Craig Sawyers

Yes to both, Dusty. Meanwhile back at that Aberdeenshire golf course https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/dec/22/planners-reject-donald-trump-revised-plans-scottish-golf-resort

RIP Chuck. Another legend bows out, but at least he had a long life.

If I was Wilman/CMH I'd be very worried indeed about the superb new season of TG

Them's neat legs you have there Dusty

I too thought that TG was much, much better without Chris Evans. Absolutely no question. It leaves the Grand Tour needing to up its game, dump things like Celebrity Brain Crash and be less puerile with their challenges. My only mild TG criticism is that the new crew are clearly reading script from a teleprompter in the studio. But I'm sure as they find their feet and get more comfortable with off-script banter that will be less of an issue.

A very, very belated Happy Birthday!

A belated very happy birthday!

Given the Formula One race carnage back in the day with absolutely no driver safety, the fact that John Surtees lived to a ripe old age is astonishing. And bikes too! RIP John Surtees.

Go for muons instead. 200 times heavier than electrons. They only live for a couple of microseconds for an added sense of speed

In the UK we have a multi-supplier market for energy, both electricity and gas. You can buy them separately or as a joint duel fuel deal. The government has mandated that it should be trivially easy to change supplier, which we do every year. Example: for the last year we used OVO, which had a per month deal which added up to UKP1260 per annum for gas and electricity. At the end of year 1 they wanted to increase it by 45% to UKP1728. Bugger that, so we have changed to another company from 20th March which offers UKP1512. I phoned up OVO to haggle them down, but they absolutely cannot budge - so we swap. Reputation counts for a lot - our Consumer Associate (called Which?) rated OVO at 78% and the new outfit at 76%, so comparable customer satisfaction. The worst ones are British Gas (who have a massive TV advert campaign) and Npower. There was a lady on BBC radio today, who was simultaneously sent three bills for differing amounts for the same time period by British Gas. She asked, not unreasonably which one was the correct one to pay. This simple request proved to be impossible to resolve, and after several months - she started getting aggressive mails from a debt collection company! Basically BG are a bunch of incompetent fuck heads. In frustration with absolutely nobody taking her seriously, she contacted the consumer program on the radio, and they got it rapidly sorted. BG have paid her a sum in recompense for the screw up. But that was only because the BBC took up her case.

Happy birthday Nate

You can buy them on eBay now http://stores.ebay.com/NuTube-US-Store?_trksid=p2047675.l2563 And there is an active group on diyAudio . Applications tests there suggest they are darned sensitive (frequency response and distortion) to bias conditions and surprisingly heater voltage.

That is truly awesome news!

Go for their throat, Jacob. Good luck. Might not be so relevant Stateside, but these are the UK rules that have to be followed by landlords wishing to evict tenants. https://www.gov.uk/evicting-tenants/overview

Yup - a lot of them need to be taken with a pinch of salt. They were based on using carbon power in the construction (a bit like Elna Silmics use chopped up silk fibres and Elna Cerafine use ceramic powder). Whatever the physics behind using carbon, hence BLACK gate, the measurements in some of the blurb indicates that the ESR is lower than conventional electrolytics, and the inductive reactance is lower too. But only by a factor of two or three, or thereabouts. A guy called Cyril Bateman, who used to be in charge of capacitor design at one of the UK manufacturers, wrote a series of landmark articles about the sound of capacitors. He did this by designing a sub-ppm distortion oscillator, a tunable filter to get rid of the fundamental, and spectrum analyzing the distortion residuals. Electrolytics were run without bias and at different bias voltages. Also bipolar electrolytics and using two conventional ones back to back. Plus reams of stuff on other non-electrolytic caps. An archive of Bateman's output is here http://www.waynekirkwood.com/images/pdf/Cyril_Bateman/ for anyone looking for some light bedtime reading.

Open baffles do things box speakers don't. Of course they need extensive EQ, but one of the things you notice if you are used to box speakers is they can sound bass-shy. If you are used to open baffles, or electrostatics, of planar magnetics (Like Magnaplanar) there are no surpises. The bass is there in the right proportion to the rest of the music with no overhang, and sounds tight and fast. And open baffles interact with the room in a completely different way, exciting far fewer resonances. Well you can buy a kit, or even buy one already built. Or you can do what I did - buy two sheets of Baltic Birch and build them from scratch. Then hot hide glue veneer them, and French polish them. Parts which are not veneered I made from a Rosewood called Cocobolo, and the feet were made from Goncalo Alves.

RIP Bill Paxton - forgot he was in so much until I looked at IMdB. Same age as me, and that in itself is scary.

Have a great one Naaman, from a fellow "gentleman of leisure"!

Before Rubycon pulled the manufacturing plug in Jelmax ten years ago (not enough volume I guess to keep Rubycon's interest), they used to be a bit expensive but affordable - similar price to Elna's Silmic and Cerafine. But since remaining BG stock has dwindled over the years, NOS or reclaimed ones go for really silly money. And of course the inevitable fakes. If anyone is vaguely interested in the cryptic apps notes in quaint Japanese-English, I downloaded all 116 of them (from Parts Connexion) back when Black Gates were available. Index attached. blackgate_index.pdf

Called either pork scratchings or pork crackling in the UK.

That looks like something based on the Linkwitz Orion. I have the same SEAS woofers in my Linkwitz LX521.

I bought a bunch of these from eBay, and use those to store jfets and low-noise bipolars, and sorted pairs/quads etc, with an ink-marker to write details.

^This. Really nice job. What are the speakers, Bjarne?

Woohoo! Just got tickets to see Ian McKellern playing King Lear in Chichester (UK) in October in the tiny 300-seat Minerva Theatre. Seen some landmark stuff in that little theatre. McKellern in 2011 took a break from filming The Hobbit in New Zealand to be in The Syndicate (a play about The Mob). Patrick Stewart playing Macbeth (went on to the West End, Broadway and then was made into a movie). Patrick Stewart in Bingo (a play about Shakespeare in his senile older years). That will actually be two Lears we have seen in a year. A couple of months ago we saw Glenda Jackson, aged 80, playing Lear in the West End, and it was absolutely awesome.

It is a really big thing, extreme ironing. Google it and look at the images. People try to do it in ever more beautifully crazy places.