dsavitsk

Agree that you need to get a pretty high quality P&S to be much better than the top end phones these days. There is a camera space between top end phones and DSLRs, but even the least bulky of them are considerably more bulky than a phone. And if a digital screen is your end viewing option, then there is no quality benefit to a P&S, but many drawbacks. The biggest other advantage is probably that you can get a zoom lens, if you are the sort of heathen who likes such things. That said, if you want a serious camera for prints but a DSLR is too bulky there are a few good options. I recently got a Fuji X70 for travel. It is just small enough to carry around when I am actively wanting to take pictures, but I would never take it with me on just a day out. But it is a lovely camera built for old school camera types who want the ability to easily closely control the technical aspects of photography. The best feature of it is that it has a flip out screen that essentially emulates a medium format waist level finder of old. That's how I learned to really take pictures, so I really like it. If you want a zoom lens, the Canon G9x is pretty cool, as is the Sony RX100 series. Here are some options: https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/2017-roundup-compact-enthusiast-zoom-cameras https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/2017-roundup-consumer-long-zoom-compacts https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/2017-roundup-fixed-prime-lens-cameras

That's too bad, Shelly. When we had the inspection done on our house, the inspector was literally laughing during the process. He thought nobody would be dumb enough to buy a house that needed so much work. But he had not met the likes of us! We managed to get the seller to do $35K worth or maintenance - basically everything significant mentioned in the report. I think the agents on both sides were shocked that he agreed to it.

Agreed. We threw out our cheap dishes and we use the fancy ones every day. Things are meant to be used.

I would take a scone with clotted cream over just about any other food on earth.

I watched the game, or most of the last period of it, which was the only hockey I watched all year. My totally uneducated opinion is that a team that can't figure out how to score with a 5 on 3 advantage probably does not deserve to win the Stanley Cup.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!

Never my favorite band, but these are in my collection. Both pretty near mint as I don't think I played either more than once or twice. If anyone here is a collector, I'd be happy to sell them with all money going to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Chevy Sonic - so terrible that I got motion sick while driving it. I would also give the Fiat 500 a dishonorable mention.

Getting a super cheap rental car for 3 days costs less than taxi or Uber rides between the airport and my parents' house, so I have driven a lot of the worst cars on the road lately. I would definitely consider the Nissan to be not the worst I have driven. Would not be my first choice if I were buying something, but it's fine. Also - I kind of like the cube. I wouldn't own one, but I appreciate the Nissan has a history of making cars that don't look like every other car on the road. I saw one of these driving around Montreal a few years ago.

http://www.magpictures.com/bestofenemies/

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

I'm pretty sure Buckley is not the originator of the sentiment: http://izquotes.com/quote/232269

Happy Birthday!

I have a working II+. I pull it out every few years to play Microsoft Olympic Decathlon.

Colin's IV (which is a common base topology) is a good alternative for a current out DAC. It is similar to Jocko's circuit, or Nelson Pass', and it can be made differential without too much trouble. For a voltage out DAC, a simple emitter or source follower works great as a buffer. Even a diamond buffer is a good alternative, and it can be made DC couple-able with the help of a servo (unlike some off the shelf diamond buffers.) Or any of Pass' recent buffers are good options. There is this myth of tubes as being pleasant sounding, and tooby. The reality is that tubes are very linear amplifiers with excellent bandwidth, and the bulk of the added distortion and limited bandwidth attributed to them has to do with the topologies and the surrounding components used. Similarly, the myth of DAC digital glare probably has more to do with the opamps used in the IV than the DAC chips themselves.

I wouldn't. A good switcher is no noisier than a rectifier, and it is generally easier to filter. There are other alternatives to opamps than tubes. The point is that there isn't a proper way to do it as it is the wrong tool for the job. An 8741, for instance, has more drive ability than just about any small signal tube and way less noise and a lower impedance than a power tube. Even the super high gm tubes pale in comparison to a $0.03 transistor, and they are unstable and difficult to use. Edit: The exception to this might be if you need gain. But voltage out DACs typically don't.

The DAC chip they use is $5 at Digikey. What am I missing? This just looks awful:

---------^ That. Tubes are excellent as voltage amplifiers, but they are high impedance devices. For a medium amount of gain, they are about the most linear option available. But a DAC doesn't need the gain, and the impedance is a hindrance.

Tom's house? I stayed at the Intercontinental - room service had good soup.

Pre emphasis correction in dac hardware is trivial. The CS8412 receiver, for instance, has a pin that goes low when it detects pre emphasis, and the PCM1794 DAC requires setting one pin high for pre emphasis conversion. So it is usually just connecting one pin to another, or as above doing so via an inverter or something. That said, I have never seen a pre emphasis track in my life, so I have never even bothered to do that much. But most commercial gear probably still will.

Not sure if this applies to your situation, but when we were considering HE boilers versus older ones, we found that the expected life (and the warranty) of the HE unit was about half as long (10 vs 20 years), and was just long enough such that just as it paid for itself, it was likely going to need replacement. Meaning that over time it would cost 2x as much and, in an effort to move from 90% to 95% efficiency, it would result in an extra boiler being dumped in a landfill.