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4351 ... and some amps...

Somewhere I have a CERN report from the 1970 about a 13kA pulsed magnet power supply. That used 7,200 2N3055's as output devices driven by another 360 of them. All of those were in massive 19% racks mounted on cooling plates with forced water cooling. Might be interesting or relevant. This was for the 28GeV Synchrotron. Eventually that was used simply as the injector accelerator for the SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron), and of course that has been superceded by the Large Hadron Collider. The current acceleration scheme is Synchrotron - SPS - LHC to get 13TeV Found the power supply paper. Attached. CERN-70-20.pdf

The more you spread this stuff about Biden being a senile rapist, the more you help Trump. It's as simple as that. Do you really want to score points against the Democratic party and the putative nominee so badly that it can justify assisting the worst president in our history to maintain control over the country?

Received confirmation from the fab house that our orders are in production (each distinct Gerber file is considered one order). I've opted for boards to be shipped to me in batches when they are ready so we are not all held up by the partially assemble GRHV boards which will take longer than the rest of the PCBs.

I have told this to many, but since I was able to vote, I have participated in every Presidential election. I am 55 now. In ALL those years, I have been hard-pressed to say that I have voted "for" someone very positively. It has basically been the lesser of two evils in my mind. And that's what politics is about to me. Bush Sr. and Obama may be the closest I've been to voting FOR someone..... I look back to the Nixon-Kennedy debates. It was reported at the time that Nixon's appearance and "edge" had cost him dearly; that media visibility was now rising in importance. Add to that the shame put on the Presidency by Nixon's paranoia and the Watergate scandal, and it's no surprise that media coverage - real or fake - dictates so much of voter political response now. People are more characters playing roles than servants to the public. And I also agree a mention above that it's often about power as well. I also look back to the CONTENT of the Nixon-Kennedy debates, and yearn for current politician to discuss matters the way those two did. It's horrendous now..... The last election, and this one, are low bars for those lesser of two evils for me.....but at this stage, I am firmly in the anyone-but-trump camp.

Sorry, I read Voltron's first post, but not his second. I was reacting to that alone. If we're gonna talk politics, you can chalk me up for thinking both of them are horrible. I used to be a Democrat, but the party's recent behavior has made me question that. At the same time, my values haven't changed - even though a lot of the party's values clearly have - and I'm not a Republican either. So I'm politically homeless, more or less. But I am absolutely appalled and disgusted by the mainstream media's handling of the political landscape even more than I am by the behavior of either party. I get why, confirmation bias sells and in the modern media landscape everybody with a smartphone is now a pundit, so they have to go with what works in getting any signal heard above the noise. But the whole ecosystem is extraordinarily destructive, runaway trains operating on their own momentum with nobody at the helm, and nobody to look out for who and what gets run over on the way to nobody knows where. I don't know what I'll do in November. But Knucks has been doing a great job curating his posts and they're one of the few things I look forward to in my day. Not asking him to change a thing.

Maybe it’s time for an additional party, but how often has any party ran an incredible candidate? It’s always a comparative decision. I’d love another FDR or Lincoln. Others Eisenhower or Reagan. They’re all far from perfection. While there would likely be other improvements with a contending third or fourth party, that unlikely would be one of them. And false equalizations are the worse, juvenile lie. Hell, parties count on the masses spreading the blame around, instead of targeting the cause. I’m all for finding humor everywhere, but false equalizations and generic generalizations, coupled with distant, indifferent mocking, leads exactly where? I mean what a ridiculous, cowardly choice Binden is? Christ, I want to stop calling myself a Democratic over it. I don’t think he’s a disaster, but even if he was, all disasters aren’t remotely equal. Do we really have the luxury of pretending so?

Those casters don't look like the type that lock in place. What happens at full tilt when a kick drum happens - where do those monster JBL's end up?

I think the answer is, ‘yes’, for the foreseeable future.

Goddamn, that was good. New Fiona Apple album! First one in 8 years! More Tom Waits influenced! I’m a happy boy.

My take is: Don't shoot the messenger. In spite of that meme, I'm actually not on board equating Biden's sexual improprieties to Trump's. Biden is a doddering equivalent of Brock Turner (remember HIM?) Donald Trump is a child rapist. I've listened to the audio testimony of Katie Johnson, the woman whom he brutally raped when she was 13 while Jeffrey Epstein watched. It's absolutely harrowing, and not something I'd post here. Also, yes, Trump is a danger to himself and everyone else. He's a toxic narcissist, bungling criminal, and in deep cognitive decline. However, in my estimation his mental faculties are not in as rapid a state of decay as Biden's. I'm genuinely worried that Trump is going to annihilate Biden during the general election because he's got fewer screws loose and because he's mean. Cool story bro: I got permabanned from redderp's /r/politics for "inciting violence." The comment that got me banned was this: Yep. Metaphorical dick punching will get you banned. I stand by my point, however. Donald Trump has zero scruples and is a dirty fighter. I supported Bernie but I'm not sure he'd have been mean enough to take on Trump in the general. Sanders has the advantage of, you know, speaking in complete sentences. Listen here Jack, Biden speaks in.... I'd be a lying dog faced pony soldier if I said I thought Biden had even 50/50 odds of becoming president. The Democratic Party are the Washington Generals to the Republican's Globetrotters. Anyway, back to funny pictures.

I happen to live in a country where we have five candidates. All suck. No exception. Nowadays politicians are in it for the money, or the power, or the relevance, who knows, but none happens to be there for the common profit. It feels as though the guys who are really pulling the threads pay for such incompetent people to be in the race.

I exported dxf files from eagle and imported that into fusion 360. I had to build tool paths for traces. It would be tedious if there were a lot of traces, but I complete control over the routing.

Some really nice krautrock:

Live-streaming Mary Fahl on FB.......not great sound, but still such passion in her "alone" performance! EDIT: she ended with an a cappella version of Amazing Grace.....perfect for the time, and her voice delivers it so well!

RIP Lee and Brian..... RIP to Mr. & Mrs. Cohen, a couple in the Boston area. Saw a news story about them. Married 77+ years, separated only during WW2. Both in a nursing home, vowed to stay with each other to the end. She contacted COVID-19, he did not but still had pneumonia from another issue. With a nurse in PPE and holding each of their hands at times, they stayed together. She died I guess 12 hours after him on the same day. He was 102, she 97. I'm tearing up just typing this.....sad, yet so beautiful.....

I've only tried LCD-4Z and LCD-2 which certainly sound unique and enjoyable, although the often-reported driver failures and unit-to-unit sound variability means I'd rather buy something else or only buy if I find extremely good prices. Then there is Hifiman... Holding the Abyss or the Raal SR1a in hand, they are built extremely well but in opposite design approaches. Abyss employs extremely solid, thick, ceramic-coated aluminum frame to position the earpads barely touching the face. Raal uses very thin, flexible, self-contracting frame to let the whole headphone shrink down on the head, with user adjusting the driver angle like AKG K1000. As an aside, the Schiit Jotunheim R amp purpose-built to drive Raal SR1a's extremely low impedance (0.4 Ohm) CAN drive the Abyss 1266 wonderfully via DIY 4-pin female XLR to 4-pin female XLR adapter (non-standard pinout). Quite surprising, but the combo sounds great. and I suspect whatever they did to increase current-delivery into low impedance is working well for low impedance planars by accident 😄 0408201821 by drjlo2, on Flickr

Classic

Nice, Nate! I was less good: I smoked cigarettes on a friend's balcony. I only smoke during pandemics.

The photo almost looks like a render.

ZIJKeE3.mp4

A pair of Carbon boards complete other than JFETs. I used Soren's pre-adjustment method on the CCS's. They all came up at 15mA initially; adjusted them to 17mA for a start. I still need to clean the boards more. These are the .6G boards and appear to have a ground plane (haven't looked at the gerbers), so all resistors, etc. are up off the board. If any of you Stax mafia dudes see anything amiss, please let me know. I was careful building these... Also, I got some pluggable connectors, Hirose DF5A (DF5A-5P-5DSA(35), DF5A-5S-5C) which are 500Vdc rated, and would fit just fine. They have one small nub or pin on the bottom, but it looks like you could either cut it off, or drill a small hole in the PCB for it.

There were some pretty major protests in Ohio over the state being locked down due to Covid19. Some protesters stayed in their cars and honked their horns. Other got out and didn't exactly engage in social distancing. The "Proud Boys" blocked the intersection to a hospital. One photo of said protests got the PhotoshopBattles remix: