Fubar

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.

There are degrees of radio nuttiness. I have two lifeboat radio transmitters, an Atlanta receiver by Marconi of the type I sat in front of on and off for 11 years and various other esoteric bits of radio kit but I'm not a ham. Propogation of radio was essential knowledge in order to clear radio traffic. After the end of the area radio scheme in the 60s it became necessary to try and contact the UK on HF with a transmitter that was 120 watts radiated at best. Bouncing off layers was either an art or pure luck.

Not much that late I'm afraid. Mostly hammered. The sale is on Friday 21st June at Spicers in Driffield (used to be Dee, Atkinson & Harrison) and live on The Saleroom - https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/spicers-auctioneers/catalogue-id-srde10108 Catalogue should be on there some time towards Friday next week. A mixed sale of collectors items and general household. Always ask for a condition report if interested in anything.

Blind leading the blind. I've learned to check both sides now. 🙄 I just got lumbered with the job. In which case there may be a few bargains available. 😎

Very timely, gents. Thanks. I've just finished cataloguing and valuing a lot of lots of coins for our local auction house and this made me check the Queen Anne farthing again. Turns out it's a counterfeit 1711 sixpence. Ooops! As mentioned by JLS there seems to have been a lot of continental hammered copper about in the late 17th. Nuremberg Jettons, Dutch Duits, etc.

I paid £149 for mine so, yes, a little over a hundred quid. 🙄

I replaced my old Lumix with a new Lumix DMC-FZ1000 but that's hardly a compact. After some research the middle of the road Canon SX620 HS seemed to be the best pocket camera around a hundred quid and has been good so far.

This tiny high carat gold coin has me stumped. I'm hoping someone has seen one before. It's 7.5mm in diameter, 0.96mm thick and weighs 0.37g. If it's just scrap gold the so be it but it looks hammered and quite old. The "O" could represent "5" in English and there are 12 pellets, possibly representing stars within the horns of the crescent on the other side. I'm not sure that is a date below the olive branch (?). I can find nothing remotely like it online. Please help before I drop it and it disappears forever. Apologies for the quality of the pictures. Had to take it with a microscope attachment on my mobile phone. Cheers Kris

Thanks Paddy One of the sites I missed.

Magic. Thanks Paddy. That was much quicker than I thought it would be. Cheers Kris

Thanks for that, Stu. Some similarities but I can't find a match. Just about all the Rajahs and states produced there own I suppose so it could be a lost cause. Kris

There's nothing as soothing and relaxing as an old clock ticking and whirring in the background.