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Craig Sawyers

High Rollers
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Posts posted by Craig Sawyers

  1. 9 hours ago, Knuckledragger said:

    YMKbekI.jpeg

    I hope that floor is reinforced.

    Wen we bought our house, new, maybe 30 years ago, I went into the front room and jumped up and down. "It's a concrete floor! We've got to buy this!"

    Mind you my speakers are a fraction of the weight of Wilsons. But I get no floorboard boing.

    Note this guy has ornaments on the shelf behind one of the speakers. I eradicated those in our room, after clapping my hands to listen for anything untoward, there was a chorus of pings from glass ornaments and plates.

    And he has a guitar behind the other, which will resonate nicely. Yuk.

    • Like 2
  2. On 1/30/2024 at 8:52 PM, skullguise said:

    Just read about this, bummed me out quite a bit....

    RIP to Brian Lumley, probably my favorite horror writer.

    https://locusmag.com/2024/01/brian-lumley-1937-2024/

    His Necroscope series was a super-creative view on the source of vampires (and the source of my username!), and led me to several of his other (Fantasy & Horror mostly) series, as well as to F. Paul Wilson, one of my favorite all-time authors.

    I did not realise that he was born in the same county as me - Co Durham in the North East of England. He was from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horden

    He seems to have learnt a lot from HP Lovecraft's style, including tales about Cthulu.

    Still 86 is not too shabby an innings.

    RIP Brian Lumley

    • Like 2
  3. I have to fess up here. In the Falklands, Rapier missile emplacements were dropped on the beach head. Rapier missiles were tracked to their (aircraft) target at that stage using S-band microwaves.

    That neatly jammed the radar on our own ships - who promptly told the Rapier crews to turn off the missile tracker. That left them with the only option to sit in the launcher nest and manually track using a rate joystick and sighting crosshairs.

    Now they were not good at this, and led to a need to train crews in how to manually track.

    From the Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapier_(missile)

    "In the 1980s, a new training simulator system was constructed in Stevenage. This consisted of a 10-metre (33 ft) radius hemispherical dome whose inside surface was used as a movie screen onto which terrain images were projected. A copper vapor laser projected images of targets and the missiles in-flight on top of the background imagery, while a smaller helium-neon laser simulated the Rapier's tracking flare. A complete Rapier targeting unit was placed in the center of the dome, and its guidance signals were captured and sent to the simulator to update the position of the missile. The projected laser imagery was bright enough that it could be tracked by IR imagers and seekers, allowing it to be used with the updated Darkfire versions of the Rapier with their IR cameras, or other IR seeking missiles like the Stinger. This system was sold separately for use with other missile systems under the name British Aerospace Microdome.

    And laser image projection system was developed my me as a consultant when working for https://www.paconsulting.com/about/global-innovation-and-technology-centre .

    The whole British Aerospace simulator was darned impressive. There was a 1kW audio system in there to give a realistic sound effect of launching, as well as sound effects from the targets (helicopters, jets etc). Scared the bejeesus out of me when we were testing it. 

    • Like 2
  4. There was an interview with some US administration hawk on the UK's radio 4 a day or two ago. He said that his advice was to hit Iran hard - really hard. And take massive economic sanctions against China, who he accused of supplying arms to Iran.

    God help the world if this crazy couplet of policies is put into practice.

    First off - how many countries does the US (and Europe for that matter) cheerfully arm to the teeth? We found that out during the Falklands War, where our ships were hit by Exocet missiles - previously supplied to Argentina by the French.

    And US/UK's reputation in attacking countries does not end well. Libya? post Ghadaffy it is still a shit show. Afghanistan? Similar - it took the ultra orthodox Taliban five minutes to take control once we "withdrew". Iraq? Still a mess, and only now just about recovering.

    And the crazy partition of Israel into Gaza and Israel by the UN in late 1947 was never going to end well, in the same way that the UK partitioned India (by Mountbatten) into India and Pakistan - again in 1947 - is still a matter of massive tensions in the region.

    We really do fuck up the globe big time.

      

    • Sad 4
  5. It is a little after the fact but on Thursday last went to see The Enfield Haunting, a play in London with Catherine Tate and David Threlfall. Dramatization of a true story about a poltergeist in a semi detached house in Enfield (a suburb of London) in 1977 and 1978.

    Major media coverage at the time (newspapers and the BBC) and a ghost hunter (played by Threlfall) permanently in the house.

    Turned out to be the two daughters having a laugh that got out of hand.

    The fiction in the play was that this daughter nonsense raised a real poltergeist that was causing true mayhem.

    image.png

    • Like 5
  6. Sorry to hear about that Brent. Condolences to you and your family.

    20 minutes of CPR is really impressive - it is really exhausting even for 5 minutes (I'm first aid trained).

    It won't be any consolation, but CPR has only a 5% survival rate. If you are lucky enough to have a defibrillator handy, that increases to 10% survival.

    RIP Jack.

    • Thanks 1
  7. When you see movies of someone as a young person you forget they grow old and die. RIP Ryan.

    On a similar topic, was watching Die Hard last night, filmed when Bruce Willis was in his early/mid 30's. Born a year before me in 1955, he is now down the dementia road at 68. In his last movies a couple of years ago, he would turn up and wonder why he was at a movie set, and had to repeat his lines coming through an earpiece having lost the ability to learn them.

  8. Yes.

    It it based on a spreadsheet implementation of a model in a National Semi databook. But with more frequency data points, and with amplifier noise taken into account. 

    And yes, you can always parallel opamps, summing their outputs via 10 ohm resistors. But even a single NE5534A is less than 2.5dB worse than the SNR with a noiseless amp (which is -80.4dB - depending on cartridge R and L) - so it is diminishing return. Parallel two NE5534A and you get to 1.6dB - so all you have found is 0.7dB in SNR. Parallel 4 and you find another 0.4dB and hence get to around 1dB of a noiseless amp.

    • Like 1
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