lb1lf

Haha, we need to talk. (Current garage: Land Cruisers BJ42 and HZJ78, SI 80" Land Rover (full grille, thank you very much), 1972 RRC, a 1966 MGB V8 (retrofit, not original).)

Oh, and a Passat for the missus. The kids call the Passat 'The muggle car'.

I really could do with a couple cars less (mostly to make room for a Toyota Century, I have wanted one for years), but I love all of them for different reasons, so...

close04 pretty much nailed it with his comment below. There is nothing wrong with the Submariner - quite the contrary, it is an iconic design and exceedingly well made.

The 'problem' is that as it migrated (much like, say, Leica cameras and optics) from being tools for professionals into status symbols, a lot of its owners went from basically banging it about, relishing each and every battle scar obtained to (sigh) worrying about resale value.

...and don't even get me started on people who buy a Rolex Submariner - the quintessential tool watch (and luxury symbol, by all means - but it wasn't always so) and then ask whether they should take any special precautions after accidentally showering with it...

Sigh.

Oh yes. I used to have a VW van (a T4) which had had a V6 transplant and an aftermarket turbo retrofitted (not by me - I am a quite capable mechanic, but not THAT capable.)

It was still a VW van, but it gave a few unsuspecting BMW drivers a surprise. Some 370bhp tends to get others' attention when unleashed.

Secret-ish.

One of the links terminated in a seeming boathouse at Andøya in Norway.

It was a landmark. As in, if you were going fishing with a colleague and asked him which boathouse we'd embark from, he was as likely as not to say 'Three boathouses down from the hush one!'

To stress how prolific tunnels are - if I drive from my home near Aalesund on the northwestern coast to the family seat at Voss (a bit inland from Bergen), some 360km/220mi or so, more than 1/4 of that distance is in tunnels. Can't remember how many, but dozens.

Not relevant at all, but would you happen to be a descendant of Heinz/Henry Ries, the photographer?

(Reading Joseph Pearson's book on the Berlin airlift, in which he features prominently, do your last name stood out...)

Of course, they do serve a purpose, in that there's more often than not airbags in them, plus they provide structural integrity often lacking in older cars - so making the car safer for its occupants at the cost of anyone outside the car.

Say, I have a Range Rover Classic (1972, 3.5l V8) I mostly use for fun and games during weekends in the summer months. Its A-pillars look like strands of spaghetti, making for excellent situational awareness from the driver's seat. It is effectively like driving around in a moving greenhouse. (Doubly so in summer, seeing as the A/C is of dubious efficacy, to put it mildly.)

If I ever roll the thing, I'll be done for, though.

It never ceases to amaze me how many drivers appear to not register blindingly obvious objects in their path.

Ranging from the understandable, but unacceptable (Say, CBDR/Constant bearing, decreasing range, which makes a lot of drivers misidentify an object as stationary even as it is moving towards them on a collision course) to the flat out unbelievable - I've been almost run over in a lit pedestrian crossing. While wearing hi-vis clothing. Pushing a baby stroller, also hi-vis. AFTER having made eye contact with the driver and even gotten a nod from her. After the car slowed down. Sigh.

In the latter case, it turned out she had assumed that us making eye contact meant that I had seen the car and would wait until it had safely passed the crossing. At least that was what she claimed when I asked why, oh why she'd approached the crossing, slowed down, made eye contact with the pedestrian - and yet proceeded to drive through...

Oh, and don't even get me started on the proliferation of touch screens forcing the driver to take his or her attention off the road to interact with the car. This was a solved problem, using physical buttons you soon learned the exact location of so you could reach for them while still keeping your attention on what was in front of you.

It's called living, which has become insanely safe compared to what it used to be only a generation or two ago.

Looking at the statistics here in my native Norway, children killed in traffic is down a couple of orders of magnitude since the sixties - while traffic, at the same time, has increased by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Same goes for drowning - drastically reduced rates compared to the sixties.

Of course, I guess one can argue that maybe it has become too safe - in the sense that kids aren't exposed to enough risk to learn how to evaluate it, leading to major crashes with reality later on.

Then again, as a parent, I kind of like the idea that there's never been a safer time to be a child.

That doesn't stop me from urging them to ditch the screen time in favour of heading out into the boonies to find something to do, though.

Look at it from the bright side; not many people get to read their own obituaries.

Of course; I will jump through just about any hoop in order to keep buying their products precisely as I know that will buy both me and the end customer long term peace of mind.

Where Siemens really shines, is in their fanatical devotion to after sales.

I rely on Siemens automation products at work. They give me end-of-life warnings a couple of years ahead - and maintain a spares inventory for a decade and change after EoL.

That basically ensures I am never caught out, and makes me more than happy to (grudgingly) accept all their ideosyncracies...

This. Also, Higginbotham's "Midnight in Chernobyl" is brilliant prose about the disaster, from the run-up through to the aftermath. At times, it reads more like a thriller (and a fast-paced one at that!) than prose.

In a very similar vein, Ars Technica did a very interesting story on the electromechanical targeting computers on WW2 battle ships a few years ago; the instructional videos embedded in the story are gold.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/gears...

Haha, I can relate. Dabbled both with live recording (using a Sony PCM-M1 and a pair of very unobtrusive capsule mikes if the venue and band didn't have an enlightened recording policy, a DA-P1 and a pair of 416s if they did) and photograpy (mostly a Nikon F3 and a 105mm f/2.5).

I got VERY good at quickly rewinding a film roll and slipping it in the hands of a nearby friend in case security spotted me and wanted to nick my film. Always had a handful of empty film rolls to give up (seemingly reluctantly)

Worst scare I had was when taping Ray Charles at a jazz festival in Norway c.2000, methinks. Well into the show, he exclaims that some ass is taping his show, and he's not too happy about it. Starts explaining he's not going to play on until he's got that tape in his hands!

I glance around, rather nervously, but noone is heading for me - so I just keep recording, hoping that someone else is on the hook. Lo and behold, moments later a stage hand comes on stage with what appeared to be a broadcast video tape, giving it to a triumphant Ray Charles who sits down and starts playing again. Phew!

I don't think you need to be very biased to consider this a war of aggression.

Which, incidentally, is itself considered an international crime.

So, these children would be alive and as well as one can be inside the theocracy that is Iran unless the US and Israel committed the international crime of a war of aggression?

Incidentally, $26B is a sum in the same ballpark as the cost of eradicating homelessness in the US, ending large-scale hunger worldwide or making significant progress towards safe drinking water for all or the eradication of malaria.

I guess that's the definition of 'iconic' - many a time I have approached someone wearing a Ramones or Motörhead T-shirt trying to chat a bit, only to be told 'Sorry, don't know the music at all, but the shirt is cool...'

Gabba gabba hey!

Presumably, yes.

IANAL, and I have only heard about a couple of cases where people have been taxed under this statute - typically carpenters having built or renovated their own homes or cottages.

(Their obvious disadvantage being, of course, that the result of their labour is very tangible - and that whenever you do any significant building work, you'll need permits and documentation afterwards, making it difficult to discreetly renovate something off the books...)

Sorry, not VAT - but the value of the benefit you gain from working on your own property (presumably also if you're, say, a car mechanic and work on your own car, etc.) is subject to taxation. Mea culpa.

The obligation to pay tax only kicks in (as far as I can tell, IANAL) if the work is substantial and of a nature which requires professional skills.

Here's a recent link, though in Norwegian, I'm afraid:

https://www.fvn.no/abito/i/GM86x4/skatt-ved-arbeid-paa-egen-...

-Besides, in some jurisdictions, the taxman thought of that.

If a Norwegian tradesman works on his own home, he's supposed to pay VAT on the value of the work he's done - not only on the materials used.

I suspect such work is being under-reported, though.

Time for a classic, Soviet-era joke:

A Soviet engineer needs some plumbing done in his apartment, and calls for a plumber. The plumber arrives, does his thing, and hands over the bill. The engineer is shocked. -'What, this is like a quarter of what I make in a month - for half an hour's work???'

Plumber shrugs. -'Well, why don't you come join us? Easy work, well paid, no responsibility - just remember to keep mum about your degree, as we're not supposed to hire academics.'

Our engineer contemplates this for a while, applies for a job as a plumber - and gets it.

All is well, good money, no responsibilites - until management requires that they take evening school classes to gain new skills and thus better build socialism. So, grudgingly, our engineer enrolls in a math class and, upon arriving, finds that the teacher wants to establish what the plumbers already know.

-'You over there - could you please come to the blackboard and show us the formula for the area of a circle?' he asks our engineer.

Standing at the blackboard, he suddenly realizes he can't for the life of him remember the formula; while a bit rusty, he soon figures out how to reason it out - furiously writing out integrals on the blackboard, only to find the area of a circle is -(pi)*r^2.

Minus? How did a negative enter into it, he thinks, going over his calculations once again. No, still gets the same result. Sweat building, he turns away from the blackboard for a moment, turning to the other plumbers watching.

As in one voice, they all whisper -'Comrade, you must switch the limits to the integral!'

I guess the accuracy of such solutions vary by jurisdiction; I just received my tax return for 2025 in Norway.

The sum owed I had calculated at the end of 2025 was less than 2% off from the sum our IRS equivalent came up with.

Their sum was the most favorable to me, though - they had adjusted a deduction I qualified for last year which I had missed.

This level of accuracy is down to our IRS knowing just about all there is to know about our income, assets, debts &c of course - oh, and on there being fewer loopholes in our tax code...

Anecdotally, I don't think hi-fi's decline has to do with cost - at least not cost alone. You can still get a more than decent system which will fit most living rooms for quite reasonable money - I just had a look at prices at a national retailer's website here in Norway, and you can get a pair of decent bookshelf speakers and a stereo amp delivering 2x60W into 8 ohms, built-in streaming support and a HDMI input to ease connection to the TV, covering the most common use cases nowadays, for less than $1,000.

For comparison, median income after taxes is approx. $50,000 a year, so we're looking at less than a week's net wages.

I think it is more likely that our media consumption habits have changed - when I was a kid in the eighties, a few - like, the bank branch manager, the dentist and a few others - had a VCR at home. The rest of us had TVs, meaning we watched what was on at the time, or (once in a while) rented a VCR and a movie.

That aside, our media choices were radio, going to the cinema (not very often!) or - drumroll - recorded music.

Hence everybody had stereos. I believe my parents were quite typical - when I was a toddler, they bought a number of LPs with radio dramas for kids on them, music for kids &c - the stereo was basically the entertainment hub.

Today my family and I - wife and three kids aged 10, 12 and 16 - have between us, let's see, 2xTVs, a 40" and an 85", the latter with a 5.1 system attached, both with Apple TVs, a stereo (making us an outlier!), three ipads, three smartphones, two dumbphones, a handful of radios, three - oops, four - laptops, a PlayStation, a couple of Nintendo Switches...

There's basically so many more options to spend our media time on, and at the same time there's way more leisure activities aimed at kids now than when I was a kid, so the kids are barely at home during the week (at least it feels that way!), leaving less time (methinks) for media consumption than only a generation ago, while at the same time having many more options.

So - basically, for many, only a generation ago, the stereo was the entertainment hub and you were kind of expected to have one. Nowadays the entertainment hub is some kind of internet-connected device, and a stereo is a niche product.

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!