Craig Sawyers

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday baker headphone man!

Alternatively, Sigourney Weaver in the UK comedy series Doc Martin. There are no aliens...

I think you could get away with that sort of shenanigans to automatically shoot an intruder in the 1880's. I was amused, though, to read in the link above that "The Brineys and Katko then joined together in a lawsuit against the neighbor..."

I thought the revolver/rodent trap was spoof - so I looked it up on the US patent office website. It isn't. It also says that it can be used to automatically shoot burglars. Revolver.pdf or any other things

OK - I sprung for a Chinese one from an eBay seller for sixty quid and free shipping. We'll see. It'll take a couple of weeks to get here. Chinese can often be quite good with what they say it is worth on the customs form, so it sneaks past customs.

The Entech meter has of course been improved upon by the Chinese https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07NY21XG2?pf_rd_r=1BCER1ZTYCX3V67DZW7G&pf_rd_p=e632fea2-678f-4848-9a97-bcecda59cb4e . There is an image of the circuit board; trivial it is not. At least the Chinese one shows a value in millivolts of noise, and does not have a random knob. So there is at least a pretense of it being an objective measurement rather than Entech's random number. Looking further it covers 10kHz to 10MHz, much wider than Entech's, and is multi-standard - so you can plug it into both 120V 60Hz and 240V 50Hz.

I'm a bit skeptical about the Entech meters, and what they are actually measuring. I have heard it said that they look in the band 300kHz to 700kHz, so the am medium wave radio band. Whether that is representative of problems in audio is debatable. After all audio gear cheerfully picks up 800+ MHz from mobile phones, Monster Cable had a variant of the Entech meter that they provided to their cable and conditioner outlets so that a sales person could demonstrate how good the product was. Same as Shunyata do now. I'm trying to buy one just out of curiousity. If I snag one for not much, I'll do some tests (oh and probably take the back off to find out what is in there...).

Well that is just weird. Almost as weird as the Portsmouth Sinfonia

Enough to make you feel horny

It is a very, very long time since I listened to King Crimson, although I did back in the early days (like In the Court of the Crimson King; pass the walking frame). Far too far back to remember who was in the band. I only twigged when I was looking up how old Toyah Wilcox was. I knew she must be getting on, and was gobsmacked how young looking and energetic she is at 62.

Double surprise - Robert Fripp, her husband playing the guitar, was one of the founders of King Crimson!

Blimey - you wouldn't think she was 62!

Great actor - RIP Ian Holm.

Apparently We'll meet Again was recorded with accompaniment from a Hammond Novachord, a 163 tube polyphonic synthesizer. Only manufactured from 1939 to 1942 (because the supply of tubes dried up as the War progressed) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novachord (A positively petite instrument as compared with the 210 ton, 67kW power consumption Telharmonium at the turn of the century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telharmonium )

Have a great day - happy birthday!

Even though she had got to 103, it was still sad that she had eventually gone. And indeed Grahame, a symbol of resilience and hope.

We saw Hugh Bonneville, post Downton, in a play in the Chichester Festival Theatre. In Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. He was excellent.

Nope https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

Astonishingly 43 years after they were launched, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still alive and broadcasting back to earth. NASA have progressively turned instruments off that are irrelevant at the enormous distance they are now is at - 17 light hours for 2 and 20 light hours for 1 - to conserve energy. It looks like the power sources (radioactive) will eventually peter out in the next year or two. They are based on early 1970's technology, to the extent that the data store is a tape recorder! Of course since the *nearest* star to us is 4.3 light years distant, the Voyagers would take 75,000 years to get there (even if they were headed in that direction).

Haven't come across these guys. Seems to come from India. Nothing the matter with that. After all they have particle accelerators and an active space programme. The thing that determines the quality of a stepped attenuator is the resistors. For surface mount they ought to be thin film, which are quite pricey - typically 25c each in 1000 off. There are 96 resistors in that attenuator, so $25 for the resistors in 1000 off quantity. Now they say they use thin film resistors and quote the resistor spec. But the price is ridiculously low. These guys are the place to go for switched attenuators https://khozmo.com/index.html . Note that they specifically use Vishay thin film resistors. This https://khozmo.com/ladder_khozmo_attenuator.html is the equivalent of the allo one and is $259 - so ten times the price. I'd say of allo - too good to be true.

Carl Sagan in 1994 after Voyager took a similar image from even further away: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." Looking at the numbers, Voyager at the time of the Pale Blue Dot image was 1.5 times the distance to Pluto away, 5.5 light hours distant, 4.5 time further way than Saturn.

Nice kit, good record.