Mind The Ladder, Tim!

Welcome to the Corona Virus Chronicles... Tim is now self-isolating, and presenting his videos directly from his apartment, via a web link.

Tim continues his exploration of 'Jacob's Ladder' toys.

Firstly, there is a bit of a trick in holding the topmost block, and turning over by 180 degrees in such a way that your fingers do not get in the way of the tumbling blocks. So some Jacob's Ladders have been made with a handle attached to the top block, which makes it so much easier. As Tim says, it is a bit like having an 'L' plate!

Tim then demonstrates a version that came out about 20 years ago from a UK company (he thinks it was the Bliss company) and the blocks, which are plastic in this case, have curved edges which make the blocks roll very smoothly as the blocks tumble down. This toy has a giraffe design on one side, and monkey on the other side. Only one design will appear properly at a time. So when the giraffe is shown properly, the picture of the monkeys is all jumbled up; let the blocks tumble down, and now the monkeys are fine, but the giraffe is all mixed up!

Another version is a London souvenir, with a guardsman on one side, and 'I Love London' on the other side.

Then a circus theme, with an elephant on one side, and a group of clowns on the other side.

Next, a Jacob's Ladder with different phases of the moon. It is not obvious in daylight, but these images are luminous!

Finally, a version with frogspawn, tadpoles and frogs.

VIDEO QUALITY

We know that the video quality of Tim's Corona Virus Chronicles videos has not been all that great. We have upgraded the camera twice, ditto the microphone; he has also upgraded his broadband connection, and when he took his laptop into the local repair shop, they diagnosed that the hard disk was slowing things down, and replaced it with a solid state disc. However the video and audio quality were still disappointing. On asking around, we were advised that video conferencing needs the computer to have 8GB of RAM and 2GB of RAM on the graphics card. Tim's laptop is only 2 years old, but it only had 4GB of RAM, and the graphics card was just what was built into the motherboard. So we bought Tim a brand new laptop, with 16GB of RAM, and 6GB of RAM on the graphics card, and today was the first time we used it. The quality of the picture is better, we hope you will agree! We think the sound could be better, and it is true that Tim's headset is a fairly budget model. So we plan to get him a better headset, and hopefully that will improve the sound quality. Tim often needs to move back when demonstrating a bigger toy, and the headset means he is always close miked.