Ed’s World

If you have come here looking for these wedding photos the following links may help you:

http://www.edsworld.co.uk/wedding/

http://www.edsworld.co.uk/john/

Enjoy!

Its been far too long since I have written anything here. The truth is I don’t have the time, nor the interest to write a day to day account for what I do as it would simply bore me and everyone who read it + the fact that the image plug-in has broken which removes yet further incentive! I may return with more content at some point, and most certainly if I get more storm pics.

Well amazing. I have this think called Akismet, that filters out spam in my world (only the virtual world unfortunately!) and recently its gone absolutely crazy filtering spam. In the last 14 days it stopped 2400 spam messages, to put that in perspective its only done 5100 since I installed it so this site has obviously been picked up by spamming robots and is being full on attacked.

Akismet seems to do quite well really as only a couple get through it so I cannot complain, but it does amaze me the lengths that these spamming idiots resort to.

I quite like my audio, in fact I like it allot. My ears usually want to reach much further than my pockets allow, yet sometimes you hear something played, what ever your style may be, and you think to yourself - yes that sounds fantastic.

I am not a die-hard fan of classic music or anything perhaps traditional, and get equal satisfaction from listening to modern electronic music as others would older more respected artists. If I feel I a have achieved a true representation of what I think is a quality sound then that makes me feel great.
Right now I am listening to some audio originating from my pc. I have attached to it an RCF rack mount amplifier of around 2×100w rms, driving a pair of JBL Control1 and backed up by a ‘BeoVox Cona Passive Subwoofer’. Quite a random mix, yet when they come together (and im trying so hard to not sound like some audiophile (eurghh) freak, it sounds GREAT, and all for the cost of virtually nothing.

The weak point, is in fact the Soundblaster audio card, this I purchased as it supports 24bit audio and had a claimed S/N of 100+dB. Nonsense, at least in my computer. My old SB Live was much better. Unfortunately not capable enough for my current needs. I shall be trying out some other cards both internal and external in the future at some point, but even so, with this minor niggle that mainly shows itself in its record mode, I have heard far more expensive equipment sound really very poor by comparison, and no of the shelf pc speaker setup I have ever heard comes even remotely close.

Well this is quite funny. I managed to find that Mr A.Wong, of Jap-express left his telephone number on website so since that’s public enough already I have decided to copy it here for anyone who may find it.

If you get shafted by a certain Mr A Wong from ebay give this number a call:
07725 846 928.

I decided to do this update, since I was just contacted by someone else he has tried to have over.

umm yeah im here this is a test post etc :)

Well again been nearly a month since I have posted, and immediately I’m going talk about the weather, finally we have had some light and heat. Sadly however I had to sell the 80w solar panel last year and at the moment I am not as green as I could be. However we are now getting very close to the start of some storm activity for this year. Already a couple of minor storms have passed over, and although not nothing to significant its exciting to think that now may soon be the time for some lightning shots. I have found a couple of new view points around since last season, and I hope to give those ago. It seems however that here at least locally I am on a natural storm formation point thanks to the North Downs. My experience last year with storm chasing was not too successful. Having met up with some of the guys from Net-Weather for a few UK runs nothing ever really materialised. Hopefully this year will be different. I now have some real experience with chases in the UK which gives me a starting point for when things start to look interesting this year.

Not allot else is new. Claire and I have decided we are going to grow mega sunflowers this year, and as a result we planted many seeds about a month ago. Ideal timing it seems as since then we had the beginning of this good spell of weather.
They have all now started to grow, and today I separated them out giving the best ones a chance to grow free of the weaker ones around them. To be honest I know next to nothing about plants and gardening, however it seems with a bit of care these little plants are already doing quite well.

I have also been playing around with panoramic photography. This opens a whole new world to my messing about with photography. In fact I have a couple of examples which I shall upload with this message. I have found this a completely amazing way to show so much more about a place than a single photo could demonstrate.

Finally the other interesting place I visited this last month was Crossness pumping station in East London. The details of the place are too much to really remember, however it was once the largest sewage pumping station in the world (?) and housed four 1000hp steam Engines. The flywheel weighed 53 tonnes and the main arm about 47. It was also mostly made in Scotland and brought down to London. They were decommissioned in the 50’s and the grade 1 listed building left. More recently one of the engines was restored over approximately a 15 year period, and as a result occasionally is now running and open to visitors. Rather than taking photos I went along with a video camera and captured a video of the restored engine here:

http://www.edsworld.co.uk/videos/crossness.wmv
Quite an amazing piece of engineering, and I must say I found it very interesting, however its a shame it does nothing more than act as a stationary engine. My thoughts are they should restore one of the pumps and also show this doing some work. Machines working hard and doing something are much more interesting than one at idle! However definitely worth a look if you want to see one of the largest engines of its kind anywhere in the world.

Sometimes you come across a gem of a website hidden out there in the world of www land. The owners of these sites are I like to think, quite like myself. Usually not understood by many, and quite often happy to spend many hours buzzing away in their garages at any time day or night. It seems Don at www.rcdon.com is no exception.

His creations are amazing. From an initial curiosity from one of his friends jet model aircraft, Don has now completed several jet engines or his own in an attempt to better understand the workings behind them. My favourite one so far is his GRV-1 Turbotug project, powered by his own GR-5A turboprop engine. Then there are his currently in progress GR-7 turbojet project and a cunning electronic starting system. The attention to detail and quality of his workmanship is breathtaking.
Home projects don’t get any better than this!

I suggest you go over to http://www.rcdon.com and look in his experimental projects section. You will not be disappointed.

Ed

Well this was quite unexpected (but beginning to become common..) we had another power cut - well three today. Two in the morning lasting in total about 3 hours, and another in the evening lasting about 2 hours. Initially I just switched over to stored power on the leisure batteries, that was ready to go immediately. However usually these ones that go at this time of day (7pm) seem to last for a while so I decided to pull out the generator connect the house to that instead of the batteries (they were a bit low on charge too) Anyway after about two hours street lights came on and we were back on the grid again. It really is amazing how frequent this seems to happen. I’m on the look out now for a more powerful and better silenced generator to deal with this more effectively!

Well the E1520s have gone back now, shame however I now have what I’ve been waiting for the B1520s. These are the big brother to the E1520s. Slightly more expensive at about £150 a cab, I was interested to see what the differences between the two would be. As yet I have not had an opportunity to give these a good listen, but even at the low levels I have tried the sound is as I hoped. The horn is immediately of  better quality and as a result handles the frequencies of 1.5kHz and above. Here are the other relevent specifications:
2 Way full range 15″ + 1″
RMS power 400w
Impedance 8 Ohm
96db @ 1w/1m
Weight 27Kg

However lets jump straight into the working of these speakers. Take a look at the gallery for images and my comments.