lb1lf

There's one (related) difference - an LP can hold approx. 45 minutes of music, a CD can hold 80-ish (The original spec called for 74, but I think the most I've seen on a single disc is 82-ish minutes).

Unless an artist is very disciplined, that means what would be a decent album at 40 minutes worth of music in LP days would be half an album today.

Again, this is a shortcoming in people, not in the medium itself - after all, a stellar 40-minute album can be released on CD, too.

I have heard expressed many times, though, the expectation that a CD should be 'full' in order to be a proper product - or, for that matter, the artist can be less severe in the cutting room, seeing as 'Oh, we've got room for that one, too ...'

I'd much rather have a condensed album which is mostly great than the same songs mixed with as many tunes which ought have been left in the archives pending a 'Collector's edition', 'Complete outtakes' or similar.

Then again (again!), at least a CD lets you skip the filler and listen only to the good stuff - at the risk of losing some of the recording artist's vision. Which, again, is a matter of (lacking) self-discipline. The LP raises the bar for skipping songs, hence forcing us weak souls (I count myself among them!) to listen to the full work, as the artist intended.

Or, at least as the artist intended before 'new release' meant uploading a new song to streaming services, making the album - as a somewhat cohesive collection of songs - a niche product.

Apropos nothing, the latest album I bought is a CD which arrived in the mail today, and it clocks in at 55 minutes and 20 seconds. Picked up a handful of LPs last week, though.

Just so.

The advantages of vinyl are basically making up for lack of self-discipline in humans. (I much prefer vinyl for that precise reason!)

a) Since putting it on becomes more of a ritual - handling the album carefully, brushing off lint, placing the needle &c - I find I make more of an effort to actually _listen_ to the music I put on. I could listen as intently to Spotify or Tidal, too - but, alas, I most often don't.

b) Seeing as you'll get some 20-odd minutes of music before having to make another choice - be it playing the other side or another album entirely - it enforces having to decide on what you'd like to listen to, rather than just letting your streaming service of choice play things it thinks you may like. (That being said, streaming services are a great way to explore new music!)

c) Given the economics of streaming, buying physical media helps both the record stores - a good one is like an excellent library, in which the librarians give you all sorts of curated recommendations for things you may like, in addition to being great social meeting places with like-minded folk - and performing artists alive; I've no idea how many hours I would have to listen to an artist on Spotify before the payout is equal to their takeout from a single vinyl sale...

d) Besides, it is cosy.

That being said, you could easily DSP CDs or streaming to sound like vinyl if that's your idea of fun - just about any playback format is superior sonically to vinyl. However, to many, it is the whole ritual of putting on a record which basically makes it worth the sonic tradeoffs... (Call me a luddite if you like!)

I had a stroke of luck this week - I am due a new laptop at work, and ordered a new ThinkPad T14, as they have served me well in the past.

Then IT calls back and says that I shouldn't configure one directly at Lenovo's website, as we are to buy them from a retailer instead.

OK, can do - but they only stock a few models, and the one with the CPU and disk I had configured with Lenovo was only available with 64GB RAM at the retailer. What to do?

'Ouch, that's gonna make accounting hurt. We'll order it for you right away.'

Anyone who would happen to come across it is likely to be suspicious of its origin and purpose, though.

I happen to drop equipment into the sea for a living on occasion, and we always paint it in garish yellow for visibility and label it clearly with contact info to allay suspicions. Typically "Scientific instrument - flux capacitor, Acme Co. - www.bar.org // foo@bar.org // 555-2368"

Also, we notify the coastal administration and the mapping agency so that an EfS (NOTMAR; Notices for Mariners) may be issued if they deem it necessary.

A cynical colleague suggested we had better label them 'Highly radioactive' to keep fishermen from picking them up and taking them apart out of curiosity...

LB1LF here - much to my dismay, I currently have no antennas at home, but I take part in the IARU Region 1 Field Day every year - some friends and I, alumni from the Norwegian University of Technology and Science in Trondheim, Norway created a ham radio club - LA1AFP - for the express purpose of having an excuse to meet up annually and have a good time.

I have mostly worked HF phone, but in latter years I've (finally!) become reasonably proficient in CW, too.

I enjoy the technical aspects of the hobby, being a radio frequency engineer - but also enjoy chatting to others, particularly to improve my language skills - Portuguese and Brazilian hams are an absolute delight and quite patient as I try to make myself understood in Portuguese!

Oh, and chasing the occasional award - but I am not very good at sending in the paperwork, so I guess I had better do that soon and get some paperwork for my shack. I have a particular soft spot for the RSGB IOTA program, as I live on one - EU-079 - myself.

I hope to be QRV from home again before long, though - I live on a farm, have lots of room, and I have a small mast and an almost finished wire beam in the barn, so with any luck I'll be able to put it all together and have a working station again sometime this spring!

Around where I live, we have electric car ferries.

To avoid having to upgrade the grid massively, we use large battery banks shoreside which are being charged at a sustainable (to the grid) rate, then the ferry charges rapidly by depleting the battery bank, leaving the grid alone.

Works a charm.

This ship will be my home for the next month - my employer has delivered the system used for launch and recovery of the ROV submersible which will be used for monitoring the drilling progress.

Just like being at war - long periods of absolutely nothing happening (enabling me to finally dig into the work backlog from the office!) interrupted by frantic moments when everything seemingly happens at once!

Perhaps it is just a Special Military Operation?

Happy new year indeed!

Still some five hours to go here in Norway, but it has been dark outside for a few hours already.

Dinner is just about ready, friends pouring in the doors as we speak and as for fireworks, seeing as we live quite rurally, a couple of kilos of dynamite is at the ready.

Professionally, 2025 has been kind to me. Got to visit Japan and Libya for the first time and am going back to Japan next week for a scientific cruise down to the Mariana trench or thereabouts; when back, I will start working on the next generation control system for our products, having spent the past few months trying to learn enough about control system architecture to hopefully avoid the most obvious pitfalls.

Oh, and I have learned from painful experience a few of the things NOT to do evaluating the current design...

The (immediate) area has been farmed for hundreds of years, so I would guess most old burial mounds etc has been recycled centuries ago. The houses there now are mostly built in the seventies, at which point (luckily!) the local council would NOT let you build upon any ancient structures.

Where I live now - same island, but farther from the natural port and, hence, less attractive land in the old days - we still have a few which noone bothered to remove (to till the land underneath or to use the stones for building walls or foundations).

My kids used to love going playing around those mounds, made for excellent inspiration for pretending games, that!

I prefer to think of it as 'battle tested'.

It is until you try to build something!

(Nothing quite like watching an archeologist go 'Oooh, that's interesting!' during a dig to establish whether you can go ahead building on your chosen spot...)

Oh, he works for the county, but happened to live just up the hill from us.

There's so much old stuff around here that he is basically being called out to perform an assessment every time anyone wishes to build anything.

Where we live now, for instance, there are a handful of burial mounds from God knows when (all plundered long ago), lots of old charcoal pits, a couple of late stone age fish traps in the lake in a corner of our farm.

To exaggerate just a little - where we could build our home was basically dictated by where we could find a spot noone had claimed thousands of years ago...

These are all over the place in Norway (as are they everywhere else, presumably!)

When we moved to the island we currently live on, our address was in a road called 'Solsteinen' (The Sun Stone), but I didn't think anything of it until I realized that the roughly hewn stone serving as the property limit marker was juuu-uuust touched by the sun on Winter Solstice. Aha.

A quick call to the local archaeologist confirmed my suspicion - 'Oh, so you're the new resident there, I'd planned on being in touch - that stone monument has been there for more than 2000 years, is A-listed and please, whatever you do, don't do anything with it. Seriously.'

January 2009.

I'd been (reluctantly) going to Mozambique for a service job on a vessel, reluctantly as my grandmother was rather worse for wear and I feared she was nearing the end. She urged me to go, though, and to tell her all about it when I got back.

She died while I was in Maputo harbour, waiting for the vessel to dock so I could get to the airport and back home.

Can't remember much of the flight from Maputo to Jo'burg, but from South Africa to Frankfurt was terrific, considering the circumstances.

A stewardess quietly pulls me aside as I am about to board the flight to Europe and asks me something like 'Gee, you look terrible, what happened?'

I just shrug and tell her my grandmother died a few hours ago, we were really close, and I felt terrible for not being with her &c.

Next thing I know, she's hugged me for a long time - to the annoyance of people queuing behind me - before dumping me in a vacant seat in business, tells me she'll be back the moment we're airborne.

Sits down in the adjacent seat, starts asking me about good memories about my grandmother, talks to me throughout more or less the entire flight, ensuring me that her job is to make me as comfortable as she can given the circumstances.

Once we landed in Frankfurt, she asked if I was OK going on alone - she'd be happy to accompany me all the way back home if I needed her, Lufthansa would make that work, no worries.

We still exchange Christmas letters every year; I mailed this year's on Friday.

Do keep in mind 96 dB is only the theoretical dynamic range of the CD medium, 99% of recordings utilize way less. (Besides, you'd be in pain if you cranked up the volume until you had 96dB of range above your hearing threshold, anyway)

CDs also eliminate wow & flutter (which ought to be pretty much inaudible on a decent deck, probably less so on an el cheapo grande walkman), which probably does more for (experienced) audio quality than high dynamic range.

Oh, and better high frequency response, for the young ones. :D

That depends on what the source of your heating is.

Say, in Norway we largely use (hydro-) electric power for heating, anyway.

So, the 2% efficient (for lighting) incandescent bulb doubles as a 98% efficient space heater, utilizing the 2% loss to light said space. 100% efficient!

A blockade need not be enforced in situ.

Say, with satellite coverage to find out where any blockade runners are and a lot of cruise missiles you could enforce a blockade from a thousand miles away.

That is a fair point, but do keep in mind that the lower in the stack you come, the more options for sourcing you (generally) have.

Say, those fancy chips going into the ship's targeting radar may all be designed in a country or two, fabbed in Taiwan using Dutch equipment, whereas the steel you construct the hull with can come from anywhere - at my employer we mostly bought steel from Eastern Ukraine until a couple of years ago; after a brief hiccup we now get it from Turkey and Brazil, mostly - but China, South Korea, Germany or India, for instance, can supply it, too.

If this kind of thing interests you, you could do a lot worse than picking up Edwin Black's 'IBM and the Holocaust'.

Turns out IBM had a rather... Uh, pragmatic attitude towards the uses the nazi regime found for IBM equipment.

At least the commercial ones I've been using on and off do not have a drying cycle at the end of the program; they just steam the heck out of whatever is inside, then once the cycle is through, you are expected to remove the tray with whatever you were washing and let it air dry on the bench.

This in contrast to the consumer unit at home which heats the interior of the dishwasher for 45 minutes or so after it has done its washing cycle to dry things while still inside the dishwasher.

After the small-ish company I worked for was bought by $ENGINEERING_MEGACORP, an integration program was promptly launched, during which numerous committees were formed to evaluate all business processes and take the best parts of both companies' DNA.

After thorough evaluation, it so happened that the existing practices of the megacorp was adopted without any modifications.

The next day, the office shredder had been labelled 'Suggestion box'.

Poor sods from head office tried to remove the sign, only to find some miscreant had mixed glass dust in the glue used to affix the nicely engraved sign onto the shredder, making removing it kind of difficult. End result being we got a new shredder.

The spare sign which was engraved just in case now adorns the outhouse at my cottage in the woods.

This is one of the most absurd facts there is.

Back in the eighties when CDs were introduced, they were NOK 165 a piece for a new release.

Last time I dropped by my friendly neighbourhood dealer (of music, that is), the CD rack said CDs were NOK 189.

165 1985-kroner equals nigh on 500 2025-kroner.

Incidentally, an LP back then was NOK 89, equivalent to NOK 270 today - whereas an LP today would set me back approx. NOK 399.

Good thing my employer pays me significantly better than my parents did in the eighties. I can still sustain my music habit.

The nominations for this year's prize closed January 31st; anyone doing anything worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize after that date may be considered for next year.

I do not know if this was the rationale, but presumably the powers that be could not see any upside to civilians possessing such equipment - after all, it could be used for purposes like calling the bluff on the official narrative

('During the recent fire at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, only trace amounts of radioactivity has been detected outside the immediate vicinity...')

or espionage ('Hmmm... I wonder why many of the freight cars coming down the track from the alleged paint factory in East Podunkskij are 100x more radioactive than those from other areas?')

We are, after all, talking about a system which restricted access to photocopiers.

Anecdotally, I came across a large (for a single user) quantity of diesel 9 years ago. (Nothing exotic - a company went titsup and I was the only one both bidding for and capable of removing the diesel from their premises within an acceptable time frame; I got approx 80% off the pump price at the time.)

I still run my tractor and Land Cruiser off the stuff; the tractor had an outing today. Granted, neither of those engines are very particular about the fuel they are given, but still...

(Water drained off every few months, also a biocide is added to keep the diesel gunk at bay.)

Oh, I am saddened to hear of Peterson's passing.

Way back when, I bought a couple of his books, probably on the recommendation of someone or other in an online photography forum - 'Understanding Exposure' and 'Learning to see creatively'. The latter in particular was wonderful for someone who had the technical aspects of photography more or less sorted, but was - ahem - deficient in the artistic department.

Anyway, I felt his style was incredible - down-to-earth, but not afraid to go into a bit of background if needed - so I sent off a brief letter of thanks through his publisher.

Lo and behold, got a very nice letter back, thanking my for the kind words and encouraging me (I had mentioned that I shot both film and digital, seeing as at the time, a wonderful film camera like the F5 could be had for a fraction of what even an entry-level APS-C DSLR cost) to experiment A LOT using the DSLR, as the instant feedback provided would help my analog hit rate progress leaps and bounds.

I was already thinking a bit along those lines, but became a lot more conscious about trying to improve my skills using the DSLR upon his encouragement - and my photos improved a lot over the following years as a result.

Thanks, Bryan.

De Atramentis, too, has a range of permanent inks which are quite fast-drying, too.

Happy customer for years.

Back in the day when the Internet was still full of whimsy, the computer club at my alma mater had acquired nuts.edu.

I still have a T-shirt somewhere proudly sporting the domain name under the NTNU (Norwegian abbreviation for Norwegian University of Tecnology and Science) logo, slightly modified - the real logo is a circle bounded by a rounded square; the T-shirt has a hazelnut standing in for the circle.

Tom Lehrer has been my go-to source of acerbic wit and brilliant satire since I first encountered him when attending the Norwegian University of Tecnology and Science; a group I joined there held Lehrer in high esteem and I, too, was blown away by how timeless a lot of his songs were; a lot of satire ages very quickly, but chances are my unborn grandchildren will laugh hysterically to 'Who's Next?' or 'Wernher von Braun' after doing the mid-21st century equivalent of googling to find out who WvB was, of course.

Godspeed, Tom. This has been a rough week - three of the heroes of my formative years have checked out of existence - Lehrer, Ozzy and author Ingvar Ambjørnsen. Sigh. Who's next?