Craig Sawyers

I was Project Manager for an instrument on board this bad boy https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiColombo The Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer (MIXS). Due to get into Mercury polar orbit in 2025 after a 7 year journey. So far two flybys of Venus and two of the overall 6 flybys of Mercury as it brakes on its way in.

Also not real, but again I wish it was Kind of in a similar vein. In the Chaplin silent movie The Gold Rush, he eats his shoe. That was in fact liquorice. Apparently sourced from a UK company who made the stuff, and made the shoes that Chaplin ate. Enough of them for several takes.

Must be the middle of the night where you are, Tice?

Oh my word - they look completely awesome!

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest won a whole raft of Oscars, including one for Louise Fletcher as best actress.

RIP Hilary Mantel, author of the Wolf Hall trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, and his slow fall from grace with Henry VIII to execution at the stake (in Oxford). She was age 70, and died suddenly. One of the very few people to have won two Booker prizes. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-63005841

Happy Birthday you long British thing!

We dumped health insurance (we used to have BUPA) four years ago. We don't have anything equivalent to Medicare. The NHS is free anyway - like totally free. Any shots you need are free for anyone. And if you are over 60 any prescription drugs are free too. The only downside is the length of waiting lists for what the NHS see as elective procedures (like hip replacements). And anything we need that is elective we'll pay for. So far an operation on a finger which cost £2k, around a third of the annual BUPA insurance cost. But is our NHS in crisis? Well yes. They are currently a total of 40,000 short in staff numbers. And ambulance response times, supposed to be less than 15 minutes are currently around an hour. And that is a critical problem if you have a heart attack or a stroke. Why are the NHS short of staff? Well - underinvestment by successive Tory governments as a result of an "austerity" program post 2008, and Brexit (also a Tory failure piled of failure). I'm starting to sound like a Johnathan Pie rant! Or as my son says, an old man shouting at clouds. I remind him that once I was a young man who also shouted at clouds!

This was actually yesterday. We went to Oxford to a concert by this wind quintet https://lumaswinds.com/ . First rate professional musicians. Three fiendishly difficult pieces https://lumaswinds.com/concert/university-church-oxford/ Astonishingly for such amazing musicians, the concert was free! And because we are now "senior citizens" we have a bus pass that gives us free travel. And the bus stop is within a hundred yards of our house. What is not to like? We got away with "free" before we blew out on a meal at Quod https://www.quod.co.uk/ 🍽️

Happy birthday!

"Let's roll." Flight 93 hero Todd Beamer along with Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick and Mark Bingham, attempted to overwhelm the hijackers of Flight 93. Moments later the plane would crash. Todd's Rolex watch, recovered from the crash site. The date still reads "11" September.

The tightening torque for devices (like TO220) to a heatsink is defined. It is less than you might think. I bought a torque screwdriver for exactly this. AN1040-D semiconductor mounting considerations.PDF

My son designs and project manages some of the largest and most sophisticated display systems around. He is my go-to IT guru. He was responsible for my last two desk tops - built from the ground up, and neither has missed a beat. For recreation he is a gamer. Two ridiculous joysticks, a pair of foot pedals and two screens. He has fiber to the house so has a ton of bandwidth. His take on W11 is don't do anything until you have to pay for it. If you go for the free roll out, you are essentially doing free beta development for them.

Admission time. I have one of the Autodesk shavers. And I swore it made a difference. But I then ripped my CD collection to a NAS drive using dBpoweramp, using FLAC lossless encoding. Now dBpoweramp compares your rip, track by track with all other rips in their database with an 8 hexadecimal number checksum (if all F's that is over 4 billion decimal). If it is green, it is a bit-perfect rip as compared with possible a hundred or more previous rips. If it is red, there is a checksum error, even by one bit. Close examination of the offending CD usually revealed a scratch or aluminium layer pin holes. Scratches can be polished out, but pinholes are end of story. If the checksum is green, then that data is added to the rip accuracy library. But there was absolutely no difference to the accuracy of the rip whether the disc had been shaved or not. So like the video shows, it seems that there is no real effect in shaving and black colouring the edge.