Monday Links from the Bench vol. DX

[NickFitz]

I'm sure NF has had a link to some iconic synthesizer in the past. I'd expect being NF it would have been a lot earlier and more ground breaking than that one though.

Quite a few: The Museum of Soviet Synths earlier this year, "Fourteen synthesisers that shaped modern music" including the DX7 back in 2014 (broken link; try the Wayback Machine archive copy, the odd transistors of the Roland TR-808 drum machine last year, and several other electronic-music-related links over the years - not forgetting, from 2011, the Brooklyn Organ Synth Orchestra playing Tubular Bells on 34 different instruments

[DoctorStrangelove]

Yeah, fail shorted, whose bright idea was that then?

Equally odd is that you can still buy the damn things.

The idea is that the metallisation is so thin that it burns off if there's a weak spot in the insulation.

The real weak spot is the plastic resin encapsulation which cracks.

I have some "new old stock" Rifa capacitors that exhibit this, fecked before taken out of the packet.

[northernladuk]

Surprised you missed the opportunity for something like this:
DX 7

I'm sure NF has had a link to some iconic synthesizer in the past. I'd expect being NF it would have been a lot earlier and more ground breaking than that one though.

[NigelJK]

Although thinking about it you could be saving yourself for DXVII

[NickFitz]

Surprised you missed the opportunity for something like this:
DX 7

Good find!

[NigelJK]

Surprised you missed the opportunity for something like this:
DX 7

[Zigenare]

The electronics chap doesn't mention the curse of the shorted tantalum capacitor.

I've had several of these, the last one a 30 year old IBM XT motherboard, which was a pain in the arse to locate.

About 30 years ago I had one on a relatively new 286 motherboard which went pop when the machine was running.

Very unpleasant smell.

In a fit of foolishness I failed to remove the battery backup from a Compaq Portable III.

It is now toast.

The Rifa capacitors are notorious for going pop, one of the BBC computers I plugged in went pop within 30 seconds.

Of course after the smoke cleared the BBC still worked.

Yeah, fail shorted, whose bright idea was that then?

[DoctorStrangelove]

The electronics chap doesn't mention the curse of the shorted tantalum capacitor.

I've had several of these, the last one a 30 year old IBM XT motherboard, which was a pain in the arse to locate.

About 30 years ago I had one on a relatively new 286 motherboard which went pop when the machine was running.

Very unpleasant smell.

In a fit of foolishness I failed to remove the battery backup from a Compaq Portable III.

It is now toast.

The Rifa capacitors are notorious for going pop, one of the BBC computers I plugged in went pop within 30 seconds.

Of course after the smoke cleared the BBC still worked.

[northernladuk]

[*]Why We Feel So Compelled to Make Maps of Fictional Worlds - Lev Grossman on maps of places that have never been: ”It’s a magic trick of sorts: maps look like evidence. They imply the existence of the terrain they represent.”

Being a D&D chap from an early age and still very much am I was looking forward to reading this one.

Got as far as...

Fictional maps are a visual trace of the ridiculous, undignified passion that we pour into worlds that we know aren’t real. They seem to confirm the ridiculous faith we place in novels—to see one is to say, silently and only to yourself, See? I knew it was real!

And clicked off.

Using the word ridiculous once was bad enough, twice? I'm done. He's probably right in a literary sense and they are indeed the right words to use but as a reader? Nah, bollocks to him. I can't see the article is going to be of any interest if it starts on that theme.

Pretty disappointed with that to be fair.

[DaveB]

It's odd the way the colour photo's appear to be somehow less authentic than if they were in black and white, as if they have been staged as reproductions or are actually more modern than they really are.

[BR14]

that Moon geezer really meant it, then

[NickFitz]

Another grey autumn day, but at least it's Monday so you can waste some time reading this lot, should you be so inclined

• Alec Guinness Hated Star Wars And I Should Know - ”When I was 12 years old Alec Guinness made me promise never to see Star Wars again. He wrote about it in his final memoir. For the first time ever, here is what really happened.” Daniel Henning, who'd seen Star Wars 102 times by the age of 12, reveals the true story of his meeting with Alec Guinness in 1979
  
  
• A Hole in the Head: A History of Trepanation - Charles G. Gross on the long history of drilling holes in the skull: ”Thousands of trephined skulls have been found and almost as many papers written about them. They have been discovered in widespread locations in every part of the world in sites dating from the late Paleolithic to this century. The usual estimates for survival of different samples of trephined skulls range from 50 percent to 90 percent with most estimates on the higher side.”
  
  
• How Jurassic Plankton Stole Control of the Ocean’s Chemistry - ”Only 170 million years ago, new plankton evolved. Their demand for carbon and calcium permanently transformed the seas as homes for life.” Christie Wilcox on the rise of calcifying plankton.
  
  
• Chernobyl Exclusion Zone - Photographer Graham Gilmore made two visits to Chernobyl and the surrounding region: ”I would like to present to you some of the images I took of the area in 2008 and during my return visit in 2009, offer some facts and dispel some myths I learned during my time in such a fascinating place.” He's also published further posts recently with more of his photos, concentrating on particular areas such as the hospital and the amusement park, which can be found under his site's Chernobyl category.
  
  
  
  
  
• Why We Feel So Compelled to Make Maps of Fictional Worlds - Lev Grossman on maps of places that have never been: ”It’s a magic trick of sorts: maps look like evidence. They imply the existence of the terrain they represent.”
  
  
• The Strange Death of James Moon - A macabre tale from Lafayette, Indiana: ”When a guest named James Moon first checked into the hotel on June 10, 1876, nobody paid much notice… A maid named Bridget Clogan tried several times during the day to enter Moon's room for cleaning but got no response. At 5 pm, she tried once more and, getting no answer, she used her passkey to enter the room. What she saw there sent her into a fit of screaming.”
  
  
• The Last Death-Defying Honey Hunter of Nepal - ”One man from the Kulung culture harvests psychotropic honey that is guarded by capricious spirits and the world’s largest honeybees.” The remarkable occupation of Mauli Dhan; there's more about him in the documentary The Last Honey Hunter:
  
  
  
  
  
• How to Preserve Vintage Electronics - ”Tips from a collector with 25 years of experience on slowing inevitable decay.” Useful advice from Benj Edwards for those of us who keep old computers lying around the place because it would be a shame to get rid of them and they might come in handy one day
  
  
• The lost dress of Elizabeth I – Revealed - ”Imagine if someone from London arrived at your most rural of rural churches and told you that bit of old fabric on the wall is worth a king’s ransom? That’s what happened four years ago to the parishioners of the tiny church of Bacton close to the border with Wales, and next week, that same bit of old fabric goes on display in London, for just a few months.” How an old altar cloth turned out to be part of a priceless Tudor dress.
  
  
• 1930s-40s in Color - It's a little known fact that colour wasn't invented to sell colour televisions, but the world was actually in colour before that. This collection of old colour photographs from the Library of Congress proves it: ”These vivid color photos from the Great Depression and World War II capture an era generally seen only in black-and-white. Photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) created the images between 1939 and 1944.”
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!