Things That Don't Work

As a converse companion to NoCo's thread about things that work first time, every time.

Behr makes an application for the phone camera to identify the color of the paint on your wall. I am going to have some small bits painted and could not find any paperwork which had the color of the paint used when I had the interior of the house painted. All I knew was that it was Behr paint.

So I downloaded the program and gave it a try. I took a few dozen pictures in varying light and at various angles in various rooms. The program happily identified the color - but never gave the same color twice. When looking for the color of the paint on the outside of the house, I stumbled across an old can with the interior paint. The label was still readable, and it was a color which the program never suggested.

Loser program. Didn't work the first time. Or the second time...etc.

A couple of decades ago, the television industry figured out how to speed up an audio track without affecting the frequency; ie, the actors didn't sound like chipmunks. The purpose was, of course, to allow the insertion of more commercials without cutting the program content.

It seems to me that the speed increase has accelerated over the years, and it at a point where I sometimes have trouble understanding all of the dialogue. <insert old fart remark here> This is especially noticeable when watching British programs.

The program I use for watching television and movies on my computer allows me to slow down the playback rate. With most programs, a small reduction to 94% produces easily understood dialogue. It's surprising what a difference it makes. Why don't the makers of DVRs put such a function in their devices?

Pitch transposers have never been very successful at changing the rate of data delivery without anomalous artifacts. Why don't you do what I do, turn on SDH sub-titling. After a few minutes you forget it's there. Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard-of-hearing are a godsend on DVDs and most broadcasts -- especially those Yorkshire English accents!

Plus -- maybe it's just me, but I don't think so -- many programs from the '60s and '70s seemed to use ambient mics to pick up the dialog, rather than a boom or radio lavaliers, so speech comprehension is in the loo (so to speak).