19 responses to “EEVblog #22 – On Blogs and Video Blogging”

• Flemming Frandsen August 1st, 2009 at 00:08

  Cool vblog, in addition to the depanting of Rigol and Chineese crap I really enjoy the war stories, so please keep it up.

  If you want negative feedback then there are two tiny sticky points for me:
  * Keep the frequency of “ya know” down to less than 0.1 Hz.

  * DRY; Don’t repeat yourself, this has been much improved lately, but it really got on my tits for the first bunch of installments.

  Fix those two and I’ll be even more happy about watching.

  … oh and Rigol should *so* sponsor you, when my tek dies I’ll be getting one of those scopes:)

  Reply

• Don Sauer August 1st, 2009 at 04:00

  I like your “think for your self” style. Paul Rako happens to be of this point of view too. We should not be taking each-others “word for it.” We should all be sharing what we find and make allowances for the fact we are all human. You are not an “authorative engineer “, but rather an “explorative engineer” like both Paul and me.

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• Eldon Brown August 1st, 2009 at 06:31

  Dave,

  Good going!

  I love the fresh approach and like your “talking across the bench discussion style”. I am always looking forward to the next.

  Eldon

  Reply

• Norman Chu August 1st, 2009 at 12:36

  I’ll keep it to the point:
  - Its good to hear stories of experience
  - The ‘try it for yourself’ style of science is the best way, not only because of peer review, but also but because people learn for themselves. (As a student myself right now, exploring, learning, making mistakes, and having to think for yourself is the only way of really learning).
  - It might be interesting to talk about [personal] projects on top of commentary, show off your stuff because I’m sure your viewers are interested in whats going on. Of course you may be bound by NDA’s or other legal pains if you reveal your workplace, your professional projects, but your own tinkering should show up every so often.

  Keep it up though, people are always interested in reading about new cool things happening. Keep it short, sweet, and to the point because people on the internet are generally impatient.

  Also keep up the requests for comments, because it really does encourage people to voice opinions that would otherwise not be posted.

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• Kathy Quinlan August 1st, 2009 at 16:41

  Hi Dave,

  Keep up the good work, I love the stye.

  On the subject of thinking for ourselves, I think (as you pointed out in a previous blog)failure is the best form of learning.

  I guess it takes a fellow Aussie to fully apreciate the way you present

  I think we should all learn from our mistakes, but also learn from the mistakes of others, as they are just as informative. I particularly like the idea of forums, as a place of learning from others mistakes. Someone may popup with an answer that makes you question your thoughts and gets you thinkig.

  Kat.

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• Norbert Schönenberger August 3rd, 2009 at 02:45

  Hi Dave,
  I really enjoy watching your videos even though I know hardly anything about electronic engineering. I start studying physics this year in October so the oscilloscope phenomenon was especially interesting .

  Greetings from Germany,
  Norbert

  Reply

• Phil Hobbs August 5th, 2009 at 13:23

  Dave,

  A suggestion: how about a post or two on some of the gotchas in ordinary components?

  I’m thinking about stuff like:

  piezoelectric SMT ceramic capacitors,

  horrible 1/f noise in thick film resistors,

  surface leakage due to flux residue under SMTs,

  Offset voltage weirdness in RRIO op amps,

  charge pumps turning up in weird places (e.g. the 500 kHz ones in some Intersil dpots),

  and instability in LDO regulators.

  Some more chip-of-the-week features would be nice too. I suggest the AD5432 fast MDAC–it lets you use +-10V references while running off +5 and ground, and it has about 10x the multiplying bandwidth of most others. Great part.

  Keep up the good work.

  Cheers

  Phil Hobbs

  Reply

  • admin August 6th, 2009 at 12:28

    Thanks for the suggestions Phil. So many ideas, so few blogs!

    Reply

• Daniel August 5th, 2009 at 15:29

  May I suggest ditching youtube.com for http://www.vimeo.com hi-def video, and no length restriction if say you need 11 or 12 minutes instead of 10.

  And maybe purchase eevblog.com ill throw in a donation if you need help.

  Reply

  • admin August 6th, 2009 at 12:41

    I am considering other video hosts, but it won’t be at the expense of YouTube. YouTube is still the #1 player so I simply have to maintain a presence there. A good number of my viewers subscribe via YouTube.

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• Thomas August 6th, 2009 at 10:12

  I think you’re doing a great job. Your personal, food for thought style really works. I stumbled on this blog a few days ago, and I just couldn’t stop watching! I’ve learned something new in each video, and they definitely give me something to think about.

  The length of the videos is also pretty good. Too short and it’s over too soon, but too long and you lose the audience. Although since I just 5 in a row, length might not be an issue!

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• Eric Haskett August 6th, 2009 at 10:38

  Hey,

  I like the suggestion Phil Hobbs made (above).

  Thanks!

  Eric

  Reply

• Daniel August 6th, 2009 at 13:45

  I sent the sites web url to hackaday.com maybe they will pick you up in an article. I forgot to mention your doing a good job Dave.

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• Darrin August 12th, 2009 at 21:41

  I have a couple of things:

  - I wouldn’t trim the length any. Modern life with all of our gadgets and the internet has conditioned us to quickly jump from one thing to the next at the expense of critical thinking. I would prefer it if you take the full amount of time to explain your point. It reinforces the information in the viewer’s mind and there’s probably some other valuable information buried in there that will be helpful in the future.

  - I wouldn’t go to vimeo. Their flash player isn’t quite as robust as youtube’s and doesn’t work with as many different computing platforms.

  Otherwise, I do find the blog very informative. Keep up the good work.

  Reply

• Lucassiglo21 August 15th, 2009 at 22:27

  i have an idea to talk about: you can talk about different signal buses(like spi, i2c, 1-wire, uart, etc)their differences, needs, advantages and disvantages of each one.

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• Daniel August 17th, 2009 at 02:20

  Hackaday picked you up. http://www.hackaday.com

  Reply

  • admin August 17th, 2009 at 07:40

    Thanks for the heads-up.
    I was wondering where all the extra subscribers flooded from overnight!

    Reply

• Frank August 25th, 2009 at 16:37

  You mentioned that you “wish you could go back and reshoot”. There’s no need, and there’s a nice little workaround that YouTube offers now – Annotations. Just put a little text tag right on top of your video, at the right moment, to point viewers to corrections (“Oops – I corrected this statement in #12.”), links, or expansions of your points.

  I personally think you should annotate a link to http://www.alternatezone.com/eevblog into each video, so all the viewers can discuss in one place.

  Don’t forget you can always edit your video description to include pointers to updates.

  Finally, as for “taking too long to get to the point”, just edit more extremely: ruthlessly snip out every gap, filler, “and”, “uh”, “you know”, breath, and repetition. The effect is intense, compelling and funny at the same time. Plus you can squeeze in 2 more minutes of solid material, too.

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  • admin August 26th, 2009 at 07:59

    I’d love to ruthlessly edit out every “you know”, “umm” and gap etc, but that takes a massive amount of time. It can make the editing process many times longer.
    Perhaps there is a better editor than my VideoStudio program to do this, but it would still be very time consuming none the less I think.

    I’ve been debating whether or not to use the YouTube annotation feature. It helps those who watch via YouTube, but doesn’t help those who podcast the program or watch with some other program (usually around half my audience).

    Reply