Craig Sawyers

Happy birthday Todd - and thanks for such an awesome place!

I am a great fan of Wagner's music. We're lucky to be fairly near to https://lfo.org.uk/ so have seen a splendid complete Ring there, plus Tristan (last year) and Tannhauser (this year). Saw Die Meistersingers in Birmingham with Bryn Terfel too. Very much looking forward to when Longborough do Parsifal. Of course there is the dark, unpleasant side of Wagner. His politics, and views on Jews were not nice at all, which is why his music was passionately admired by Hitler. Wagner hated Brahms with a passion, and put it about that the sounds in his music were based on the sounds of dying cats he shot from his balcony with a bow and arrow. Which may or may not be apocryphal https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/apr/12/highereducation.arts

There are quite deliberate dissonances in Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium from the 16th century. And Mozart received a really heated letter from his father for using more adventurous anharmonious intervals in his music. So in a sense it has ever been thus, although clearly accelerating in the 20th century with not only Schoenberg but also Stravinsky, Messiaen, Cage and many others.

Oops! Belated best wishes!

Iranian German teenager, later found dead, apparently by his own hand. No known links to terrorism, acting alone the Germans say. RIP the victims of this latest madness.

That is absolutely true. RIP Gary Marshall.

British scone recipe http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/scones_1285 My grandma (1897 to 1986) used to make these without scales to weigh anything out. And used plain flour with cream of tartar and bicarbonate of soda to make it self raising. They are the best scones I have ever tasted.

It was a great, beautiful and good sounding product with two problems. First, the laser machined, triple silk screen printed, and highly innovative (and expensive!) perspex front panel was fixed to the metalwork with double sided tape, and there was no datums to assist, nor any jigs. So it was applied by eye, and needed to be in the correct place and square to better than half a millimeter. There was a massive wastage - until we got a jig designed and made. Second, I discovered that the Lynx designer (and company founder) was dyslexic, so on the (hand drawn) engineering plans instead, for example, of 124.5mm it was marked up at 125.4mm. So there were tantalizing minor fit problems all over the place. In fact, the first time they went bust in New Zealand was because the blind tapped holes in the heatsink for the power transistors were not deep enough for the screw length (so the screws bottomed, and the transistors were not in contact with the sink), so every last product blew up when it got used - I strongly suspect that was also a dyslexic issue - sort of "drill and tap 3.5mm depth" when it should have been 5.3mm. Like many audio products it died not because of lack of passion, hard work and innovation, it died because of minor and avoidable technical issues. And after being acquired by Wharfedale, it died as a result of the near death experience of Wharfedale in the early 90's consumer recession.

Back a decade or three I was CTO of Wharfedale, and we acquired a bust company called Lynx for a tiny sum of money. Run by two New Zealanders; they made a really sweet range of products based around an FET power amplifier. Sounded very nice indeed (even if it was a bitch to manufacture). This is an example http://www.canuckaudiomart.com/details/649106536-super_rare_lynx_nebula_mosfet_integrated_amplifier/images/694258/ . Anyhow, we were sat one day when a return came in - with a letter saying from a guy in Hong Kong saying it had burst into flames and demanding some outrageous compensation. We unpacked it, and sure enough it was a charred mess inside. Smelling strongly of petrol. We got the Chemistry lab at Leeds University to do some forensics and write an expert report. We sent that to the guy in HK - and that was the last we heard from him.

RIP the 84 dead in Nice France when a truck drove through the crowds celebrating Bastille day, watching a firework display at 11pm local time. Bastard drove for over a mile swerving to kill the maximum number of people. More than ten children among the dead. Eventually shot dead by police.

Bloody hell - that sounds dreadful Chris. Fingers crossed it heals OK; what did the doc say?

You have truly surpassed yourself with that last collection, Knucks. Truly superb!

It is mains harmonics. You must be in the UK because they are at intervals of 50Hz. Nothing to do with signal distortion.

3200 people in Hull. Hull - how on earth that number of people in *Hull* were persuaded to strip, then be spray painted shades of the sea from head to feet is a matter of astonishment. All shapes, sizes and ages. It was the news coverage, where this mass of people walked through the city centre. Absolutely no passers by took the blindest interest - almost "Well - this is Hull on a Saturday morning - what can you expect?" In this world of woe, this all leaves me refreshed and makes me smile.

That is really rough. That is no age at all, and in such tragic circumstances. So sorry for your and Matt's friend Jake, RIP.

Have a great day Mike!

CHM must be loving all of this. It'll be interesting how the three NPC old blokes sitcom with cars thrown in works out.

Have a truly great one Birgir!

Two people who broke the UK in one picture - the privileged Oxford University (so-called dining) Bullingdon Club, Criterion for entry: rich. Cameron and Boris Johnson in the shot. Fills me with the urge to defecate.

Meanwhile, a hero's welcome for Trump to Scotland

Have a great one! Happy birthday

No way am I going to trust my machines to this POS. W7pro64bit is just fine thank you. There are all sorts of horror stories about corrupted hard drives, unrecoverable situations and dead machines out there. To kill off W10's pop up insisting I upgrade (which was installed against consent almost as a virus) I used this https://www.grc.com/never10.htm Ha Ha - double post was a result of installing W7 updates at the same time!