Craig Sawyers

Just done a tour of the music radio channels, particularly the classical ones - Radio 3 and ClassicFM - and they are all playing somber music.

(I hate this autoappend thingy. Can we not have it manually selectable?) Nick Mason and the Queen tinkering with his Ferrari 250GTO

The saturation coverage continues. Radio, all TV channels. Some are shut down and simply say "see coverage on BBC. BBC1 and 2 are showing exactly the same broadcasts. But bizarrely all sports fixtures have been cancelled (including football and athletics), live music has been cancelled including the Last Night of the Proms. There has been a wholesale cancelling of scheduled TV programs. There is no escape. The media are focusing on anyone weeping. The question is why on both counts. We've kind of lost the plot. It can not have come as anything of a surprise that a 96 year old lady has died. It was different when Princess Di was killed in a car crash - that was a surprise and shocking, and the media were completely unprepared. But it has been on the cards for a decade that the Queen was on borrowed time, so all the documentary material was ready to just roll out. Wall to wall at the click of a button. That might seem churlish. But you have to be here to witness the media madness and the public going OTT

One of the more revolutionary things she pioneered was the ability (pay) to tour the palaces. Buckinham, Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral. She introduced that when there was a catastrophic fire at Windsor Castle, which cost £36.5 million to restore in the early 90's. She funded that by charging entry fees for public tours of the four great palaces. There was no government (or therefore British public) funding, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Windsor_Castle_fire Although charged entry was only supposed to last for five years, it has been continued for 30 years.

Yes indeed. She spent her life devoted to duty. I'm now 66, and QEII was Queen for 5 years before I was born. That is a staggering statistic. The Monarch who was the longest lasting in British history (nearly 71 years). 7 years longer than the next longest, which was her grandmother Victoria. Now I was never an avid royalist, but even I am somewhat humbled by two days ago she took Boris Johnson's resignation and Liz Truss's taking over in person. I must admit that she did not look well. Of course every major channel on UK TC is now saturation coverage. Because she was 96, there was a whole lot of prepared material that is just being regurgitated. Every inch of her life from childhood onwards. It'll take a week or a fortnight for all this to die down and life to return to the drab nonsense we are all suffering under. We were lucky to go to a Buckingham Palace garden party before Diana met her fate. So we ended up a very few feet from the whole lot of them. We had another invitation that was buggered by Covid and alas might now no longer happen.

But how many furlongs, chains and links is the length of the decks? Like many things, this weird and should-be-obsolete units live on. Horse races and training gallops are measured in furlongs (220 yards), and the length between creases in cricket is a chain (22 yards). And a furlong times a chain is an acre - which was the area a ploughman with a horse or ox-drawn plough, could plough in a day. And if you catch a train to London, the distance countdown to the platform is shown on discs by the side of the tracks, in miles and chains (80 chains to a mile). Here's another one. The difference in UK and US shoe sizes is 1/3 inch. This unit is known as the Barleycorn (the length of a grain of barley) and dates back to Saxon times, although it was standardized as 1/108 of a yard in around 1300. And why do we in Blighty buy petrol (gasoline) in liters, but measure our fuel consumption in miles per (UK) gallon? And why are British road signs in miles and not km? And why is beer served in pints, but every other booze measure is in liters or fractions thereof?

Some months ago, we visited the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth. https://maryrose.org/panorama , and this thing was parked up at the quayside a few hundred meters away. I remember saying to Mrs S "Wow - that is really impressive. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of the fucker" Little would we know that it would all be a bit of a British disaster.

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Unfortunately it is too true. In particular from 1st October gas and electricity prices are rising by 80%. After they went up by 60% in April. And forecast for a further 80% in January. And god help us what happens in April. First rate video. Dunno who she is, but it calls the shots for sure.

The unregulated power supply on the original T2 is its real Achille's heel. Other than thermal management that is. One thing to watch with T2 transformers is that the heater windings to the pentodes float at 500V. So there needs to be adequate insulation barriers inside the heater transformer to cope with that, and adequate insulation in the umbilicals. With mine I ran the floating heater wires inside the umbilicals inside a glass fiber sheath.

It helps using it in one of these No slop at all.

I have to check, but I think mine is 12". Yup. Freud 12", 36 tooth with negative hook, so at least it has no tendency to climb out of the cut. This is the beast https://www.freudtools.com/products/SD512 .

Now you have to do what the Bullingdon Club do. This is a male-only "dining club" at Oxford University attended among other leading conservative politicians and Prime Ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson. There are various initiation ceremonies of varying levels of distaste, including burning a £50 note (not alas as paltry as a fiver) in front of a homeless person on the street. Here's the infamous photo and what they are doing now. https://www.itv.com/news/2019-07-18/boris-and-the-bullingdon-club-where-are-they-now

I've got one of those, shipped from the US by a friend. It was the only dado set that would fit my Wadkin radial arm saw. It is a frightening thing to use!

There is good news from his website - he reckons to be back up and running later this year. He is in his mid 70s by the way. Clearly can't keep a good man down!

One of the places I used to buy timber, run by a really nice guy, has burned to the ground. Apart from the workshop, which contained industrial grade Felder machines https://www.felder-group.com/en-gb/products/planer-thicknessers-planers-thicknessers-c1948 , his fine timber store went too; he used to supply musical instrument makers. The extract system burst into flames while he was working in there. He beat a hasty retreat and watched as it burnt to the ground. You can just about make out the carcase of the Felders and radial arm saw. Fortunately he was insured, and Just Giving raised £14k. https://mactimbers.com/

There are some folks that you know would devour time (AKA a Chronophage) if you met them at a party. "This is really interesting - my 7th bandsaw was..."

That is a good solution! But put an interlock on the door anyway. Costs nothing, and is a belt and braces precaution. My experience is with pulsed IR lasers, which of course you cannot see. Had to be careful to keep fingernails out of the beam, because that particular laser would blow a fingernail off. Frequency doubled into the green it used to attract flies and wasps, which would explode spectacularly. An interesting calculation was that a single pulse from that laser, if divided up evenly and without losses, was enough to cause eye damage to the population of London. It ran at 30 pulses per second.

Anyone using laser engraving with a 20W laser needs to be exceptionally careful. That is 2000 times eye safe, and is a Class IV laser https://www.lasersafetyfacts.com/laserclasses.html . The raw beam will drill a hole in your retina, causing explosive boiling of whatever humor is next to the retina. Assuming that you aren't going to get the raw beam in your eye, scattered light from the focus is also far above eye safe. So - you absolutely need to wear safety goggles. Not Amazon hokey ones - but serious ones from say Thorlabs https://www.thorlabs.com/ , and expect to pay $200. Then interlock the door to prevent anyone in your household inadvertently walking in and getting eye damage. I spent many years working with lasers in this class, and wearing googles was mandatory as was interlocked doors. During laser safety training (also mandatory) an ex-Nam veteran said that nothing in active service remotely compared with the horror of looking at the world through his blood-filled eyeball. Nuff said.

PIP Billy Woodman, founder of ATC loudspeakers. One of the audio greats. Too early at 76 after long ill health. https://atc.audio/

He got his just deserts. She cut him out of her will. https://radaronline.com/p/nichelle-nichols-star-trek-startrek-last-will-testament-exclusive/

RIP Isabella - what a nice doggy. She had a great life from the pics. But it sure is tough to say goodbye to an animal companion. The difficult kind thing to do. And RIP Nichelle Nichols. Alas boldly gone.

Have a great one, Todd!