointless for years, and is largely based in misconceptions.
• Better than a Bare Bulb: Alec will frequently hang a lampshade on any deficiency. Be it in his script, his video, a piece of technology or anywhere. Sometimes they are lampshaded using Blatant Lies. Items that get lampshaded include:
  • Any and all Puns.
  • Any Overly Long Gag.
  • The Early-Installment Weirdness when he refers to a video made before his square shelf set, such as in CED Part 2.
  • The fact that "One more thing: the VHS notch" has an extremely similar premise to the previous video.
  • A caption bonus at the end of "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD" lampshades that the telempromter in "One more thing: the VHS notch" spelled it as both "Freddy the Feces" and "Freddie the Feces"
  • Even the slightly swinging shutter string "Trinitron: Sony's Once Unbeatable Product" is not exempt.
• Blatant Lies:
  • The second channel Technology Connextras was originally called Technology Connections 2. In "The JVC LCCS monitor has some quirks", the first video he uploaded there following the name change, he claims that the channel was always called that and never ever anything else.
  • A small one appears in "One more thing: the VHS notch", where text in screen says "this clip is totally not playing backwards".
  • In "Film: the reason some of the past is in HD", right after Alec talks about gate weave^note That's the slight shakiness seen on film sources, especially visible on static text, and right before he talks about Video Inside, Film Outside, there's this quote:
    Alec: What do you mean "this sounds dubbed in"? This was totally recorded at the same time as everything el- *Interrupts himself*
• Body Uploading: In "Closed Captioning: More Ingenious Than You Know", Alec uploads himself into an analog video system when talking about how closed captioning worked in analog television.
• Bootstrapped Theme: The jazz music he used in the VHS vs. Betamax quality comparison would later be adopted as the closing theme on all of his videos. The music is called Floaters by Jimmy Fontanez as part of the Youtube Audio Library.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Many of Alec's videos covers subjects that would be considered incredibly boring to talk about, but he goes into great lengths to explain how certain things work, why they work that way, and how it affects people that interact with them. For example, his video on elevator signal cues shows how a simple double ring from an elevator helps those with visual impairments know that the elevator is heading down whereas a single ring would indicate the elevator is heading up.
  • In practical examples, Alec extols the virtues of things like the Hunter ceiling fan - a 120-year-old design that remains one of the more practical ceiling fans with minimal changes away from the original purpose - and the minivan - a car derided for being the quintessential Mommy Mobile but has better practical use compared to the SUV or crossover, the latter even made to counter perceptions of the minivan.
• Brick Joke: In part 4 of his CED retrospective, Alec mentions that the codename for the format was "DiscPix", emphasizing the "S" sound in case anyone mistook it for something else. Later in part 5, when talking about the lack of porn on the format, he says "The only way we'd have gotten that kind of DiscPix..."
• Buffy Speak: Alec will occasionally include comically imprecise language for humorous effect (sometimes overlapping with Sophisticated as Hell).
  • In “Sound by Numbers: The Rise of Digital Sound”, he skips over most of the biology of human hearing by referring to the structures of the inner ear as “the heary bits”.
  • In LaserDisc Part 1, Alec also says that when he was in fourth grade, he thought LaserDisc was "a weird and non-specific way to refer to a DVD" until he saw the 12 inch reflective optical disc.
• Call-Back:
  • In his video on the GeoSafari, he compliments the device for not having blue LEDs in a reference to his rant on them in his humidifiers video.
  • In his video on The Clapper, Alec notes that the receptacles in The Clapper are the first receptables he's ever seen that actually grab onto the holes drilled into American electrical plugs, a feature he noted as woefully underused in his video on plugs.
• Captain Obvious: Alec using his cat to demonstrate the inspiration of an early retroreflection design in his retroreflectors video:
  Alec: This is a cat.
  Commenter: (makes note for future reference)
  Another commenter: Phew, I would've never known what it was if you never told me!
  Yet another commenter: And a super cute one too!
• Catchphrase: A few have come into existence so far.
  • "...[so that's] NEAT."
  • "Fun fact!"
  • "Through the magic of buying [X] of them..."
• Common Knowledge: Invoked, he never hesitates to stand up against widespread misconceptions. Just a few examples:
  • He vehemently disagrees with Betamax being "better" than VHS, with his experiment in comparing the quality of the two to be very difficult to notice even when squinting and has also gone on record saying the VHS tape transport mechanism is way more clever and efficient than Beta's.^{technical details}The myth of Beta having a better picture may have originated from the fact that Beta spreads a video field across a longer helical scan sweep, thus allowing more detail (measured in TVL lines) to be recorded. However, Beta 1 speed (which Alec didn't use) could only record one hour on a normal cassette, and thus was discontinued on new VCRs by 1980. Beta 2 and 3 speeds are slower to record more on one tape, nullifying Beta's supposed picture quality advantage.
  • As a small addendum to the above, he also avidly stands on the hill of The Rule of First Adopters in the VHS vs. Beta war being a complete myth, as Sony had no control over what actually appeared on the format. Also saying that the porn industry's eventual preference to VHS was an effect of VHS's victory, not a cause.^note Alec did however say that in the case of CED, RCA controlled what content that could be released on it, and therefore it had no porn. It only lasted about five years on the market (players sold 1981-84, discs sold 1981-86).
  • When talking about NTSC vs. PAL, he also dismisses the claim that PAL was "way superior" and that NTSC was the wrong choice, as NTSC had a far earlier start and PAL is actually nearly identical, with its one advantage (never having to adjust the color timing on your TV) being eventually negated anyway once sets with automatic color timing adjustment came into play.
  • When he talks about the US power grid, he is all too happy to immediately shoot down the claims that European 220 V is "safer" than the US 120 V system, by virtue of Ohm's Law being a thing.
• Color Wash: In his discussion on high pressure sodium light bulbs, Alec talks about how the orange-peachy glow from the lamp makes everything look off with the colors as he demonstrates with some random objects of various colors. When the bulb is warming up, the colors are washed out to the point that you can't tell what color is what. Even when the bulb is fully warmed up, the colors still look off, such as a jar of red pasta sauce looking more like a puke brown.
• Continuity Nod: The beginnings of many of these videos briefly mention or show what was in the previous video. CED Part 5 mentions rice cookers, while DVD+R vs DVD-R shows Alec putting away a coffee percolator. So far, the most blatant one is in "LED color experiments 2019; Beyond the Sharpie", where he didn't bother to put away his VHS and Beta VCRs before making the video.
• Crippling Overspecialization: When Alec talks about Betamax, he says it's basically a shrunken version of Sony's previous U-Matic videotape system. However, he says Sony seemed to have gone too far with making it small. This made Beta unable to record as much on one tape as VHS could.^{technical details}It also didn't help that Beta's helical head sweep angle was shallower than VHS, which hinders recording time even if both cassettes had the same amount of tape. With standard cassettes (Beta L500 with 500 feet (150 meters) of tape vs. VHS T-120 (812 feet, or about 250 meters)) on the "standard" tape speeds, Beta could only record 1 hour, whereas VHS could record 2. The later tape speeds Beta III and VHS EP (a.k.a, SLP)(both 1/3 of the normal speed) could record up to 3 hours and 6 hours, respectively. Thinner than normal tape stock (L750 in Beta for 750 feet (222 meters) of tape, T-160 for VHS (1075 feet, or 328 meters) with the 1/3 speeds make for 4.5 hours on Beta and 8 hours on VHS.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: How he views the VHS vs. Beta format war, as detailed in his two-part series, contrary to popular belief. In fact, his view on it is that the only reason Betamax caught on at all was because it beat JVC to the market, but otherwise JVC pretty much toppled them in every other manner, and even when Betamax introduced a new innovation, it was quickly rendered obsolete by VHS copying it or, worse yet, doing it better.
• Curse Cut Short: At the beginning of the Automatic Record Changers video:
  Alec: On the front is Side 1, and on the back is...Side 6? The fu-
• Deliberately Monochrome: Combined with Raster Vision. Alec used at least two monochrome TVs to help explain the basics of analog TV before mentioning color in later videos. Both of them appear in "Lines of Light: How Analog Television Works". He also puts himself on the Panasonic monochrome TV (or some of his other color ones^note The known color CRT TVs include two 13" Trinitrons (1987 and 1994), a General Electric TV, a small boom box screen, and a small JVC Liquid Crystal Color Shutter display.) when demonstrating what he says about analog TV.
  • In "Retroreflectors; they're everywhere, and they cheat physics (sort of)", Alec makes the screen monochrome during an Editor's Note. This uses a digital effect with a freeze frame as opposed to a CRT.
• Deliberate VHS Quality: Alec puts segments of his own videos on a real recordable^note for obvious reasons, he does not do this with formats that can't record, such as CED and LaserDisc format (VHS, Betamax, Video8, etc.) when demonstrating how these formats looked.
  • Alec put video of himself on a VHS tape and transferred it back to his video "The Impossible Feat Inside Your VCR". He also toggles from SP to LP to EP speeds to demonstrate how video and audio quality suffers, and why the latter doesn't with VHS Hi-Fi.
  • "Comparing Beta & VHS on Quality: Was Beta Really Better?" deliberately uses VHS quality for obvious reasons.
  • In DVD: The Death Knell of LaserDisc, Alec does this to show how little image quality comes through when Letterboxing widescreen content to a 4:3 SD analog format like VHS or LaserDisc.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Alec often does this for comedic effect.
  • "CED Part 2":
    Alec: If you want to learn more about videotape technology, you can check out this much earlier video of mine. But be warned: it's a much earlier video of mine.
  • "The VHS cassette was more clever than Beta" (among others):
    Alec: Hello and welcome to the first video of No-Effort November! A series of videos for the month of November where no effort is made.
  • Exaggerated in "LED Experiments: Making Holiday Lights Less Garish":
    Alec: You can string a whole bunch end-to-end because they use so little energy. They're probably inherently safer because they use so little energy. They're cheaper to operate because they use so little energy. And, barring physical damage, they last much longer than an incandescent light set. Another huge advantage is that they use so little energy.
  • In "Door closers: ubiquitous, yet unloved and often maladjusted", Alec notes that the hinge style of door closer can cause problems with pinching, which has resulted in legal action after "these were used in public places and public fingers got publicly pinched — in public."
• Derailed Train of Thought:
  • "One more thing: the VHS notch": Alec says "Have you ever noticed that some things are bigger than other things?", then gets sidetracked talking about how the tendency for pockets on women's clothes to be smaller than ones on men's clothes is unjust. He later gets back on track saying the VHS cassette is bigger than the Beta cassette, and how VHS prevented users from sticking a Beta tape in.
  • "The JVC LCCS monitor has some quirks" has Alec talking about the titular display, but gets sidetracked talking about EPCOT. This was because the Macrovision-protected tape he used to demonstrate the LCCS's shortcomings is the 1991 tape A Day at EPCOT Center.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: If you're used to his current throughput where Alec sits in front of a backdrop full of square shelves stuffed with all sorts of old tech, it can be somewhat weird going back to his earlier days where he stood in front of a green screen with a more plain backdrop. Go even further back, and you'll find yourself face-to-face with a completely different backdrop that's either different shelves of old tech. Sometimes it's accompanied by a White Void Room. However, the overall format of the show has largely remained the same. Likewise, Alec's older videos lack the bloopers and the snarky text in the closed captions that appear in the end.
  • Also Lampshaded in CED Part 2
    Alec: If you want to learn more about videotape technology, you can check out this much earlier video of mine. But be warned: it's a much earlier video of mine.
• Epileptic Flashing Lights: Occasionally happens in these videos, but Alec will always give an epilepsy warning before it happens. And the flashing always involves filming a CRT with a mismatched shutter speed. In case it wasn't obvious, epilepsy warning for all videos in this trope's examples.^note While the timestamps in the video links don't link directly to the offending flashing, they link straight to the epilepsy warning that Alec provides.
  • Technology Connections:
    • "How Analog Color TV Works: The Beginnings" is possibly the oldest known epilepsy warning on the channel. It was to demonstrate how irritating a sequential color wheel TV would be to view if each color field was 1/30th of a second.
    • "LCCS: The CRT / LCD Hybrid from JVC" has an epilepsy warning for a slow motion shot of the titular display.
    • "Film: the reason some of the past is in HD" has an epilepsy warning at the beginning, for 5:40 and 8:30. Both of these involve flickering CRTs.
  • Technology Connextras:
    • "Filming CRTs: It's pretty easy, actually" has an epilepsy warning when it's about to show a CRT filmed with a smartphone camera.
• Face Palm: In "TOSLINK: That one consumer fiber optic standard", this is Alec's reaction to learning that there are gold-plated TOSLINK cables. Quite rightfully so, considering TOSLINK connectors don't even conduct electricity on their plating.
• Fake-Out Fade-Out: Happens a few times.
  • In the beginning of "Filming CRTs: It's pretty easy, actually" on his second channel, as soon as he says what you need to do to film a CRT screen with zero flicker^note That is setting the shutter speed to 1/30th or 1/60th of a second so as to match the flicker rate of the CRT, he then cuts the video to black and starts playing the closing music, before popping the video back up and going into a bit more detail.
  • Happens again near the 22-and-a-half minute mark in CED part 3. It comes right after a Sequel Hook where Alec promises to finally talk about CEDs after talking about the history of RCA (which he spent most of the video doing). This Fake-out Fade-out even has the names of Patreon supporters.
• Fast-Forward Gag: In the "Coffee Percolators: An Explanation and Roast" video, Alec has both the stovetop percolator and electric percolator running. When he goes upstairs to start the stovetop percolator, he has the video sped up and you can hear the sound of the electric percolator also sped up. Alec in the subtitles notes that it sounds like a laser blaster and then a steam train that progressively gets faster and faster.
  [pew, pew pew pew, pew pew] It does sounds weirdly like a laser blaster when sped up. Fascinating, innit? Now it sounds like a steam train. I think I can, I think I can ithinkicanithinkicanithinkicanithinkican—Oh God, IT'S GONNA BLOW!
• Funny Background Event:
  • When "Macrovision: The Copy Protection in VHS" shows what an attempted copy of a Macrovision-protected tape looks like, the text citing the film source as Rain Man is all wavy.
  • "Trinitron: Sony's Once Unbeatable Product" has an arrow pointing to a swinging pull string for the shades for the window behind the Trinitron. It is accompanied by the text "OMG That's Annoying"
  • The teleprompter in "One more thing: the VHS notch" shows text which has little to do with the video itself.
    Teleprompter: These words on the teleprompter are here to enhance the illusion of this cutaway. They in no way represent the actual content of the script.
    It was a bright sunny day in the 99 hectare forest, and Freddy the Feces was all riled up to go...
  • The beginning of "Cassette adapters are remarkably simple" has Alec wearing a different shirt whenever he shows an alter ego.
  • Two minutes into "The Needlessly Useless Webcam Activity Light", the whiteboard behind him reads (DISTRACTION).
• Fun with Subtitles: Alec slips a lot of jokes in the captions whenever he isn't directly speaking such as the fast-forward section of the electric percolator boiling up coffee. This is effectively the main joke of the Closed Captioning video, such as the delay in regards to live-broadcast captions.
  • Silly captions also tend to come up whenever an audio demonstration is being done, such as when comparing how different car horns sound.
• Hilarious Outtakes: At the end of every video. These may involve Alec getting distracted, stumbling over words, or props going wrong.
• Hypocritical Humor: At the end of his comparison of VHS and Beta's tape designs, he goes on a long tirade about how absolutely none of this even matters anymore because they're completely dead formats and haven't been relevant for the last several years, and chides Beta adopters for picking the wrong format to back. He caps it off by saying he's off to go check out his HD-DVD player.
• Insult Backfire: in the defense of CFL, Alec says one commenter described LEDs as "glowing computer chips" as if it was unflattering, but Alec thinks it sounds cool.
• I've Come Too Far: In CED Part 5:
  Alec: Sonnenfeldt made the case that having come this far [in the development of Selectavision], it would be silly to quit.
• Just in Time: Invoked in the Trinitron episode, as Alec noted that Sony's patent for Trinitron—which they strictly controlled, to the point of making licensing almost impossibly difficult—expired right as Plasma and LCD TV's were beginning to arrive, limiting the amount of time competitors had to profit off their superior CRT technology without needing to license it.
• LOL, 69:
  • When he talks about his Keyboard in this video, he has the keyboard go to 69 BPM and makes it say the number, to which he replies "Nice"
  • In "Old pinball machines are amazingly complex", Alec has the score display of an old mechanical pinball machine displaying 420690 as its score readout while beginning to exhibit some oddities of how it works.
• Mad Libs Dialogue: In "The VHS cassette was more clever than Beta", Alec dubs in the exact measurements of how much more tape the Betamax tape transport mechanism uses than VHS. The captions even say the numbers are obviously dubbed in.
  Alec: The beta machine needs [12] more inches of tape. That's about [30] centimeters.
• Mommy Mobile: "Get over yourself. Embrace the minivan" on Technology Connextras. Prioritise your needs over what other people think about you, and you too will want a minivan.
  Alec: Look, you may not know it yet, but you want one of these. It's time to spread the gospel of the minivan, because there's way too many car buyers out there who are too vain to consider the Swiss Army knife of vehicles when this is the best class of vehicle out there.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • In "Bubble Lights: The Weirdest Christmas Light?", Alec says "At least I actually didn't put a lot of effort into this one, finally", implying "No-effort November" videos rarely live up to their name.
  • Alec says that RCA put their "SelectaVision" brand on their first VHS VCRs, despite the facts that A) SelectaVision refers to what's now called home video, and B) VCRs were not marketed for home video at the time, only TV recording. However, the rise of pre-recorded cassettes and home video meant the SelectaVision name now fit the device.
• No Punctuation Period: In "Closed Captioning: More Ingenious than You Know", Alec mocks YouTube's captions for not adding any punctuation with a run-on sentence.
  Alec: By hitting [the closed captioning] button, your device will start displaying the text metadata embedded in the video stream that either YouTube has auto-generated, or that super awesome content creators like myself have put in so that you don't have to simply watch a stream of unpunctuated words flow by like the world's largest run on sentence that never ends and which often contains incorrect words because the captioning system isn't quite perfect and that while useful as a tool could really use... (jokes sometimes end up here, too!)
  Text: This went on for some time...
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • In "The Impossible Feat inside Your VCR" Alec says "no joke" when reassuring people that his VHS filter is, in fact, done with real VHS hardware.
  • In "Macrovision: The Copy Protection in VHS", Alec emphasizes that there are, in fact, circumstances where copying a copyrighted piece of media is allowed.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In Why Sony's Beta Videotape System Failed--and failed hard (Part 1), Alec says Sony felt this way when RCA released a VCR that could record 4 hours on one VHS tape, with Sony promptly copying the innovation of slower tape speeds (for more recording time) with a new VCR.
  • In CED Part 4, Alec says RCA felt this way in 1966 when The New York Times published an article saying CBS was working on something called the EVR, or Electronic Video Recorder. This was while RCA was trying to make some sort of home video system work.
• Overly Long Gag: Invoked, as Alec will often exhaust himself with the length of a gag.
  • In "Automatic Record Changers: We used to like them", there is a gag about Alec's voice explaining how record changers work in deliberate lo-fi.
    Record!Alec: It's just like magic!
    Alec: Well it's not really like magic
    Record!Alec: *giggles* It sure is! The record-
    Alec: No. Stop it. We're done with that.
  • "LED Color Experiments 2019; Beyond the Sharpie":
    Alec: Yes, I'm a sucker for Christmas lights, I just love how festive everything becomes when we waste just that extra bit of energy lighting up the neighborhood with frankly silly sums of small, shimmering string-suspended shiny sources of sparkling light. Since striving for savings seems sensible sometimes, scores of stores sell some super slick se... uh, okay that's... that's enough of that!
  • In "Cassette Adapters are Remarkably Simple", Alec has an alter ego gag which he believes went along longer than it should.
    Alec: Ever wonder how they [Cassette Adapters] work?
    Alt!Alec: Only all the time!
    Alec: No. Stop. That gag is over.
• Painting the Medium: Alec will often demonstrate audio and video technology, with imperfections and artifacts coming as he talks about them. This may take the form of Deliberate VHS Quality, Raster Vision, or a Repetitive Audio Glitch.
  • On multiple occasions, Alec makes jokes about the YouTube cards not displaying properly, such as in "The VHS cassette was more clever than Beta" where the card distracts him when it appeared a few seconds late.
  • Audio:
    • "The Impossible Feat Inside Your VCR":
      Alec: The only caveat to VHS Hi-Fi was that because the audio was recorded along the helical scan portions of the tape, the source of the sound had to switch back and forth with the heads. Now our ears are actually far more sensitive to gaps in information than our eyes. So if the tape was damaged, *60hz buzz*, or if the heads didn't line up quite right, you would hear a low 60hz buzz. Ordinarily, though, this was a fairly rare occurrence.
    • In the TOSLINK video, a Repetitive Audio Glitch happens to demonstrate what glitches can happen with digital audio connections
    • In the DVD-R vs DVR+R video, another Repetitive Audio Glitch appears when Alec talks about what was inconvenient about burning data to optical discs.
  • Video:
    • Alec put video of himself on a VHS tape and transferred it back to his video "The Impossible Feat Inside Your VCR". He also toggles from SP to LP to EP speeds to demonstrate how video and audio quality suffers, and why the latter doesn't with VHS Hi-Fi.
    • "Lines of Light: How Analog Television Works" uses Raster Vision with a black and white CRT when explaining the basics of analog TV, and explaining that analog standards deal with lines, not pixels.
    • (Epilepsy warning for the linked video) In "How Analog Color TV Works: The Beginnings", Alec flashes the screen with colors to demonstrate how irritating a sequential color wheel TV would look if each color field was 1/30th of a second.
    • "Trinitron: Sony's Once Unbeatable Product" also uses Raster Vision. It shows close-ups of a Trinitron and a Slot Mask tube to show the differences in the dot pitch patterns.
    • "DVD: The Death Knell of LaserDisc" switches aspect ratios to demonstrate how DVDs achieved widescreen in a way superior to LaserDisc.^How?By squishing a 16:9 frame into a 4:3 frame and unsquishing it for playback, similar to Anamorphic celluloid film. This means more pixels go to the movie frame, while fewer pixels are wasted in the Letterbox. Although DVD has a constant resolution of 720x480, which would be 3:2 with square pixels. It is squished for 4:3 and stretched to 16:9. LaserDisc used the the same 16:9 technique with Squeeze LD, but Squeeze LDs are rare and look squished on standard players and TVs. Right after, he uses Deliberate VHS Quality to show how little image quality comes through when Letterboxing widescreen content to a format following 4:3 SD analog standards like VHS or LaserDisc.
    • In the first minute of CED Part 2, repeating parts of the disc is shown and demonstrated to be a common problem with the CED system.
• Parody Commercial: a fake sponsorship from Too Many Kitchen Appliances occurs in the coffee percolator video.
• Percussive Maintenance:
  • In the first minute of CED Part 2, Alec does this to fix a Repetitive Audio Glitch on his CED machine.
    Alec: Anyway, let's get on with th- on with - sh - sh - on with - on - sh - sh - sh - sh - show - on with - sh - sh - sh - sh - show - sh - on with - on with - *THUD* - on with the show.
  • In his Connextras Sights and Sounds video on Laserdisc players, he hits the top of his Pioneer CLD-D502 player to open it because it has a slipping belt that causes the tray to get stuck when opening.
• [Popular Saying], But...: In "Door closers: ubiquitous, yet unloved and often maladjusted", he notes that he had to cancel a different video, but "When one door closes..." [holds up a door closer] "...this thing might be why!"
• Psmith Psyndrome: In "One more thing: the VHS notch", the Funny Background Event on the teleprompter shows "Freddy the Feces", a parody of Winnie the Pooh. However, the spelling is inconsistient as "Freddy" and "Freddie". Later, in the closed captions of "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD", this inconsistency is lampshaded.
  Captions: Join us next week as the adventures of Freddy the Feces continue! Actually, I take that back. It's Freddie the Feces, like it always was.
• Pun: Alec is quite fond of these and will sometimes lampshade it, such as this quote in Klaxons; "What makes them sound like that?".
  Alec: "Oh boy! We're gonna have a honking good time with this video!" *INTENSE GRIN*
  • Sometimes he will acknowledge how bad his own puns can be, like at the end of his "cat's eye" demonstration in the retroreflector video:
    Alec: [The "cat's eye" reflector] was the first raised roadway marker, with many copycats appearing over the years. No, I will not apologize.
• Pungeon Master: Not only does Alec love making puns in his videos, his Twitter account is full of them.
• Raster Vision: Discussed in a few of the videos while using CRT TVs.
  • Technology Connections:
    • "Lines of Light: How Analog Television Works" uses a black and white CRT when explaining the basics of analog TV, and explaining that analog standards deal with lines, not pixels.
    • "Trinitron: Sony's Once Unbeatable Product" shows close-ups of a Trinitron and a Slot Mask tube to show the differences in the dot pitch patterns.
  • Technology Connextras:
    • "Filming CRTs: It's pretty easy, actually" shows that the scan lines on a CRT are more pronounced when the shutter speed captures one field (1/60 or 1/50 of a second, depending on region) than when it captures one whole frame (twice as much shutter time, 1/30 or 1/25 of a second).
• Recurring Element: Alec will often use an intense grin in various videos and thumbnails. This may be used as a stock image for visual technology^note Things like TVs, printers, or LightScribe discs, or it could be when he believes something he did/made is not well executed.
  • Technology Connections:
    • "LightScribe: HP's Clever Twist on the CD Burner" shows this as a monochrome image on a LightScribe CD label image.
    • "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD" shows Alec's intense grin slowly appear on his 1987 Trinitron to demonstrate that analog TV/Video works differently from celluloid film.
    • "Retroreflectors; they're everywhere, and they cheat physics (sort of)" shows Alec with this face through a mirror.
    • "Electric car chargers aren't chargers at all – EVSE Explained" shows Alec making this face when he says he should have installed a cable conduit for his NEMA 650 outlet.
    • "Klaxons; What makes them sound like that?" Has him lampshade buying two of certain things, as he shows a second klaxon he acquired, and took apart.
      Alec: Well, through the magic of buying two of them, I have an already-taken-apart one right here. That joke is never gonna get old.
    • In "Why it’s not possible to synchronize turn signals (but also absolutely is)", he has to think before adapting that saying to "buying three of them", since he bought two blinker relays to demonstrate how different two of the same kind can behave, then bought a third to disassemble. Then Alec says "through the magic of buying four more of them" when he starts exploring different types of flashers.
    • And Alec took it even further in "Back-up beepers: Obnoxious, but getting better - and spreading" when he noted that reverse alarms were usually potted in resin to protect the circuitry, so the circuitry was difficult to get through. "Through the magic of buying two of them (and some patience with a Dremel tool)", he did open one up, and found it full of sand...with the circuitry still buried in resin. He then pulled out a backup alarm that just happened to have its circuitry just loose in the sand.
  • Technology Connextras:
    • The thumbnails of "A Tale of Two CD Players" shows this face. In the video, it's when he makes a joke about Sony removing the headphone jack from their CD changers way before Apple removed the headphone jack from their smartphones.
      Alec: That was a bad joke. Intense grin
    • The thumbnail and beginning of "Fixing the Sunbeam Toaster" show this face.
• Repetitive Audio Glitch: Always combined with Painting the Medium, often to demonstrate where these glitches occur.
  • In the TOSLINK video, to demonstrate what glitches can happen with digital audio connections
  • In the first minute of CED Part 2, it's shown and demonstrated to be a common problem with the CED system.
  • In the DVD-R vs DVR+R video, this appears when Alec talks about what was inconvenient about burning data to optical discs.
• Rhymes on a Dime: happens in CED Part 1
  Alec: Transmission of audio [over radio waves] was relatively rare and mainly experimental and wouldn't become what you might call "a thing" until after the the war. Speaking of after the war, well, actually, before the war, in 1904, what rhymes galore!
• The Rule of First Adopters: In CED part 5 and "The VHS cassette was more clever than Beta", he says porn was in fact available of Betamax as well as VHS, and that the belief that Beta lost due to banning porn is a myth. He also says that porn was banned on CED due to RCA controlling what content is distributed on it. CED players were only made from 1981-84, with discs being discontinued in 1986.
• Running Gag: Crossed with Easter Egg.
  • If you watch his videos with closed captions on, the closing music is always referred to as "[adverb] smooth jazz". A few adverbs he has used include "progressively", "optically", and "sequentially".
  • "Freddy the Feces" is a recurring gag, being a written parody of Winnie the Pooh. It can be found in the closed captions of "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD" after the Hilarious Outtakes, the teleprompter in "One more thing: the VHS notch" and the teleprompter in "Teleprompters are clever, simple, and also pretty neat". It's not uncommon for the story to lampshade the name change between "Freddy" and "Freddie".
  • "Through the magic of buying two of them, I have one already disassembled!"
• Rule of Three: Played straight and subverted at the beginning of the LED Experiments: Making Holiday Lights Less Garish:
  Alec: You can string a whole bunch end-to-end because they use so little energy. They're probably inherently safer because they use so little energy. They're cheaper to operate because they use so little energy. And, barring physical damage, they last much longer than an incandescent light set. Another huge advantage is that they use so little energy.
• Self-Deprecation: Alec does this quite often in the subtitles for humorous effect.
• Self-Duplication: Four Alecs briefly appear in his second LaserDisc video.
• Serendipity Shock: For seven years, Alec complained how LED Christmas lights just don't compare to their incandescent version due to how the colors on LED lights aren't warm and look more neon/monochromatic like LED lights do in many gamer PC builds. Every year he would make an open plea to any Christmas light making company to make their lights like the ones that were made in the past. On the final day of his No Effort November series in 2024, Alec finally finds the kind of LED Christmas lights he always wanted thanks to a friend and he can barely contain his excitement.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • The episode about black-and-white film development goes over the process in much detail, elaborating on the various methods and chemicals used, using a film roll from the previous episode as an example. When we finally see the results, it turns out there is no picture to be seen other than the numbers counting down the number of frames left on the roll; the film was already way past its expiration date and therefore degraded to the point of uselessness. Ultimately Subverted, as Alec simply takes a similar series of stills with another, better-quality roll of film off-screen and then shows the results of developing that.
  • The red fridge. Alec first explains his liking of it due to a retro design and semi-innovative cooling system. Then he puts data loggers inside to check temperature and went on an apparently months-long testing spree to figure out how the fridge went from "decent" to "terrible" at staying cool when ANYTHING was put inside it, including the inability to stay at food-safe temperatures when simple cans of bubbly water were placed inside for 24 hours. He then figures out a problem with the temperature sensor, and is able to install his own temperature control system into the fridge, but even he admits the new system takes the fridge from moderate to passable at best. The final note is that even the manufacturer must have noticed the flaws, because the particular model of fridge is no longer on the market.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • Alec eventually gets to this in "Film: The reason some of the past was in HD" when describing differences between video originally recorded on film, and video originally recorded on analog videotape:
    Alec: But the number one sign of something shot on tape is...it looks like it was shot on tape. Okay, this isn't helpful, I know. But honestly, you sorta get a feel for this after a while. Analog video is just kinda smooth and soft and fuzzy, and film just...isn't.
  • In "DVD+R and DVD-R: What was that about?", Alec says the titular format war was a war of "technical technicalities". Things the consumer will almost never see^note The only things consumers experience are mutual incompatibility of early DVD drives and DVD+R having dual layer discs and being able to write data in multiple sessions (instead of having to consolidate into one).
• Shout-Out: Alec will sometimes make references if they fit with what he's talking about.
  • "DVD: The Death Knell of Laserdisc" has a Star Trek reference:
    Alec: A number of things came together to make DVD spread like wildfire. Sell like hotcakes. Disseminate like the Borg. Resistance is futile.
  • In "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD", Alec says "One day, I predict millions might learn Latin and Greek sitting in front of their TV sets" in a reference to the ride Carousel of Progress.
  • In "Reusable handwarmers that get hot by freezing", Alec places an orange hand warmer with the blue hand warmer he was demonstrating throughout the video at that point, and mentions he was trying to "get an interdimensional portal going".
    Alec: So far, no luck with the portal...
  • In "Chest Freezers; What they tell us about designing for X", Alec points out they don't have shelves, so you get food stacked on top of other food; although this gets them endorsed by the Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things.
  • In the beginning of part 1 on his video on the CED, Alec describes a few ways people could watch content on TV during during the 1960's.
    Alec: You've got your network affiliates, a few of those newfangled UHF stations - I hear 62's pretty good...
• Sound-Effect Bleep: In his discussion about car horns, he startles himself when he activates the titular, and very loud, klaxon.
  Alec: I'm pretty sure they use a fair bit of current, so I better use this car battery that I just had ly—(touches the klaxon's wires to the car battery dipoles, and it startles him with a loud honk) Holy *Gary honk*, this thing is loud!
• Stealth Pun:
  • In "A record player that can play CDs: The Fisher DAC-145", Alec says "If you wanted to get reel fancy maybe you'll have a reel-to-reel deck, too". The closed captions reveal his punny intent.
  • "I bought a freeze dryer so you don't have to" opens with Alec saying "So I bought a freeze dryer. It’s quite sublime." Freeze driers work via sublimation.
• Stop Trick: Several times in the "Brown; color is weird" video, Alec cuts to Robert Dunn from Aging Wheels saying the word "Brown", with Robert sitting in the same place as Alec, and wearing the same brown jacket.
• Sudden Name Change: Parodied and lampshaded in the closed captions of "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD".
  Captions: Join us next week as the adventures of Freddy the Feces continue! Actually, I take that back. It's Freddie the Feces, like it always was.
• Take That!: He'll occasionally take a jab here and there:
  • In "The Best Easy Way to Capture Analog Video", he recommends that you may want to un-stretch your captured video so the originally 4:3 ratio isn't 16:9. He then follows it up with "If you don't want to, we can't be friends."
  • In the TOSLINK video, he compares the light found in an input TOSLINK port to be "as dark as the future of Windows Phone."
  • In the E-Ink Exploration video, Alec throws some shade towards laptop manufacturers by saying that said manufacturers are perfect for adding an e-ink display on a Laptop because make "funky stuff no one asked for".
• Take That, Audience!:
  • In particular, whenever he foresees snarky but uninformed comments about to be made, you can expect he will make some joke at those commenters' expense, such as when he brings up Ohm's Law to the inevitable Europeans who argue 220V is "safer" than 120, or just about the entirety of his comparison of VHS and Beta's cassette designs where he constantly makes jokes at Beta purists' expense.
  • In his video where he talks about how laptops can also make a good desktop via docks, he points out that Macbooks and Linux computers could also work with docks, but says not to ask him for advice on either since he has zero experience with them. He takes a jab at Linux users by saying that if they want to figure out how to use a dock on it. they'll just have to "figure it yourself like you do with everything else on your computer."
• Tempting Fate: At the end of "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD", Alec claims that modern digital video is "always perfect". His camera promptly stops recording, and we hear him laugh right after.
• They Don't Make Them Like They Used To:
  • "Closed Captioning: More Ingenious Than You Know" talks about how line 21 captions on analog television could let the broadcaster or tape master decide where to place the captions. It could move up and down so as not to obscure text on screen, and move left and right to show who is talking. Meanwhile, YouTube's captions have no such functionality.^note Alec's own pinned comment points out that the viewer can reposition captions at will. But uploading a certain caption file type lets the uploader decide where the captions get placed, overriding the user functionality, just like Line 21. However, writing captions on YouTube's own caption editor doesn't give uploaders that option.
  • Alec posits that one reason for the declining popularity of automatic record changers in the 1970s was that they lost advanced features in changers from the '50s and '60s.
• Verbal Backspace: Alec simply can't suppress his disdain for coffee snob—err, enthusiasts in "Why don't Americans use electric kettles?"
  Alec: ...there are also fancier kettles available which let you set them to a certain temperature. Great for certain types of tea or really pedantic coffee snob—I mean, enthusiasts.
• Video Inside, Film Outside: Conversed in "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD". Alec talks about how some shows, such as Cosmos and Monty Python's Flying Circus, were shot on video when on sets and on film when on location. He also says this is because a 16mm film camera was far less bulky than video equipment for a few decades.
• Visual Pun: In the reverse alarm episode, Alec mentions that the circuitry of a reverse alarm is potted in resin, so it's difficult to get through. He then goes through trying to "de-pot" one with a Dremel tool, and pulls it out a flower pot.
  • In the outro to the video about how toasters work:
  Alec: And of course, I'd like to raise a toast...
  Toaster: (pops toast up)
  Alec: ...to the wonderful people on Patreon.
• White Void Room: The oldest videos on the channel sometimes feature Alec looking at old tech in one of these, including the oldest video, "Edison's Impression: Laying Sound into a Groove"