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Pro: open-top motoring in Napa Valley is amazing. Con: Driving yourself means you have to spit at tastings.

Ray on Midnight Special...

I prefer to think of it as his Holiness's final act was giving JD Vance the gasface.

Week Two of Krafting... How could I not?

The duality of man.

Bananarama - A Trick of the Night Fun Boy Three - The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum)

finally. higher signal to noise ratio, more than 110db. takes signals up to 20 volts peak to peak unbalanced, 40v peak to peak balanced. no input attenuator that adds noise for those stupidly high voltage dacs. ( requires 30v power supplies) (volume control in the middle) thd about .005% no feedback. work in progress 4 layer board. preamp2025f.PDF

I can report that JoaMat's new mini T2 boards are working as designed/intended. This is with EH 300b and Amperex 6DJ8 and same filament regulators as JoaMat has shown before. Have only listened to it in mono (which sounded great) since I managed to blow channel nr 2 by re-using a 1N100D that I thought was fine but which wasn't. Lots more current through one of the lt1021's than designed for and it blew after a couple of minutes. Spare parts are on order so expecting to get back to a stereo setup by the end of the week. If you intend to build this, get yourself some 1N100D now. The only place I found with some in stock before next year is TME and it's dwindling fast (was 115 this morning, is 83 this moment).

Definitely. RB survives thanks to Max's insurmountable talent. McLaren has a bit more than the rest, but Lando seems to be overwhelmed by the responsibility. Very interesting season. Maybe more than the next one, which I don't completely believe is going to be tighter.

I keep my (now nearly 20 year old) Nikon D200 and 300mm F/4 on a lowboy chest in the kitchen, ready for whatever fauna shows up. Mr. Cardinal, being his usual show-off self. The pond froze for a preciously small period of time. Missing from these photos is the excited "roof roof roof!" noises that green sweater dog kept making. The sounds echoed off the ice and trees surrounding the pond. It was quite a scene to behold. Tune in next time for a 2006 logging camp!

Three weeks later, here is the outcome. A single enclosure all-in-one with GRHV and GRLV with high voltage and heater soft-start. The 10M90S is attached to the side wall, and thanks to the large size of the metal, the temp is about 104℉(40 ℃) after 1 hour. The only thing is I made the mistake of the main soft start module(the one on the power outlet), which makes it only functional when you use the back power switch. In this way, I keep the front power switch on all the time to avoid the ripple current. Still have a huge room to be improved. Planning to add a DC power supply for the heater for the DHT version, as well as the flashing soft start indicator.

soren asked for the board with onboard grlv preamp2025g - CADCAM.ZIP preamp2025g.PDF

Nothing more fun than peeking inside a "balanced" preamp to find a dual gang volume control... 🙄

J.D. Vance may have killed the pope. Pope Francis, dead at 88. https://www.reuters.com/world/pope-francis-has-died-vatican-says-video-statement-2025-04-21/ https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-francis-dead-01ca7d73c3c48d25fd1504ba076e2e2a

Note to self -- Keep the induction cooktop away from the oven exhaust when I am baking at 500+ degrees... Mostly cosmetic, but may effect longevity... 🙃

Rest in power Amadou Bagayoko at 70. We saw Amadou & Miriam live a couple of times and they were fantastic and fun and inspiring. The tag line of the NYT obituary sums it up: As Amadou & Mariam, he and his wife were improbable pop stars on two counts. Their style was venturesome and eclectic, and they were blind virtuosos. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/obituaries/amadou-bagayoko-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.904.NxQ_.biksAuc9OkK5&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare I'm going to play Dimanche à Bamako right now. ☹️

This happened last Friday but I wasn't ready to post about it till now. One of my cat's, Sam was diagnosed with liver disease in September of last year. A cause was never determined and the only realistic course of action was to put him on a regiment of various meds and keep him comfortable. Last week he took a turn for the worse, not moving around as much and no longer able to control his bladder. He was put down on Friday, it's one of the harder things I've had to do but it was time and he's at peace now. Sam was 2 months shy of his 7th birthday and his older brother Jax is 15 and still going strong!