Craig Sawyers

I somehow thought the punch line was going to be different

RIP Michael Collins. The man who orbited the moon but never walked there. That just leaves Buzz Aldrin from the first landing.

This is only an updated version of the FETRON, introduced in 1972 by Teledyne. A thick film hybrid JFET amp in the header of something that looked like a nuvistor. fetron.pdf

Happy birthday Kevin!

My son-in-law is an aborist in NSW Australia. In fact it is his company, and employs a team of 15. https://www.gibbontrees.com/ I can absolutely guarantee that they would not do what the palm tree clown did. In fact you can see on their website that they specifically offer palm tree maintenance and clearing.

Me too. It was a serious shock when the only thing that came up was a page from Wayback Machine from the dim and distant HC.

When the site went off-line, I heard about the UTAH datacentre fire and wondered if it was related. Same thing happened with EEVBlog, who suffered the same fate - they were evidently lucky and their bit of the server structure was not too badly pooched and came back in two or three days. But what a nightmare. Thanks for sticking with it Todd - you are an undoubted hero!

I'll look forward to hearing what was the problem, and the clearly heroic efforts to get everything back and running without any loss of historical data. Awesome.

Woah - its back! I was seriously suffering withdrawal symptoms.

I just found this on another forum, where there was discussion about audio systems possessed by demons (you know the effect - paranoia about something not quite right) Anyway, snip of another poster's reply "my turntable is haunted by a plattergeist. If I can't get it dispossessed soon, I'll have to bury it in its vinyl resting place" I'll get my coat....

Circa 1865, the ruins of Charleston SC during the civil war. Colourised.

Hope you had a great day, Doug! Happy birthday!!

One of the last concerts we went to pre-lockdown was Graham Nash - and evening of music and recollections. Completely excellent in all regards Prior to that Neil Young in one of the weirdest concerts I've been to. At one point he and his band turned their backs to the audience, went to the back of the stage and jammed for 20 minutes. And that was one of the less strange things. Also Graham Nash and David Crosby (who have since fallen out big time). At one point Nash said to Crosby "behave - or you'll have to play with Neil Young and go deaf". Superb, absolutely superb.

Although the Suez canal has been deepened and widened several times since it opened in 1869, it clearly isn't deep and wide enough to cope withe that behemoth container ship jammed across the canal. My dad was in the merchant navy shortly after WW2, on oil tankers that were pre WW2 vessels. He went through the Suez canal frequently. although those ships were toys by comparison to the monsters that sail nowadays. He told a story about losing power half way across the Atlantic - the old tub had developed perforated boiler tubes and was losing steam pressure. To keep it going he found sacks of sawdust, and fed those into the boiler to plug the leaks. When he ran out of sawdust he got the ship's supply of porridge and progressively fed that into the boiler. That limped them to port in the West Indies. Without those stunts they would have been dead in the water mid Atlantic.

I had no idea that Sony manufactured such monsters. I'm assuming back in the day.

It was like a grand tour though, with excellent hotels in interesting cities on the way. Not like Joni Mitchell's Amelia "I dreamed of 747s over geometric farms" "I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes" Must listen to Blue today....Mitchell at her poetic best.

Intrigued by that old colorized photo, I did some google-fu about Imperial Airways (now called BA!). They were first to run flights to Australia. There were 35 stops on the journey, which took just short of a month to get to Melbourne. Apparently their safety record was not great....

Interior of a 1936 airliner, run by Imperial Airways, the first British commercial airline. Looks really safe.

Happy birthday!!

I use one of these https://www.peakelec.co.uk/acatalog/dca75-dca-pro-semiconductor-analyser.html Not as capable as the Locky_z unit, but compact, curve tracing via USB, and plenty good enough for matching. Limited to <12V, <10mA I also have the SOT23 adaptor for mine Peak unit, since many transistors are available only in this format now

Bloody hell - that is an insane price. And the lightweight screws that are part of the package are not metric - they only work with the supplied nuts. Don't try to use them in tapped holes in a cartridge (they will be M2.5) - the SME ones will bind and ruin your day. Try SME for the price - it can't hurt to find out. They still manufacture everything in-house. Even the screws, nuts, spacers, finger lifts - everything. The only thing they buy in is the raw tapered arm tube, which comes from Chicago White Metal https://cwmdiecast.com/ , but even then all post machining, painting, silk screening etc is in house.

I suspect you can order one from SME. It'll still be pricey, but at least it supports SME (in spite of their no-new-arms policy) rather than internet gougers.

Very hard to get my head about the fact that she's gone, so young. Fuck cancer It saw my wife's mother off nearly a decade younger, aged 42, when Carole was only 18.

RIP Sabine Schmitz, a major endurance racing driver, and Top Gear fun and crazy German driver. Died at age 51 after battling cancer for four years. Too early, far too early. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/motorsport/56420308

Have you actually *read and understood* the welcome message?