Random thoughts on life, the universe, and everything.
In my last blog post I mentioned that my new Marantz hi-fi s tone controls only affect its speaker outputs, so I hadn t tried them. This week I ve connected my speakers directly to the Marantz amplifier and retired my old power amps and bass equalisation circuit. The Marantz manual is very unspecific about what its tone ... Read more
I had been contemplating replacing my ageing Hi-Fi for a few years. I wanted a DAB tuner and I fancied the convenience of a remote control. My old system was a NAD FM/AM tuner and pre-amp, an Acoustic Research AR77-XB turntable (with an SME Series IIIs pickup arm), a Cambridge Audio CD player (inherited from ... Read more
Back in June 2021 I made a small garden pond out of an old kitchen sink. After taking this photograph I planted pendulous sedge (Carex pendula), blue flag iris (Iris versicolour), and rough horsetail (Equisetum hyemale). Within a year the pond was attracting wildlife such as hover flies and this lovely damselfly. I was particularly ... Read more
In April 2020 I bought my first model train set a Kato N gauge Rhätische Bahn (RhB) loco, carriages, and track. This came with normal Rapido couplings fitted and a set of close couplers that look a bit more like the central buffer on the real thing. The close couplers minimise the distance between ... Read more
I was struck by this observation I read recently on a model train forum: You get what you pay for. If a piece of software is worth nothing to the person who wrote it, what does that say about it? I can only assume the author has little experience of using or writing open source ... Read more
A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post pondering why I have a web site. At that time I had a blog on Google s Blogger.com platform and a hand-crafted web site hosted elsewhere. My hosting company had recently increased its prices a lot, which prompted me to ask why I have a web ... Read more
Five years ago I wrote about my first attempt to make Hungarian sour cherry soup. My recipe has evolved a little since then, so I thought it might be useful to record the current version. Serves 2.
You might already know that I have my own web site http://www.jim-easterbrookme.uk/. It s a modest affair and I don t update it very often the last change to the main page was in November 2015. Recently my web hosting provider withdrew the lite package I was using and migrated me to another package, at more ... Read more
A few months ago I converted my N gauge train set to DCC operation. As well as fitting DCC decoders to my locomotives I also converted the points by fitting a tiny decoder in each one. This makes setting up a temporary layout (I don t yet have any sort of permanent layout) nice and easy ... Read more
In my last post I wrote about my attempts to measure vignetting in the lenses I use with my DSLR camera. Another lens problem that the camera can correct (but only for Canon lenses) is lateral chromatic aberration. To determine the amount of correction my lenses need I printed out a simple test chart and ... Read more