Zennor diode

[hirez]

Back.

Porthcurno beyond splendid. (Mechanical amplifiers! Pre-Baudot paper tape! Just OMFG I want to live there!)

Goonhilly tiresomely corporate. (Not allowed out of the tour-bus to go skip-diving! Spotty bastards!)

Poldhu shut. (Boo!)

St. Ives fogbound but cor gosh the Tate was free and full of fine things. (Engine covered in copper sulphate crystals! Is it art or Vauxhall?)

Was taken as female by Ilfracombe B&B owner. (Good! If odd, given my attire!)


So is FB still leaching away people from LJ, or it it just those who never post owt anyway?

Comments

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

I rarely post these days, but am resolutely staying away from Facebook.

[dedbutdrmng.livejournal.com]

I have a facebook. I don't understand it. I like what I know and my people fear change.

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

Different tools for different jobs. LJ is for keeping a journal (duh!). Facebook is a shared calendar, an address book and a platform for toys and games. It also beats the pants off LJ for photo hosting.

[ivory-goddess.livejournal.com]

Porthcurno beyond splendid

But did you see the tiny telegraph poles behind the loos in the car park? D has a photo of me standing next to one from earlier this summer - they're only about 6 ft high!

I thought Goonhilly was Quite Interesting, but it was a foul day when we went so there weren't a lot of other options.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Damn. No. I probably steamed past the things on the way to the cable-landing hut on the beach.

Porthcurno was fun because I got to chat at length to a fellow who I think must be a retired C&W engineer - he was fettling the demonstration telegraph kit in the bunker and seemed pleased to have a vaguely technical audience. It was all brass, sprockets and pipe-smoking chap tech.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

We had a long chat with a bloke in the museum, who clearly relished the chance to explain the technicalities to someone who knew which way up to hold an electron.

It all seemed very heroic - gutta-percha insulated cables going halfway round the world, with chaps on remote islands acting as human repeaters when the signal got a bit blobby.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

You know, having the workings of International Telegraphy explained made it clear why telegrams were what they were. It was one of those odd 'available tech shuffles into place' moments because I'd never actually thought about the words coming out of a telegraph-morse converter on a strip of paper before.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

And I guess they already had morse-on-paper-tape - I remember seeing the squiggles at the museum - so it was an obvious step to replace the squiggles with letters.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I wish I'd asked the bloke about the telegraph-morse -> alpha converter now. Although the signal's synchronous, the encoded characters are of differing lengths.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I am having trouble imagining how that can all be done in clockwork.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

One of them was 26 (ish) coded wheels on a shaft, with varying cammery on each wheel to match the dot-dashes. When the wheel(s) that didn't match the incoming data stream jammed a (per-wheel) little toggly thing under the sneck-lifter, freeing the clutch for each wheel and letting it fly back to rest.

At the end of a character, you have one wheel left in position off-start and the others have all reset. The you work an adjacent toggle shaft (bit like a Wilson pre-selector gearbox) and the one wheel that's away blocks another toggle, working the one relevant typebar.

All, naturally, in polished brass.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. How perfectly splendid.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I can't quite see it. I'll have to go and look at one. What a personal disaster.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

YHM.

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

Poldhu is nice, but not spectacular. Essentially a club hut for the local HF hams with a projection video of Marconi history. Very little actual exhibits from Marconi's time. Shame you missed it, but really you didn't miss that much.

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

Facebook can fuck itself, frankly.

[red-mel.livejournal.com]

"St. Ives fogbound but cor gosh the Tate was free and full of fine things. (Engine covered in copper sulphate crystals! Is it art or Vauxhall?)"

Now now my 1st car was a Vauxhall Nova! Glad you had a good time. I could run off and live with the artists down there.

Goonhilly is total shite, though Andrew enjoyed it and Bel screamed through it!

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

I'm considering scapping my farcebook account, cos I never use it. LJ access is limited by having no intorweb at home - Local library will allow me to read but not post/comment.

If they let you out to skip dive, they'd need another bus to carry your loot on.

[jendama.livejournal.com]

Was taken as female by Ilfracombe B&B owner. (Good! If odd, given my attire!)

So, what were you wearing and how did you style your hair that day? Curious, I am.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Black t-shirt with the sleeves removed & combats. Hair as usual.

I suspect long hair + bare upper arms was enough of a cue.