Craig Sawyers

I wouldn't trust what is in those bottles

Happy birthday!

I have to take my helmet hat off to those creations Grahame

OK - I threatened some time ago to show my signature penis latte art. Here we go:

Looks like a belated - happy birthday!

Happy birthday!

Ah well. That would darn well explain the mobile phone size screen

Well it is showing Eric Clapton Unplugged live in concert. So not just for menu use. The DVD case is in front of the microscopic TV.

Happy birthday!

It is either a room made by giants, or that is the smallest flat screen TV possible. My computer monitor is larger that that.

Speaker porn? Amplifier porn? Lots of porn.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday Steve - have a spectacular day!

Thirty years ago today, Carl Sagan showed images of the earth from 4 billion miles taken from Voyager: the "Pale blue dot" He said: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

This has also been posted before, and these guys do it for a living. There is no spoon....

Have a great day Jeff!

RIP Kirk. There was an interview on the radio this morning with someone who interviewed Kirk Douglas when he was 100. He said, to the effect "I don't know any actor now. All the greats - Laurence Olivier, Burt Lancaster - they are all of them dead. I'm pretty much the last one left". There is a sadness to that that quite chokes me up.

I was lucky enough to have a long email conversation with him around 10 years back. That was where he shared the bet with Widlar. He actually contacted me, because he worked out that (feel sorry for my wife at this point) I am a Tektronix test gear collector and restorer as a hobby. The conversation moved progressively to AI, which he was agnostic about - but he reckoned the future was in Augmented Reality, where embedded computer systems would elevate our processing power and intellect. And here we are thinking 5G is a shiny new thing... A hell of a thinker was Barrie Gilbert.

RIP Barrie Gilbert, analog design titan. Brit who moved to the US to work at Tektronix. He was responsible for the on-screen readout in the 7000 series scopes, and the Gilbert Cell that was used as the core of the Tek custom amplifier chips up to and beyond 1GHz. Is also used in every 4-quadrant multiplier chip out there. He was so good that Analog Devices hired him from Tek by agreeing to build a whole facility out in Beaverton for him to play in. The story was that he had a bet with Bob Widlar to design a minimum component constant current source. Gilbert lost (he came up a three transistor one) when Wildlar came up with a 2 transistor one. The Widlar source is used in just about every op-amp, and every AB power amp that has been built since. In full flow in 1991 describing what is known as the Gilbert Cell "The translinear amplifier" Aged 83 - RIP Barrie Gilbert.

Makes you feel kind of horny

The ultrarare Wharfedale Option 1. Only 8 pairs ever made during the mid 80s. Full dipoles, actively crossed over and with Quad current dumper amplifiers in the pod at the bottom, and a balanced input. The large enclosure at the back was a bass reflex subwoofer that could be turned off if you only wanted it to go down to only 35Hz. The amplifiers were heat sunk to the bottom pod, which was cast aluminium. The reflex enclosure pod at the back was fibreglass skins around a honeycomb core. It could go to 120dB without breaking out in sweat. Unfortunately, although apparently the sound was stunning, the price tag was about £10k (about £35k in today's money). Now if it was a Mark Levinson Cello speaker, or Apogee etc it would have stood a chance of selling. But it was hobbled by being a Wharfedale, which at the time made high volume consumer audio speakers, and not high end things like Option 1. Crap name too. Brochure-Wharedale-OptionOne.pdf

Jeeze. Looks like a set from a post apocalyptic zombie movie.

Now that looks really awesome.

Even in the UK, where basketball is not a big thing, this hit the main BBC news on both the TV and radio. Shocking news. RIP Kobe and Gianna As Nate says, helicopters (and light aircraft for that matter) have a bad record for safety.