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Have you ever taken a photograph, that could have been black and white, but wasn't.

Bridge'n'Bacon

Last stage of the dresser build happening this weekend. Hated Waterlox finish so scrapped that and going with Tried and True again.

Long time subscriber of Elizabeth. She has upped my vocal appreciation game.

Lucky you to be hearing one of the most epic bands of all time for the first time. Enjoy!

Killers Iron Maiden 1981 https://album.link/i/1147158978 Example: Nothing like sleeping on an album for 42 years before giving it a good listen. It kicks Ass. The title track is a standout - but the example hooked me hard. I have to admit, if I had not already, I was a little turned off from maiden back in the day, mainly from the cover art, t-shirts and fans at the time. I was in the meat of highschool during their starting albums. So with all that, I never really gave them a chance until much later, and I was into different things (mostly jazz and classical) in the 90s. So to be able to come back to this and pretty much 'discover' these albums with 'fresh' ears, is pretty refreshing. No recommendations needed - I am pre-sold on the catalog. Things added to queue.

Not only did I take [a few] photos, I took [a few] photos at headphone gatherings. I also got suckered into the Light.io camera. 🤕 Well, basically pulled into all the Valley origin camera companies. Stay strong Foveon! And, I guess, Apple and Google.

I own one of the red ones. I have never successfully taken a photo with it.

An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba in the morning

You know, she listens to a lot of silly stuff (considering her background), and then delivers. She also just did Child in Time and the number of time she stops it, and...just hilarious.

Too many TICE jokes in there to choose just one.

This!

I thought Temu was pretty harmless until it served up this ad during my golf game. Yes all those things are exactly what they say they are for.

Thanks all! I had a nice day off from work, but didn't get much of what I had planned to do done, which was OK.

As the zoomers say, that last one hits just right. Serious purists would grouse about "nisen bokeh" but as most photographers eventually figure out, faults can make a lens interesting. I haven't taken too many photos since moving to MV, which is silly as when I lived off-island I took photos like mad when I visited here. I mentioned a while back I bought the Moment and Hipstamatic apps for iOS: Hipstamatic is never not silly, but I actually really like the framing of this image. The faux vintage effects add nothing, TBH. This one actually works pretty well as a photograph, hipster or not. Not hipster at all. The Edgartown docks. IR 5D, 17-40L at the wide end, F/4, 1/60th, ISO50. Straight out of the camera with no edits at all. This happens remarkably never. There are two types of photographers: those who have no idea about metering for infrared and liars. My street. IR 5D, 50mm F/1.4 @ F/8, 1/200, ISO100. I ambled around the neighborhood with the 5D and faster 50mm. The latter is actually a terrible match for the former, for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is that the 50/1.4 has a huge bright spot dead center in infrared that doesn't appear at all in the visible color spectrum. Curiously, my older 1987 50mm F/1.8 doesn't have this problem at all. Of all the photos I took this afternoon, this was a last minute one as I was crossing the road. At the time I remember thinking "well, there was no effort in that one so it will suck." It was the best of the bunch, by a huge margin. South Beach, EDG. Moment app on iPhone 13. I adjusted the EV down a bit. I do not get along with touchscreen controls. Some days I wish I'd sprung for a 13 Pro, but the price difference could get me a Canon 35mm F/2 IS. The gateway to South Beach. Also Moment on the i13. I got the sea horizon reasonably straight but that didn't stop be from loading the image into Photoshop, pixel peeping and getting that MFer as level as I could. I do like the framing on this one. About 5 feet ahead of the previous photo. I adjusted the horizon and fussed over the levels of this shot quite a bit. It looks remarkably non-pseudo-HDR, and I consider that to be a success at this point. Missing from this image: the cold AF breeze coming off the Atlantic. EDG harbor again. Taken right after the IR photo at the top. The late afternoon sun was gorgeous and the iPhone was the best (visible spectrum) camera I had on hand. I did correct the horizon but didn't make many adjustments otherwise. I like it. Throwback Thursday: ("Knuckles, it's Wednesday.") Truly a monstrous edit. I started with a not very good photo I took and had previously edited in 2005 and rand it through Topaz Gigapixel AI, upscaling it 6x. Then I loaded it into Luminar 4, where I made dozens of tweaks and applied a lookup table. Next I used Topaz DeNoise AI to clean the image up and remove some of the posterizing effects brought on by Luminar. Lastly I dragged into Photoshop, used QuickMask to select the sky and denoised and otherwise cleaned it up (it needed a lot of work.) Then I straightened out the horizon and adjusted the levels. This was a project I worked on and off again for a week. Was it worth it? Probably not. I find the end result kind of amusing.

"Rare misses aside, hearing Faltskog and Lyngstad’s impeccable voices weave through a battalion’s worth of riffs, bells, and whistles is an indefatigable source of ecstasy. Listening to “S.O.S.” or “Dancing Queen” or “Super Trouper” for the first time can feel like hearing “Good Vibrations” or “Born to Run” in the same fashion: Your pleasure centers are overwhelmed until they blow up like the Grinch’s tiny heart, expanding beyond their old size and becoming something new."

Maybe the schematic is missing a connection point, but it appeared that Q9/Q11 are biased solely by the input? At any rate Jose, it appears you are running a balanced CFP2? If so, if it were me, I would front-end this with a ubal->bal board, and use JFETs as the input stage for that. It will be a) transparent, and b ) give you flexibility on using SE sources as well as balanced. Well, transparent unless you are one who can hear a) plating on connectors, b ) teflon vs. cotton vs. air vs. any other form of dielectric known to man, or c ) some form of crystals within 1 mile of your listening environment, or d) grass growing. Hate how the forum software turns a "b)" into a smiley

R.I.P. Jim Brown at 87...

Oof. So I've spent ...entirely too long today working on getting a temporary (or "temporary" if one prefers) setup going. It has been an uphill battle. Long time listeners will remember I made use of a Native Instruments Traktor Audio 6 USB audio interface for years. It served as both the dual stereo outputs for my DJ software as well as the analogue inputs for Mixlr. It died a slow and awkward death. I have been trying to diagnose its issues today. What I've learned so far: The device is called an "Audio 6" because it has 6 stereo pairs: 3 in and 3 out. They are grouped into "Main" "A" and "B. The "Main" pair is completely shot. I have not tested the Main inputs today, but given that they were the point of failure when I stopped using this unit, I suspect they have not magically un-fucked themselves. In addition to that knowledge, I have also figured out that the Main ouputs are just as dead. Both the Main RCA outs and the headphone jack (which is permanently routed to Main out) produce nothing but horrid, headphone destroying static. The good news is that output A and output B appear to be working. This is a plus as I need a good 4channel USB DAC for this "temporary" setup, preferably one with RCA outs. I haven't done a proper test with a DJ mixer yet, but so far the Audio 6 looks promising. Unfortunately, that is the only good news. I still have to find a space in a tiny room to set up my large-ish 19" DJ mixer, laptop and necessary USB audio widgets. I also need at least one USB audio device with a working stereo pair of inputs. In the past I have used an Onkyo MSE-U33HB which dates from the turn of the millennium and was primarily sold outside of the US: Right before I moved, and again recently I confirmed that the output stage of my unit is dead. It's probably something as simple as bad capacitors, but it's beyond my ability to fix them. I need to rest the input stage and see if it's similarly dead. If it isn't, I'm going to once again press the Onkyo into service as my Mixlr Box. If it fails that test, I'm going to have to get creative.