Craig Sawyers

I have no idea what those weird images are from. But I'm torn - I don't know whether I want to watch it, or not.

Happy birthday, tall thing!

Ivor Tieffenbrun's (Linn) maxim was always "If it sounds better, that is because it is better". On the one hand it could be taken as just a company slogan, like Quad's "The closest approach to the original sound". But on the other, it is quite a deep statement to the effect that measurement is not enough in determining subjective quality.

Oh bugger. Far, far too early.

You heard it here first. Solid gold toilet stolen from Blenheim Palace. Apparently an artwork. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-49700620

This is so true. Boris has generated curved space that is sucking the UK into a black hole. But he is now stuffed. He cannot go for a no-deal (now illegal) and France has said "no extension beyond 31st October". And the Scottish court has ruled the Boris's suspension of Parliament for five weeks is illegal https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/11/scottish-judges-rule-boris-johnsons-prorogation-unlawful . All in all a pretty bad week in Boris-land. And I'm massively enjoying watching the bastard twist in the wind.

It does! I'll have to post an image of one of mine. Wife: "Oh - you've done latte art! Hey wait a minute..."

I used to enjoy running in a lightning storm - I really like the deluge of rain after the hot and humid that led up to it. But one day, about a mile of so from home, there was a simultaneous flash and BANG. Followed by a strong smell of acrid and ozone. Must've struck not many yards away. Scared me really bad. That cured me entirely of running in a lightning storm

My latte art looks more like a penis and testicles than anything else. I would make a lousy barista!

Thanks for the heads up guys. I'll keep an eye out for any weed intrusion and kill the bastards as soon as they raise their ugly little shoots.

Well these guys went down 6 inches, started with dense nylon planting film, 4 inches of hardcore (about 20 tons), and 2 inches of fine crushed grit (10 tons). All compacted at each stage. So nothing is coming up through that lot. Things might get out at the edges, but if anything sprouts there I'm just going to hit it with kick ass weedkiller. The planting film is there sure to stop weeds (and ants) getting through, but also to stop the hardcore from sinking into the ground underneath. The thing that astonished me is that everything they dug out, and all the hardcore etc was brought through in an endless relay of wheelbarrows. They worked their asses off from start to finish. When they arrived in the trucks, it was only a minute or two before they were at it full tilt. Lunch was ten minutes and then pow back to it full bore.

Not quite yesterday, but last week. What passed for grass in our garden was 50% weeds and infested with ant hills that defied all attempts, chemical, biological and thermal, to kill off. So after three weeks of preparation (painting 35 metres of fence twice, painting walls white, all after digging out 15 metres of Virginia Creeper and ivy) a team of five guys came for four days to fit artificial grass. Cheap it was not, but the effect is so much better that the mess it replaced.

Oh dear. The very real perils of land speed records. RIP Jessi.

It was known that firebreaks work since 1666 during the Great Fire of London. " [Samuel] Pepys spoke to the Admiral of the Navy and agreed they should blow up houses in the path of the fire. The hope was that by doing this they would create a space to stop the fire spreading from house to house. The Navy – which had been using gunpowder at the time – carried out the request and the fire was mostly under control by Wednesday, 5 September 1666"

RIP Peter. Another good guy gone.

Waterboarding the teddy. That is one kid I would not want to meet as an adult!

Point well taken!

Well our kids were born in 1986 and 1989, so definitely not boomers (I'm a boomer). Rob and Helen own their own house. And Liz and Oscar (the Australians) have saved a monster deposit by hard graft and will be buying in the next 6 months. Rob works as a project manager in major audio visual installations. His latest was the Samsung King's Cross https://www.samsung.com/uk/explore/kings-cross/ AV systems, the most complex bit being this, 4 metre wide curved screen LED display with 0.8mm pixel pitch. The LED modules weigh a ton in total, and each networked module has got 6-axis microadjustment to ensure minimal error in module position. Helen works in advanced image analysis for defence. Liz now works mainly in costume and theatre installation design with some acting Oscar runs a 15-man arborist company clearing power lines from tree problems (gum trees grow real fast) So any idea that non-boomers have got a bum deal is certainly not the case with our offspring.

WTF? Why would anyone do that? Does not compute, fzzz grkk....

Serial data with an embedded clock (for example the NRZ used for SPDIF) is subject to a well known set of random and deterministic jitter mechanisms. Agilent make high end car priced gear to measure and characterise these in high speed data links - but lowly SPDIF is just as prone to these at a pedestrian data rate. And although it is true that Red Book CD's use a robust error correction code (Cross-Interleaved Reed Solomon) a SPDIF link uses a simple checksum.

Just heard that on the BBC late afternoon current affairs programme on the radio. RIP Toni.

I went to see him with his string quartet at the Holywell Music Room in Oxford https://www.music.ox.ac.uk/about/facilities/holywell-music-room/ about 20 years ago, It was a very good concert as I remember it. This is one of his pieces Just worked out that he was in his early 30's when he composed the iconic Morse theme. It was a real shock that he has died, and so early. RIP Barrington.

Different package, but Linear Systems do the LSK389 (in TO18 style can and also surface mount) in three Idss bands.

Where did you buy the long-obsolete dual FET's? Or did you have a hoard of them