Design notes (pdf)

lm3886, amplifier

But really, it's a very good film. Highly recommended.

Twenty thousand newsfeed items, in exactly 9 months (about 100 per day).

The design center for the forms tool is around 10000 records. Performance is still just fine (this is my main newsreader application).

:-)

All I need is a power-amp, with reasonable heft and minimal (15db?) gain.

Daniel recently pointed me at diyaudio.com, which is a treasure trove of project ideas, and frequented by a fascinating mixture of clueless Darwin-award material and radical guru innovators. The chip-amp approach tickled my fancy -- there are a few very interesting designs there too, but I want to stick with something ultra-simple.

The electronics should be straightforward, but I also want a nice-looking enclosure. Something to match my minimal skillset, but which will look good underneath the Squeezebox. So, armed with a few sheets of paper and a pencil, a sketch emerged. A copper box with wooden legs.

How to source the materials? Newburyport's Port Sheet Metal does copper, but only up to 48oz sheet, which isn't substantial enough for what I want. Luckily I found Admiral Metals, only a short drive away. They have a warehouse and walk-in shop, with offcuts, sheets, flat bars, rods, and various other bits and pieces. Copper, brass, aluminium, steel, and more. The offcuts selection was wide enough for me to pick up a couple of 9x11 x 0.1875" plates and some 2.5" x 0.25" flat bar -- sold by the pound (and this stuff weighs about 20lb, altogether!). Vastly cheaper than onlinemetals. If you're looking for metal (or just up for a tactile experience) I'd unreservedly recommend giving Admiral a visit.

Now I just need the wood. And a few months to put it all together.... :-)

Say you put on a concert, and it's quite popular -- people start arriving at least two hours beforehand, and form a queue. Do you
[a] Open the doors some time before the scheduled starttime of the concert, so people can take their seats and the line move?,
[b] Split the head of the line across two doors if necessary, to allow lots of people to enter quickly?, or
[c] Wait, then split the line three-quarters down just before opening the doors, so latecomers get in at the same time as the two-hour-plus waiters?

Beardy man and ditzy girl decide [c], of course. (Who are these people? The promoters? Hmmm.) Note: method [c] guarantees that many of your longest-standing (literally) fans are extremely annoyed even before they get through the door.

Then, of course, nothing resembling a decent seat left. When punter complains about this, given the multiple choices available to your Neanderthal brain, would you choose to insult said punter and call him an asshole? Beardy-man does. We leave.

Heptunes, we won't cross paths again. Not if I see you coming.

Mr. Thompson, I don't know what your latest record is like, and I likely never will. It's good that you play gigs in Newburyport - the 2003 show at Nock was great - and we're all big fans, actually. But we'll not be seeing you play live again, not here.

It's not bad at all, after a little warm-up. Some more thoughts below.

Hurricane Dennis has a very compact, intense center and could produce sustained winds of 145 mph upon landfall and storm surge values of 14 – 19 feet above normal tide levels just east of the landfall location. Conditions will continue to deteriorate across the panhandle of Florida as the storm progresses along the forecast track. Sustained tropical storm force conditions (sustained winds of 39 – 73 mph) are expected to begin during the overnight and early morning hours across the western and central panhandle. Hurricane force conditions (greater than 74 mph) are forecast to begin impacting the western panhandle on Sunday afternoon and persist through the evening hours.Good luck to the emergency response teams - people I have an unbounded respect for, since spending some time working with them over the past few months. And to panhandle residents, hard hit by Ivan last year. Hang in there.

Makes me wish for a nyabinghi mountain solstice jam.

It's a story straight out of the most paranoid ravings -- government, big pharma, big money, secret meetings, coverup -- but this one's personal.

In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal [a mercury-based preservative], and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth, and 2-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that 6-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. "The best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives."

For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade.

As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines.

And, in case you trust your elected representatives to do anything other than line their nests at the expense of your children, there's this:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood transcripts -- and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. Congress repealed the measure in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders.

Stinking corrupt liars, the pack of them.

Normally, I can just turn that stuff off, switch the channel, ignore the crap. But this is different. The full story is more subtle, and more important, than the right-wing hate machine would have you believe; and today I was more disgusted by their apologia than I've been in a long while.

As a counterpoint, go read billmon. And read the senator's full remarks (PDF).

He has some nice vignettes (The dangers of heuristic instantiation, about communications), and plenty of crunchy morsels (on the etymology of the oboe, the probability of being descended from Charlemagne and so on). Enjoy.

Meanwhile, my hosts file still works, so I can blog in isolation for a while.