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While I'm not where near my late 00s output, I have begun to take, edit and post photos at a rate that I have not in over a decade. Just a short walk from my house. The 17-40L is a bit silly at the wide end (TBH just about everything that wide is) but I end up using it that way more often than not. I attribute this to a lack of discipline on my part. Conversely, the 17-40 is actually amazing at 40mm. Infrared version of a scene I posted earlier (points up.) IR is never not a PITA. Out of the camera, this shot looks awful. I spent over an hour futzing with it. First I denoised in Topaz DeNoise AI. Next ran it through Luminar 4 where I made a bunch of changes and applied a lookup table. I've begun to use L4 for the conversion to B&W. It's basically as good as (my totally legit copy of) Photoshop for that task. I also applied a lookup table, which made a fairly subtle difference. Lastly, I dragged the image into PS, removed some dirt spots and fixed the [gosh darn] horizon line. I actually quite like the end result. I've been moving toward "normal" looking IR images (vs freakish alien landscape) for a while now. Other than the odd tone curve, one might not immediately notice this is an IR photo. Downtown Edgartown. Similar, but not quite as involved process as above. Luminar 4 manages to add so much noise to images with its pseudo HDR math (even when I specifically disable most of it) that I have found I need to do both "before" and "after" passes in Topaz. This is a much more obviously IR shot. I do like the strong beam of light from the late afternoon sun. Edgartown docks. Less processing than some of the shots above, but I still did a careful B&W conversion and spent considerable time on the levels. Across the street fro my house. What makes this photo for me is the tiny jet with the contrail between the clouds. I've also been editing some older photos, specifically a bunch from 2008: Two shots of the late Heidi the cat, surveying her kingdom and ...doing cat stuff, I guess. Taken with the very good Canon 85mm F/1.8 I borrowed for a few days. The 85/1.8 is a great lens that forever lives in the looming shadow of the glass Gojira that is its F/1.2 brother. Exiting a bar on Christmas Eve, 2011. PowerShot S95 wide open (F/2) 1/13th handheld, ISO200. I didn't like the photo when I took it, but nearly a dozen years later I think it captures a mood. My driveway after a blizzard, January 2009. Light source is my house + car's headlights. A few weeks earlier that same January. Cold sunset over a Stop & Shop parking lot. Back to the present day. Some odd cloud formations over my back yard. Moment app on an iPhone 13, with minimal futzing in PS afterward. I've got a bunch more to post, but this is going to have to do for now. Flickr has gone "503 Service Unavailable. No server is available to handle this request." half a dozen times while I've tried to make this post.

RIP

Interesting. My first music purchase Ever was the 7" Single - Heart of Glass. {I may have it}

It turned into a bit of a saga, but my brother enlisted Steve to help identify a new tool for the shop that he wanted to surprise me with. My siblings were around the house while my terminally ill brother made many phone calls and repeatedly ordered and reordered the specified machine. That info leaked to me and made me self conscious about him buying me a gift and worried about how it would work out, but nobody (including Steve) would tell me what it was or how it was being delivered. It finally arrived a couple of weeks ago and there was another whole saga to get the 500lb box up to the shop. Turns out it is a dual drum 25" Supermax sander. It is very cool and with some shifting it fits into the shop in a good spot. I wired the 220V/30A connection myself with the same type of plug as the Hammer jointer/planer it sits next to. I am ordering some stuff to make a wye connector on top so that the two tools can also share the same dust collection hose with a quick connect setup. I can tell that this is going to be a great tool to have in the shop at twice the width of the planer and currently set up with 80 and 120 grit papers to cut the sanding time way down on lots of projects. Thanks Tom, and Steve, and even Doug who consulted as well. IMG_0462.mov

Mozart: Symphonies Nos.35 "Haffner", 36 "Linzer", 38 "Prager", 39, 40, 41 "Jupiter" Berliner Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm 1995 https://album.link/i/968876434 Example: This was a bigger undertaking and more rewarding than I thought. I have to admit that when I first queued it up. I just saw Böhm, Berliner, Mozart 35 and 41 on DG. Sweet. Oh - 35 through 41! oops. That is many more full symphonies than I signed up for. Furthermore it was not until I was well into the first movement of the 36th that I was like, hey - this isn't the 41st. {checks the TIDAL playlist}. Ah, 23 tracks and 2 hours and 27 minutes playtime. Well okay then. Fascinating journey. I don't think that I have listened to them as a set before (it was a lot of notes). But there was a flow to them and progression that I could pick up on themes or techniques that were presented in one symphony that are picked up and explored or expanded on in later works. And having them presented by a single source with Karl and BP really works. Now, not my favorite recordings, some passages are a bit heavy, the delicate phrasing can get lost in a bit too much power. But pacing and structure where rock solid.

"The show premieres Friday, June 16." https://www.motor1.com/news/670773/the-grand-tour-eurocrash-trailer/

I bought this 7" at Kmart when I was 7 years old. (I believe I bought the Theme from the Greatest American Hero the same day)

I still have the 4070s, if you want to try those, Neil. Weren't they made for recording studios? 😁

This is my impression of most Mozart in 7 words or less.

Doing the math... If 7" had a street value of $20 in 1981, adjusting for inflation and the extra inches... It looks like I could supplement my income by about $140 an hour.

So I've had my hands on one of these that works for the last week or so. It's definitely not an amp you'd use to show off a flagship electrostatic headphone. That said, it doesn't sound as bad as I might have expected going in. For the person who's new to electrostatics, or not that knowledgeable about the particular headphone they are using, they'd probably be perfectly happy with the sound. I know empirically that I'm not hearing all the headphone is capable of, but subjectively, it can still be quite an enjoyable sound, particularly depending on the complexity and challenge of the audio being played back.

I doubt he gives the slightest shit what anybody thinks of him...he has his shtick and it works for him. The guy has made bank by doing just this for years and by this stage anybody watching him and thinking there's any objective value there is more retarded than he is. I would hope most watch him purely for entertainment value. Me? Don't have the time or inclination. (Just realised this is my first post...and it's about Zeos...not terribly auspicious but I'll try do better).

I couldn't get past 2 minutes....holy shit that guy is an ass! And I DON'T need that head POV camera and all its motions....

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fwEAz2hAXSNwIfFTTsbz_ce4g8zhBLut?usp=sharing

Look what UPS just delivered from Digikey... And of course something is missing (3x 2sa1860)!

Seems you have built yourself a good amplifier – Congratulations! To get rid of those annoying offsets – build KGOOS.

You are welcome. It depends on how quickly they drift. My understanding is that the largest part of the drift is caused by the transistor parameters’ temperature effect. That also includes the Hfe of Q32 Q33. Unlike the balance servo, the offset servo is a proportional regulator so its error varies with the gain. Hence the offset varies with temperature. If it drifts up and down faster than like one hertz, it gets into the 1/f noise territory and needs attention.

I was just sent this and I had to share it: Now we all know Z reviews is trash but this is just pure shilling.

Something like this: Both 285.6 x 116.8 mm

Ryan Adams and the Cardinals Don Was is a brilliant bass player.

I need a toolbox. Unfortunately I live in good ol' boy territory, so if I get the one I want, I'll probably get taken around back and...so I will just let y'all imagine:

That’s pretty cool, except unusually I just toss my art in the trash or place for free ads on Craigslist.

So the art craters were at the Rancho today bright and early and I have to say that, other than Milo and Otis, I have never seen sawdust fly like that. These lads knew what they were about!

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.

Documentation? heh Which amp? This is a confusing thread because there are at least 3 amps discussed here, maybe more (Kevin or others, correct me if I am wrong): CFA2 (CFP) - current feedback amp. Each board does 1 channel SE, so 2 for stereo SE, 4 for stereo balanced. Kevin later did a mod to this adding current mirrors feeding the servo. People who had built the original noticed that the servo was audible as to quality of opamp. The schematic in Kevin's archive is the older version. CFA3 - current feedback amp for balanced. Not sure if anyone ran boards for this one. Basically a pair of CFA2 amps and ubal-bal board on one pcb. Schematic does not show the current mirror mod as in 1 above uberamp - seems to be a power amp; I've never quite figured this one out Here are the schematics for the CFA2 (current mirror version), and the CFA3. I also attached my BOM for a CFA2. Amp quantity shown is for stereo SE. If going balanced, double it. It should reflect the later current mirror version. You'll also need some GRLVs or other power supplies, etc. cfa2cmirror.pdf cfa3production.PDF CFP2_BOM_update2018march.xlsx EDIT: I also ran across another schematic on Kevin's site which I hadn't seen before: currentsourceamp2.PDF. This seems very similar to the cfa2cmirror schematic, but is described as a transconductance amp.

Not worthy of its own thread: Drobo is Officially Done as the Company Moves Into Liquidation. For years I used one as my primary backup. See here on my very crowded desk, a decade ago.

As someone who grew up on 80s wrestling, I recognized early how important a good heel was to any narrative. Clown ass Hulk Hogan owes a huge amount of his success to wrestlers like the Sheik and Andre the Giant.