Fubar

Looks like my problem don't amount to a hill of beans compared to yours but it really isn't a problem. I keep telling myself that. Somewhere I think I've got a copy of Bert Weedon's teach yourself guitar book. I got rid of most of my computer kit to the local computer museum a year or so back to make room for more "stuff". I wouldn't mind but kids don't really ever completely move out so their "stuff" is still taking up valuable space I could use.

My wife calls me a "collectomaniac" so I have a collection of coins mostly acquired by accident, a collection of bits of crashed aircraft, a collection of books mostly left over from book dealing, a large collection of photographs of ships, a collection of 78rpm shellac occupying about a metre of shelf space and a collection of vinyl that's mostly purchased when it first came out occupying slightly less shelf space. That's just scratching the surface. 🙄 And most of it not worth storage space. Luckily I have now finally retired after being "let go" from my part time auction house involvement. By "luckily" I mean I will no longer be tempted by stuff that nobody else wants. I don't think there's anything in my vinyl collection that stands out. Normally just stuff that I enjoy or holds memories such as The Shadows, Gordon Lightfoot, Chicago Transit Authority double albums and Bert Weedon. 😮 Normally played on either a Technics SL-J110R with a stack of same make or a Kenwood stack, unless I've already transferred them to digital. Oh! plus a reel to reel tape deck and a collection of tapes mostly recorded when I was at sea. Sad or what!

That is sad. 😥 So far I've counted about 16 species of bird visiting or living here and with no mechanical background noise during this period it seems they've all found voice at the same time. At the end of the day this is what gardens are really for.

As long as you don't let them flower in the first year apparently. Ours are now getting long in the tooth so we don't get too many decent ones any more. This one shows promise and I have 18 new ones in the greenhouse almost ready for planting out.

We have a family of these nesting this year and he's been so efficient that he has had to start searching the undergrowth for more snails.

Mobile phone cameras are very good for instant results and that's what I liken them to. The old Kodak Instamatic cameras. There's too much electronic processing going on for really sharp photography. I have a Samsung and it has all sorts of ways of taking a snapshot at 20MP but once you put it into a photo processing program it doesn't look quite right. Because of their construction there's only programming to change depth of field and all the other things you normally fiddle with. All very clever and sufficient for everyday use. Some mobile phone cameras are also a lot better than others. I suppose it comes down to personal choice and what you normally use a camera for.

That was taken with my Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 bridge camera (20MP) in aperture priority mode and max zoom (400mm equivalent). Also in burst mode. I gave up on multi lens SLRs when film died but I've recently acquired a Canon EOS 700D DSLR with an 18 to 200mm lens that seems to function well. I must save up for some more lenses but find that the Panasonic is a lot more convenient. Lugging around bags full of lenses still doesn't really appeal. I've been into photography since school days but only recently joined the local photographic society to see if I could learn anything new. As far as composition goes there are a lot of intriguing ideas about and at least I'm not now relying on the camera doing all the work in auto so joining has helped a bit. I had thought of digging out one of these museum pieces cluttering up the garage. 😕

Luckily the local wildlife will come to my jungle. Being in total lockdown because of vulnerable family and being a member of the photo club means I have limited access to wildlife to photograph. Some will sit still while trying to distract the cat from the nest. Unfortunately this means I took over 200 pictures this morning.

Totally interchangeable. Radio is the modern equivalent of wireless which I reckon is anything with valves or at least older than me. At sea I was the wireless operator, or the radio officer, or sparks, depending on who was addressing you. The latter because of early spark transmitters. My favourite book on the subject is called "WIreless at Sea". 😉

The first time I ever heard Pink Floyd was while watching the movie "Crystal Voyager" at the cinema. The track was "Echoes" and it was played as the background to a dude surfing a tube. That was 1973 and I've been hooked ever since. Around that time we also had a thing going with making displays like the pulse section at the begining. A local TV shop was doing part exchanges on old TVs and we scrounged a bunch from his scrap pile. Disconnect the scan coils and apply a stereo channel to each coil and watch the pretty Lissajou's figures. Stuff like PInk Floyd's with a lot of single note pulses was ideal especially if the stereo was well seperated. Disco lights had nothing to compare. While I was at school in the early 60s Practical Wireless or Practical Electronics had a circuit for something called a "Spectrophon" that converted sound to light using OC25 transistors as amplifiers. Usually audio split into three channels but that was adaptable. At the time the MOT test came in so with a bit of adaptation you could power those big Marechal headlights from scrapped cars in the local scrapyard. Now you get the same sort of thing on a chip. 🙄

Another Shoe cartoon by Jeff Macnelly from the 80s. This one is probably my favourite.

Another one from the Shoe series.

Being an ex-computer engineer I always found these Shoe cartoons amusing. So I saved a few over the years.

Dampier seems tro be the favoured landing place for these things. I have a friend who has ships regularly in this area and he gets updates when one is in port or at anchor. The map was from yesterday and shows expected position today (8th) For some reason it insists on putting up two copies of the map. Apologies. 😣

From memory (radio college was 50 odd years ago) ground wave propagation is limited and most HF long distance communication relies on sky wave (radio waves travel along the surface and off into the sky). As the earth cools at sunset the boundary layers move and it's possible to "bounce" the sky wave off the layers in ever increasing distances of bounce. HF works well with this phenomenon because of wavelength and density of layers. MF has not enough power to bounce more than a couple of times but in sunspot activity this can change. The same goes for VHF which normally passes straight through the layers with no bounce. It's an age related thing that these facts, possibly well garbled, pop in consciousness every so often.