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Just so we're clear, this is my absolute favorite car of all time.

My new small obsession: Fat Cat Art. A HS FB friend followed this woman's page, she has a fat cat and is a painter (or does photoshopping well). She injects her cat into various scenes and famous paintings. Sadly, her cat (Zarathustra) just passed recently. But she's amazing and fun with her work, even some YouTube videos that had me chucking tons. I especially liked this because we used to have a fat orange cat named SOTA. Some of you may remember a multi-page thread around 2006 on H-F where SOTA was photoshopped to hell and back. He became known as The Rambo Bose Kitty, and had his 15 minutes of cat fame. Anyway, fun to browse: https://fatcatart.com/?lang=en

I was at one of my favorite audio stores Tuesday, picking up my KEF subwoofer I had ordered. The owner had me siting listening to a wonderful system (*) with a new Luxman Class A integrated (only $12k) and Aerial 7T speakers. We played some lovely things, including a fair bit of Aventine, which sounded just fantastic on the system! (*) we also talked rooms and system synergy. He gets it, in a massive way. When I was in Florida I visited a dealer there who carried McIntosh, Classe, and Focal Kanta & Paradigm Persona speakers. In systems costing anywhere from $60K to maybe $90K, I thought many aspects of my much less expensive system actually sounded better. The local dealer talked about how they were likely more theater-based and carried the expensive gear to support the local nouveau riche in Naples FL (of which there are MANY).

Horrible as their sometimes use may be, after reading this pretty critical article I kinda want to try out "Second Brain" apps/services. Anyone try and have an opinion of Notion, Obsidian, Mem, or other? I'll likely dive in all three, but thought I'd use the collective first. I've gone years using some older software like DEVONthink, The Brain, and even Yojimbo, but generally they've been slow to move to the cloud, so I've dropped all along the way for more primitive organization.

I knew of an ex-colleague who used to praise Notion, he had some templates he had used for things both personal and work-related. Can't remember much, but his kids' activities came to mind as one of the templates. Know nothing else about it or the others, though.....interesting article, and almost makes me want to try one out myself!

My favorite Xmas album.....

Funny, I actually just bought and applied that same lube to my spindle after years without any. I saw a YouTube video recommending that one. After getting the new cartridge, I've been all anal about dialing in the antiskate, VTA, VTF, etc. It's good to be into vinyl again.

I've spent some more time with the headphones now (when I really should be testing out the new CRBN) but I like these a lot. They really do nothing wrong, soundstage is a bit flat (flat earpads though) and they aren't great with small detail retrieval but other than that they are neutral, honest sounding and I can spend hours listening to them. Now for the wanky things (besides that name, seriously... anus in your company name can never be a good idea ) such as the box these ship in: Almost Voce bad but at least it is well made, unlike the Mr. Speakers box. Here is the silly dual cable for these, male 3 pin XLR's on one end 3 pin mini XLR's on the other. It feels terrible and I'll rip it apart later. What truly bothers me is this shit, these are cheapest XLR's you can buy short of the knock off Neutriks and they are pushing 600V bias and 200Vrms through this? Yeah it's not ok... I'm thinking about what I'm going to do with that energizer as the transformers seem to be pretty decent. Probably just fit my own PSU to it and change it to three Stax sockets that the headphones actually fit into.

i'm done

Faded Murder Boards. FMB FOTM FTW.

Finished a couple more Murder Boards/Christmas Presents.

After several years layoff I have built a KGSShv Carbon which uses boards I had in and 4 Cree sicfets from several years back (luckily). The power supply is KGSShv v8 and the amps Carbon v6. It has been one of the easiest builds because of a different way of making the cases which I have described in Making diy cases, https://www.head-case.org/forums/topic/18892-making-diy-cases/ It is set for 400v supplies and 17mA output stage currents. It does not get particularly hot in a 20o C room, the heatsinks run a max of 40o at the centre. The power supply pass transistors are bolted to the bottom of the case and the case runs pleasantly warm to the touch. The size is 335 W x 314 D x 155 H inc feet. Weight 8.5Kg. (13in x 12.4in x 6.1in, 18.8lb.)

vinyl