Craig Sawyers

So the guy next door has been on a major project. The previous owner has put in wooden decking and a fish pond, which I thought looked kind of nice. Current guy didn't like it, so he hired a company of knuckle draggers to take that out and put "something" in instead. I need to take a photo of the edifice and post it. It is basically a built-in double barbecue. This is truly in the brutalist style - it is like an angular horseshoe that you can stand behind, but big enough that two or three can get behind there, and so seriously built could double as a nuclear shelter. One barbecue is I think gas powered (well, there was copper pipe going on at one point), and I think the other is charcoal. Where the decking was he has paved in off-white slabs, which are also on the top surface of the barbecue horseshoe. The outfit he got to do all this started in October, and have just finished. I swear you could build a whole house in that time. The problem is that this is in the UK - where it is cold and rainy more often than not. Last year we managed a total of three barbecues in our kettle because that was the only coincidence of (a) decent enough weather on the day (b) a weekend and (c) enough certainly of good weather to buy the meat. We planned to barbecue several more times, and ended up cooking inside on the hob. So I have absolutely no idea why the guy has spent so much money on something that will hardly ever be used. I look forward to seeing it used in anger, but I'm not holding my breath.

RIP the victims of the car atrocity in London on 22nd. The entirely home grown British citizen from Kent, married with three children, who after a host of aliases and violent past converted to Islam, hired a car and drove along the pavement at pedestrians on Westminster Bridge towards the Houses of Parliament. Got out and knifed a policeman to death before being shot dead. Total elapsed time, 80 seconds. Two dead at scene (including an American tourist), plus the policeman and the madman. One has died since, and many with life changing injuries. 29 casualties in total. Looks like he was acting alone, although of course ISIS has claimed he was one of their "soldiers". But that is precisely what they would say. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/24/london-attack-eight-suspected-associates-westminster-terrorist/

This guy writes synth music that draws images on an old storage monitor (Tektronix FWIW), This starts simple and get more amazing as it goes on.

Reminds me of the horseradish root I dug up last year. It looked so much like a madrake I almost heard it scream as I pulled it out of the earth.

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.