dsavitsk

Happy birthday!

I think he clicked the wrong face. On a small screen it's difficult to see. @TMoney is a lover of cats. I am sorry for your loss, Craig. 18 years is a long time for a cat, and a sign that you gave her a loving home.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/interactive/2021/photos-nikon-small-world/

It's been a while since I built something goofy just for the sake of building something goofy. This is a JFET buffer pushing a stepup transformer (LL1674) to a 71A parafeed output stage using some custom Lundahl parafeed outputs. Tubes are CCS loaded with CCS driven filament supplies and shunt regulated bias. HT PS is choke input with a small regulator before the CCSes. The driver PS is dual Jung regulators. Sounds lovely other than for the slight hum that eludes me. It's surely something stupid that I won't find without rewiring the whole thing.

Rick Wakeman, eat your heart out!

Kids today. You have no idea what it was like using Python 1.5 in the late 90s when even perl programmers looked down on you.

This has been the claim of Linux proponents for going on 20 years. Someday it will be true.

FWIW, this is a really nice TV. Picture, out of the box with no calibration, looks better to me than the plasma. Sound is at least as good as any soundbar I was likely to buy. I've heard speakers that cost about as much as the TV itself that sound worse. The interface works great. I'm not happy I needed to buy a new TV, but I am definitely happy with the one I got.

I'm having trouble homing in on the issue. It's a single blink, which as far as I can tell indicates a problem with a board that the service manual indicated our TV doesn't have. Obviously I am not finding what I need to find, so I think that's going to take a while.

Thanks for the suggestions. Mercifully, there are not that many options to consider. I think it comes down to Sony (A80J) or LG (C1). Probably either is more than fine. Sony seems to get the nod in terms of picture (particularly upscaling) and sound, but costs a few hundred more. Wirecutter recommends the LG which I consider a strike against it. Both can probably forgo the Roku. It will be nice to have fewer wires for cats to chew on. It's possible that the Panasonic is fixable, but that's not going to happen this weekend, and the US Open starts on Monday! Its diagnostic mode was indeterminate.

The unthinkable has happened. Our Panasonic plasma is no more. ☹️ I could use suggestions on what to replace it with. Probably looking for 55", price range of $1500-1800 max, about where the panny was when we got it. Our setup is pretty minimal - no cable, no ht, etc. Just an antenna and a Roku. So sound quality is a consideration, as is the tuner. When we got the plasma we bought and returned about 6 TVs before settling on the plasma. I'd rather not go through that again.

I don't know how much interest this will have here, but if you are interested in law and/or policy discussions, the Lawfare Podcast is generally highly recommended. Sadly, the best podcast out of Lawfare just ended because two of the three commentators went to work for the Biden administration. That said, this recent episode on the police state in Xinjiang and the treatment of the Uyghurs there, and elsewhere, is interesting, horrible, and terrifying. Definitely worth a listen.

We renovated a bathroom a few years ago. It was actually in mostly fine shape, except that the drain pan under the shower, which was made of lead, had started to leak. This was not surprising as lead pans have a useful life of 75 years or so, and ours had been installed in 1931. At any rate, there was no real way to only replace the pan, so the whole bathroom had to be gutted. I remember asking the contractor whether all the newfangled and improved construction materials would also last 90 years. He laughed and said 15 to 25 was probably the max.