Nothing In Particular

[Ali Tait]

See you there.

[pre65]

On the list of exhibitors (show website) the LDA icon does not work.

[Ali Tait]

We're in the MCRU room.

[jack]

Live dynamically ranked table of AI chatbots:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-a ... eaderboard

Recently, I have mostly been using https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts ... view-05-06 (and am extremely impressed with the quality of response).

[Paul Barker]

Nat west banking app have an AI txeting assistant, I think its called Cora. It ias as thick as two short planks. But there is another problem anyway, when you want to go in the bank and get cash having left youre card at home there are way too many steps and repeats of the same step. Bye the time you have finally satisfied every step everyone in the bank will know how to get money from youre account. Its far too delayed and far too public. It should be simple and discreat and also shouldnt ask you to put youre secret (joke) number in twice. Its Nuts.

By the way when you ask Cora how to do it, she hasnt got a clue.

Luckily in the bank theere are human beings hanging around and they know how to guide you through the far too many steps especially the one you have to do twice which givs onlookers an opportunity to get youre number twice in a row .

After the last time wherein I had to be guided by the human who actually knows how to get money without youre card , another human clearly over seeing caught me on the way out and said, “did that go well for you?” I said yes thank you, in the end, I got my money. I had asked cora but got no help at all. He said “she isnt very good is she?” I wouldnt personally apply a gender to ai. What stupidity?

It reminds me of the stupidity of Apple ai guide. Obviously you are using an iphone and you ask how do I do this (whichever function you cant find, I cant remember myself, but something I couldnt a hieve no matter what route I tried) Siri thats what apple call their helper. Siri says…. Wait for it? “i can’t answer that question?” I reply “what do you mean you dont know how to achieve a function on an iphone?” You are met by silence.

[Paul Barker]

Nat west banking app have an AI txeting assistant, I think its called Cora. It ias as thick as two short planks. But there is another problem anyway, when you want to go in the bank and get cash having left youre card at home there are way too many steps and repeats of the same step. Bye the time you have finally satisfied every step everyone in the bank will know how to get money from youre account. Its far too delayed and far too public. It should be simple and discreat and also shouldnt ask you to put youre secret (joke) number in twice. Its Nuts.

By the way when you ask Cora how to do it, she hasnt got a clue.

Luckily in the bank theere are human beings hanging around and they know how to guide you through the far too many steps especially the one you have to do twice which givs onlookers an opportunity to get youre number twice in a row .

After the last time wherein I had to be guided by the human who actually knows how to get money without youre card , another human clearly over seeing caught me on the way out and said, “did that go well for you?” I said yes thank you, in the end, I got my money. I had asked cora but got no help at all. He said “she isnt very good is she?” I wouldnt personally apply a gender to ai. What stupidity?

It reminds me of the stupidity of Apple ai guide. Obviously you are using an iphone and you ask how do I do this (whichever function you cant find, I cant remember myself, but something I couldnt a hieve no matter what route I tried) Siri thats what apple call their helper. Siri says…. Wait for it? “i can’t answer that question?” I reply “what do you mean you dont know how to achieve a function on an iphone?” You are met by silence.

To sum up, Apple and Nat West need more work.

[Paul Barker]

Maybe if I had a Android phone and I asked it how to get money without a card it would guide me through it step by step. I dont know dont have any device at all on Android. I have a windows laptop and everything else apple. The purpose for buying the windows was to work the gui for the valve curve tracer. But then I had my stroke and me building the tube tracer is probably never going to happen. Im at the level of, anything harder than changing 4 coupling caps is too steep a mountain to climb. That is why I have decided to go back to relay bases for building the push pull amp using a phase splitting interstage and ex Quad II OPT’s and chokes. Reason for that is the Quad II IS far too tightly packed for a point to point hook up guy like me, after a sub arachnoid haemorrhage.

My verbal cognitive mind is coming on leaps and bounds but transferring that to writing is a car crash. I gave a birthday card to a 6 year old in church called Naomi. My daughter is Naomi. But my hand put another character after it had already finished writing, very untidily, Naomi. I didnt have time to go to tesco for another card and anyway it was before 10 am. So I scribbled it out. I had to give her a card that looked like a moron wrote it.

Some days I crash and burn, which takes all day to get out of, the next day I see a chink of light through the tunnel and by the end of that day I can put on a face to other people that all is well. But it isnt, by the day after that I am still fragile and scared of trying to do anything dextrous such as writing or hooking up an amp. Thats where I am today. Seems most unfair that the pio caps were leaky, and the writen word of Morgan warning about them was proved. So I ordered PIO (you see that was a cognitive failure) should have typed polypropylene caps. I havent yet got the confidence to swap them. They have a red olastic demeanour and gold leaf writing so they must sound great.(sarcastically he says.) bet they dont sound anywhere near as good but hopefully they wont blast the output valves with dc volts.

So you will understand if at Owston I only have my SE EL38, which in any case demonstrates to me why I like SE.

[Paul Barker]

Fingers crossed, but dont yet feel up to soldering them in.

[brig001]

Listening to Army Dreamers by the lovely Kate Bush and realised that anyone younger than me is unlikely to understand the lyrics. BFPO will be a mystery to them. I feel old
Brian

[Mike H]

Yep.

.

When I was selling tansformers, for a while we had a regular customer who lived in The Falklands, he wasn't actually military I don't think but at least some sort of technician - but anyway he could use the BFPO to mail order kilograms of transformers at a time. Mostly private projects but probably the biggest order was for 12 10H chokes, followed shortly after by another order for a further 10, they were overhauling some ancient transmitter or something.
Thing is, every order was £12 shipping.

[jack]

Sign of the times: quality axial electrolytics now seem to cost several multiples of their radial equivalents.

I'm currently restoring a Roberts R55 and an R66 - both lovely radios from the 1950s - the R55 was released in October 1954 @ £11 18s 6d and the R66 in April 1956 @ £13 19s 9d - in today's money that's £284 and £302 respectively! Radios were not cheap... To put that in context, for most of the 1950s, the average weekly male salary was about £9 - £10 which reflected the state of the post-war economy. It was assumed that a married man with two children needed a minimum income of £9/pw to just pay the basic bills. It was tough...

These radios are almost entirely axial electrolytics, but I'll not be "capacitor stuffing" (putting new smaller caps inside the cases of knackered original caps) and I'll not be using new axials as the cost is silly.

I won't be hollowing out the old caps as some may contain PCBs (Polychlorinated biphenyls) which are *very* nasty.

https://www.nepc.gov.au/sites/default/f ... trical.pdf

[Morgan Jones]

I see the valve tester you took for a day out to the Audiojumble featured in this quarter's BVWS (British Vintage Wireless Society) bulletin. BVWS might be able to help for cheaper axial electrolytics.

[jack]

I see the valve tester you took for a day out to the Audiojumble featured in this quarter's BVWS (British Vintage Wireless Society) bulletin. BVWS might be able to help for cheaper axial electrolytics.

I recently asked them for a list of the spares they sell, to no avail... There's an old list from about 2014 in the BVWS Journal, but nothing recent or on their website.

Even Jan Wüsten of "Ask Jan First" fame (http://www.askjanfirst.com/eindex.htm) is fairly pricey now...

Morgan: Any chance of a copy of that photo? Thanks!

[Morgan Jones]

I would imagine the image is copyright. But that's immaterial as I only have the printed bulletin. I expect if you ask BVWS nicely, explaining that you're the owner of the kit, they will send you a file. But you do have the real thing to gaze at...

[steve s]

I have / had a few old Roberts radios over the years not been interested enough to get into restoring them
But reading this inspired a brief internet foray

https://m5poo.co.uk/roberts-r66-portable-radio/

This was quite an interesting read.. especially on the inspiration for the design