Craig Sawyers

I have no idea whether you can get this in the US, but House of Fools. This is a BBC comedy show with a live audience in its second season, written by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, and is unique, weird and absolutely hilarious. Has me in tears every week. If you like Monty Python, you'll like this.

^^ That was a serious bit of kit, and drop dead gorgeous to boot. I have a mate who owned a Ferrari (forget what sort) at one point, and he rapidly found out that he had to do a course in how to drive the thing - he couldn't steer a straight line and change gear at the same time until he learnt the techniques. And his was a lot less powerful than the La Ferrari animal. Shows what a good/great driver May is. But yeah - the Peugeot section was endlessly long and Top Gear at its worst. And this is the same team that brought us the Reliant Robin shuttle launch what a contrast.

These http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/40104270/make awesome equipment stands. The top is constructed the same way as Russ Andrews Torlyte - it is basically a wooden honeycomb. Very light and non-resonant. Price, like all Ikea is stupidly low - we're talking £8UK - so maybe 15 bucks - as compared with two orders of magnitude more for Torlyte. So cheap in fact it is worth buying one and just trying it out. And massively strong - I am using the double width one as a test equipment support at the moment with several hundred pounds of gear on it.

Yeah, me too. My bedroom carpet was covered in soldering iron burns and solder splatters.

Happy Birthday!

That would have been the LS3/5A Dusty. A BBC design by Harwood (his design paper attached), and made under license by a few manufacturers such as Spendor, using KEF drive units. Bewlideringly still made, using newly manufactured B110 and T27 drivers from here http://www.falconacoustics.co.uk/ls3-5a/ls3-5a-walnut-15ohm.html. Not cheap as you can see. Or you can buy a kit form version http://www.falconacoustics.co.uk/ls3-5a/ls3-5a-b110-t27-cabinet-kit-complete.html It is still a speaker to be reckoned with. But to get real bass from it you definitely have to cross it over to a sub - but the tiny original box is surprisingly good. Craig 1976-29.pdf

Went to see this: http://www.londontheatre.co.uk/londontheatre/news/ltg14/boa14583.htm Tiny central London theatre seats 100, and a stage the size of a living room. Absolutely awesome to see world class acting that close. Boa is the nickname of Harriet Walter's character - no idea why they did publicity photos with a snake.

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He badly needs to be acquainted with the blunt end of a base ball bat

^^ I both want badly to eat that, and weirdly not, at the same time

Have a great one Steve!

Bit late but could be red plague http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_plague_%28corrosion%29an electrolytic corrosion process on silver plated copper

Happy birthday!

Have a great one!

You sure know the way to party, Ed! Enjoy your termite festivities

Time to get out the foil helmet

Wow - stay safe. Sounds dreadful squared. http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/31460804where the storms in your neck of the woods get top billing. On the Eastern seaboard, temperatures of -23C (-9F) once the 60mph wind chill is factored in. Which means do not go out. And the weather just being bloody awkward, it looks like another storm system is coming in after this one.

Went to Twickenham to watch England thrash Italy by 47 points to 17 in the 6-nations Rugby ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Nations_Championship). It was a really fine day out!

Yeah, there really is some bollocks talked for sure. One of the highlighted bits of jargon in particular took my eye All dielectric (insulation) slows down and smears the signal traveling inside the conductor, and when insulation is unbiased it slows down different frequencies at different energy levels by varying degrees Which is of course total nonsense. A data cable (in fact all cables) has a characteric impedance. Drive it from, and terminate it with that characteristic impedance and you will get complete fidelity. You would have to use some pretty god awful dielectric (highly lossy) to degrade a signal in any significant way. I've done a LOT of measurements of various cables, and connectors, using Time Domain Reflectometry, with a 25 picosecond pulse rise time (around 12GHz effective bandwidth) and a halfway decent teflon insulated coax with a non-inductive termination shows no degradation in pulse fidelity from DC to 12GHz. I also don't subscribe to the silver cable thing at all, by the way. Copper is pretty darned good enough. There are no measurable difference on a digital cable between silver and copper using the above technique. The only caveat is that is sometimes a good thing to *reduce* the rise time - the faster the edges, the wider the spectrum, and the higher the probability that those very high frequency components will get where they didn't ought to get. So you start with a good cable (from TDR testing) and then electrically slug it to reduce the spectrum generated by the edges.

Indeed, but I only have evidence from my ears for the copper SD cables - the 100, 300 and 500. Because I was so convinced about this (and so was Mrs S), that when I did the work on measuring them at 3C http://www.3ctest.co.uk/I chose to waive my fees and have three 500 SDII cables instead (about $7k's worth in across the pond money). Just to give you an idea, the 500 has a stack of three circular circuit boards at each end (that is what is in the pods). There is a pic somewhere on RA's website to show this. The individual boards and surface mount components are provided by the board house (mains rated parts have to be wave soldered according to the specs of the parts). It then takes six hours to take the boards, the raw Kimber cable, plugs and sockets, pods etc and assemble and PAT test each cable. There are a total of 96 wires to terminate in the 500. The pods are potted internally with flame retardant goop, just in case one of the parts fails and goes incendary. The devil is most certainly in the detail when you have 240V ac mains (in the UK). The whole assembled cable then goes through a super secret and shit process code-named "X", which gives the same sort of benefits as cryogenic treatment, but without using cryogens.

Basically it is all down to RFI control - both into and out of the connected equipment. Works from around 100kHz up to 1GHz and more, and has an attenuation (in EMC lab conditions) of up to 40dB as compared with a kettle lead. Oh and there are no ferrites, which themselves are non-linear and generate harmonics, and no series components either. Works mainly in differential mode, but also has a useful effect in common mode too. Basic rationale is that the mains environment is exceptionally noisy now. Cheap switched mode supplies in fluorescent, LED lighting and CFL's, networking over power, which is now squirting 100-300MHz straight into the domestic wiring at watt and several watt levels with a range of 300 metres, and wifi, cell phones, digital cordless phones etc which all couple into the mains wiring. Once that garbage gets into a piece of audio equipment it gets rectified in semiconductor junctions. How bad is the effect? Well at the extreme end, when your cell phone cranks up the power to locate a cell, we'll all have heard zzt-zzt-zzt from an audio system (even broadcast audio) - and that is high hundreds of MHz getting rectified in your 20Hz to 20kHz audio system. Problem is also that that conventional power filters (like the ones on the back of IEC connectors) are only required to be good to 30MHz, and that is where the specs stop. After which they can actually increase the signal level as the multiple components in there go into self-resonance. Only reason I rolled over on a low royalty (about £30 per cable) was that it will launch in the US directly from Ray Kimber sometime this year, so the market should go up significantly as compared to just the UK. Only a very few (one or two) of the silver variety sell each year over here, which is kind of not surprising. I'm not about to get rich quick with this for sure.

Oh dear. Time to fess up. The SD in the cable mentioned above stands for Sawyers Disc. Which is moi. I get a piss poor royalty for every one sold.

^^ The Shambles, York UK

^^pre-marinated bacon

I was attacked by a pheasant yesterday. I kid you not - I was out walking, and in the middle of nowhere I saw this cock pheasant strutting around. Really nice looking bird so I stopped. He came closer and closer until he was just an inch or two from my foot. Anyway, I walked on, and the damned bird followed me, paralleling the path. After about 400 yards it attacked me! Must have been on its territory, but it is way outside breeding season. I kicked it and it had another go. Kicked it again - no luck the damned bird came on. Eventually I too a real soccer kick at it, and it decided I was going to fight back and gave up. Forget the parrot, try taking on something the size of a pheasant! At 0 degrees C.