Leaderboard

Milo and Otis, wow is all I can say. As for me, a gift for a disabled warrior to go with a wheelchair ramp for his house. Carving the handle was one thing but etching the trident was a nerve wracking endeavor. One shot with no do overs. Thanks Mark, you da man.

Here are the before and after shots from the Milo & Otis kitchen remodel.

I know nothing about them, but already interested in Goth Babe and Nap Eyes.

Longish term modern DIY T2 reliability. I estimate its been used around 8+ hours (and more often than not 12 hours) a day almost every day since I built it. yesterday I took it apart for cleaning. I noticed all four 140K resistor strings connected to the voltage reference in the virtual batteries where somewhat discoloured.... hmmm... on further testing I found the D24 led on both channels did not light up at all not even dimly. :-(. but the amp seemed to work and sounded good. (on the left is a brand new resistor from the same pack as the 140Ks I removed from the virtual batteries.) I checked also psu voltages - good. I measured the voltage across the D24 led- about 1.4V. When the amp was originally built these leds definitely glowed as strongly as the others. All the leds where tested before soldering in and were from the same bag I even hand matched them just for overkill. The D24 leds are part of the circuit that provides base voltage and current to transistors that provide feed into the virtual batteries. I checked the virtual batteries - all were 741V on startup and the adjustment pots could adjust the output. So the batteries look good despite the slightly cooked resistors. I removed the voltage references and tested them in a glden reference LV - all good. The discoloured resistors can be explained by the fact they have about 0.423W flowing through them excluding base current draw from the 2 transistors and are on the underside of the board with little airflow - maybe1W would be better or some airflow holes in the pcb, or mount them to the topside of the pcb. So I decided to de-solder the 140K resistors for measuring and the 140K resistors have drifted slightly but all measure within 141.5K. So a little cooked but probably not the case of the problem. But why are the leds not lighting.... Looking at the circuit diagram the D24 leds should get about 0.5mA current excluding any draw from the bases of the transistors. (560V / (560K *2 resistor string to ground). I used the exact SAME leds for the other positions and it also looks like those leds get about 0.5mA excluding base transistor draw and they glow nice and bright. I de-soldered the leds and tested the D24 resistor string to ground. They spot on resistance and have not been damaged or drifted and so should provide 0.5mA current draw through the led. However the desoldered D24 leds would not glow at all with diode check on my brymen BM869s multimeter but do pass current and are not open or shorted. I tried my keithley 2015 in diode check mode (it has adjustable test current) and got absolutely no glow at 10 or 100micro amp but did get strong glow at 1mA - same situation on both D24 leds. I tested my remaining leds from the same bag and they glow on the brymen admittedly fairly dimly, and glow on the keithley at 100 micro amp again dimly but visibly. (I did test all of them on the brymen before soldering into the amp). So the leds in D24 have degraded over time . I used the same leds in the other places in the amp and they are all fine. This would explain why the batteries are working but the leds are off.... So the plan is to do some more testing on the leds and replace them with another model. But what's causing the leds to degrade in brightness on the -560V rail when the others have not? any ideas? regards and and I apologise for the long winded post James Update: I replaced the D24 leds... they now light brightly with a voltage drop across them of about 1.7V. I replaced the resistor strings with the same resistors but now placed on the top of the pcb, raised from the pcb by about 1cm. After a ten minutes with no lid on the amp the resistors reach 65C on the top and 71C on the sides. So its easy to see how on the underside of the pcb with the lid on they could reach temperatures which could cause discolouration.

DIY AVA Ultimate 70.

New backup process is in place and verified working. It's doing daily for now but may bump it up to every 4-6 hrs, we'll see.

What The Hell Happened to Head-Case?!?!? TLDR version: The datacenter that the head-case server is located in sustained a power outage on April 4. When the backup generator kicked on it caught fire and that lead to the fire suppression system (a fucking water based one!) kicking on and causing water damage to equipment. The head-case server was in the 'more affected' area of the datacenter and as such was offline until early in the morning on April 24. For further details on the incident you can see here: https://webnx.com/outage-updates/ You may be wondering why during such a long time the site wasn't simply migrated elsewhere, this is a fair question and the answer is simple. As this is a hobby site the backup process hadn't been properly verified as working in quite a while and the latest verified backup was nearly a year old. Migrating the site and loading it from that last verified backup would have meant losing a years worth of content. This was not a valid option and until I could confirm that the drives in the server were dead I wasn't willing to restore that old of a backup. From what I can tell there has been no data loss but I don't currently have a full report as to what if any hardware needed replacing to get the server back online. Due to that lack of info, I don't trust the server and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some additional downtime due to hardware issues. The Future A fresh backup at the time of this post has been taken and moved off-site. Over the next week or so a new backup process will be put in place and verified. After that is done it's very likely that the site will be moved to a new hosting provider. Further details about any move will be provided at the proper time.

I'd say it's a phono preamp, but not the EAR 912 which I thought it was

darTZeel monoblocks looks like chonky computer cases to me. Their name looks like a "gamer" brand as well. Frank Herbert once said he based the Harkonnen on the Swiss. For Giedi Prime!

I haven’t set the 1675 in months (I haven’t worn it in months), and it hasn’t been serviced in 5 years. I guess it is still keeping good time.

I'm still not considering attending a large scale event, even outside, but the real reason this announcement trips me out is how few of the acts I have even heard of. I am at least familiar with 4 of the 11 headliners, and a smaller percentage of the rest. Jeez. Am I that out of it or is this just a second tier line-up? Or both?

Happy belated Birthday Kevin! I hope you enjoyed the day

I'm not seeing any issues with attachments or anything actually hosted here. Based on that link, I'm assuming you mean the first post in that thread? If so, there's only three attachments linked actually hosted here and they all work just fine.

Happy Birthday Dr. Gilmore!!!

I have already posted it on other occasions but I love this album

Happy birthday Senor Stax!

Happy birthday, Kevin!

HaPpY bIrThDaY KeViN!

Happy birthday, Kevin!

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, Dr. Gilmore.

Happy Birthday, Kevin!

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday KG!

Happy birthday Kevin!

Happy Birthday, Kevin!

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday Kevin!

Happy birthday, KG!

Enjoy your special day!

That Fucker!

Just be aware that Brent had several biscuits last night.

I have been continuing to play with turntable motors. I have two projects, one a controller with platter speed feedback for 3-phase AC motor and another controller for DC motors, which is an ultra-compact version of the one in swt61’s turntable to drive the Maxon motor. Here are some photos, just got things soldered up and have a whole lot of very tedious testing and software writing to do in addition to the SAMD microcontroller, that cutout is org castellated pads will also fit the new Raspberry Pi 2040 chip, which I am hoping to play with a bit. I hope they work!

Nice juxtaposition shots Al. I'm always a bit surprised at what we started with. It's funny how fast you can put something out of your mind. Marc, that trimless look is all the rage now in San Francisco. I like the clean, simplicity of it. It's more work than conventional trim, but worth it in a modern setting IMO. The best part of this job was doing it with Milo. I'm still flabbergasted at how quickly he picks things up. And his design sense is impeccable. It's not really work when you're having fun, except grouting!

It is called z-channel molding and creates a uniform channel and shadow line around the windows and doors. It was Steve's idea to use this method rather than standard trim.

Thanks Todd for undoing Brent's damage to the site.

Massive Attack – Protection

RIP Humpty. 😢

RIP Shock - Sorry that you had to stop what you were doing, and can no longer ruin, the image the style that I'm used to.