Craig Sawyers

Happy birthday!

You might end up with a soft start into the first C to protect the rectifier - and clearly the capacitor too!. Sort of timed relay shorting a resistor between rectifier and first C once the rectifier is nice and warm and the capacitor is charged via the limiting R. Or a MOSFET or similar device instead of a relay. What transformer is needed depends on the resistance of the inductor, the ripple on the first C (~3V p-p), and other resistive losses in the rectifier and winding resistances of the transformer itself. You could lose ~40V all told.

Are you talking about an LC filter following a tube rectifier, Kevin?

Well candidly, fuck me. I've just dipped into this thread, and I feel the need to barf. I have never seen such a construction nightmare. Handmade dremel boards FFS. Ugh. And that was not the worst by a long chalk. When I started building amps aged 15-16 I was doing far, far better job than that nightmare. Although an early one is festering in the attic for decades I'll wager it would still power up fine. Bit of a labor of love Kevin to rebuild the horror show.

That must have been a toasty ride!

Heartfelt condolences.

Commissioning a new PC, DELL Optiplex 7090. My son Rob came down and helped out, putting an addition 1G SSD in there, moving bookmarks across, and putting one of the spinning rust drives out the other PC in there will all the legacy files. It is physically tiny, in spite of the fact that it has an i7 processor. It even turns out it has a backup battery in the power supply. Anyway, it goes FAST! I've gone for LibreOffice to keep as far away from the Gates evil empire as possible, and eM Client email software.

Anybody notice the Latin name for the fish? Microbrachius dicki .

Have a totally spiffing tall day, old bean.

In her day she was an incredible ratter. We had a rats nest under the shed. They set up home because our neighbour had an aviary, and the rats were after the roosting birds. I bought a rat trap - a huge back breaking sort. Baited it with chocolate and waited. Next morning, trap tripped, chocolate gone, no rat. I eventually bent the mechanism to operate on a hair trigger, if you sneezed it would trip. Next morning bait gone, trap tripped, no rat. Those buggers are clever - they must have used a stick to trip the trap. I had no idea that rats were tool users. The guy next door tried a humane trap; all he caught was a hedgehog. Then Cleo got on the case. Worked her way through the lot of them. Of course they fight back, so she'd come in really proud with tail high looking a bit battered, and outside a half eaten rat. She got all five of them. She was a quite small cat, but a scourge of rats! And voles, and mice, and birds etc etc. Many brought back alive as a trophy to try to teach the higher primate chimp owner how to kill a small animal.

Ah - gotcha. Sorry I knee jerked - I'm just kind of raw at the moment. Can't sleep tonight very well - it is 2am in the UK

Sorry - why was that a funny post, TMoney? I can assure it it was not fucking funny having a cat I've know since she was 1 year old euthanized. Not even remotely a ha ha moment.

We had to say goodbye to our old girl - 18 1/2. Until yesterday she was great, eating like a horse. And two days ago I took her to have her nails clipped. But in the last day she went downhill real quick. In the end she could hardly stand, and had even lost the will to get out of the litter tray. At the vets there was no option, and we had to make that difficult kind choice. Carole came along for moral support, because we reckoned that the end was not far off in any case. We're having her cremated, and we'll bury the ashes in the garden RIP Cleo, you were a splendid cat.

My accent has got a lot softer after several decades away from the North East. Geordie actually has a lot of words and phrases from the dark ages invaders from Denmark, Sweden and Norway (5% of my DNA is Norwegian). I'm gannin hyem for going home is exactly the same phonetically in Danish, as is bairn for child. Fell for hill or mountain is from the Norwegian fjell, and a splinter of wood in your finger in Geordie is a spelk, from Swedish spel to chop wood. It even lives on in science as the word spallation, in which a proton beam is smashed into a tunsten target to produce a neutron beam - the proton chops the neutron out.

Happy birthday!

Newcastle - that is where I'm from. How did you get on with understanding the Geordie dialect?

Ah - the Lake District. Perfect and Idyllic area. I've been up about 80 of the fells there (there are over 200 of them all told), and pre-covid we'd holiday there twice a year, and hire a cottage as a walking base. It is about 5-6 hours drive from where we are. If you plan to do some walking there, be careful. I'm a trained walk leader, and even I can get caught out!

While we're on the subject of chocolate, that is a native word in the Mexican Indian native language of Nahuatl. As is avocado and tomato. 🍅

Forgot to say - keep the chocolate McVities in the fridge. Double delicious.

I can mainline a whole packet of those bad boys.

Digestive biscuit And then you can get ones coated in chocolate. Yum yum.

That was the European Union, not just the UK. Which makes most of the measures no less daft. It is a lot of years back they were a whole lot dafter. They tried to standardize the loaf. And in the UK we have a biscuit called the Digestive. It is a particular biscuit that is dunked in a cup of tea. The EU tried to change the name, because in their view the name Digestive implied it was auto-digesting. They succeeded in neither of these idiocies.

Well, I passed the aneurysm screening. It is just a one-off; allegedly if you don't have one at 65 the chances are slim that it will be a problem later. My grandmother died from one - but she was nearly 90. Way back in 1986. The other thing I've been getting hot under the collar about is the UK ban on halogen lamps. Our entire house is now LED, other than in my workshop where all four lamps I installed are halogen. Now only one has failed so far. But halogens are ~UKP1 and the LED version is UKP5. So I've just stocked up with halogens before they become illegal. The thing that riles me though is the UK government is selling this on the green agenda, saying it will save 1.26 million tons of greenhouse gases. Per capita that is 0.018 tons of CO2 per person per year. Put that against the 6.8 tons per capita in the UK, and the halogen ban will reduce our carbon footprint by a mere 0.26%. But it misses the point that halogen lamps are a mature technology, and can be made for very low cost. LED lamps need a semiconductor fab to make the LEDs, and use noxious gases like arsine and phosphine, and are inherently higher cost.