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Some absolutely gorgeous video of the inside of the Sagrada Familia, and the details of Gaudi's string physics model is also very interesting.

I'm really not the travelling sort, but I'd love to visit this one day.

As far as churches go 137 years aint that out of the ordinary. York Cathedral was started in 1230 and finished in 1472. What is probably unique about this project is that it was started as a house of God in a deeply religious country and will now get finished as a work of art in a mostly atheist country. If it weren't for its magnificent design it would probably not be finished right now as the Catholic Church is dying in Europe. And in Spain at an above average rate. Churches are being closed, sold off or demolished all over the continent. There is really no need for a new one if the old ones can't be filled with devotees. My own city of Nijmegen used to be staunchly Catholic and had dozens of churches, and most of the remaining ones will probably be gone or no longer be a church within the next 10 years.

I built 7 of them during covid so far. Planning no. 8 currently. It's just like pedal building or that snack, once you pop you just can't stop.

I always thought he used a volume pedal behind his Muff, which was always set to full volume, so he could bring in as much or as little of it as he wants. Then again, I never watched that much interviews with the dude. A great guitar player, but by god, that man has the most boring droning put me to sleep voice in human existence.

Building my own guitars I can't help escape the idea that a LOT of what is being done continues to be done that way because its always been done that way. In no small way either because if they don't then the guitar purists will crucify them. FOR LEO FENDER AND LES PAUL GOT IT RIGHT THE 1ST TIME!

Although of course, sometimes, when you do try something new instead you discover, oh, THAT'S why they did it like that. So you gotta try it, see if you like it, or not. Occasionally you must reinvent the wheel to understand why the wheel is as it is.

Can't tell if your just having a bit of fun there but an estimated 800,000,000 people in India live in poverty right now. At no time before 1750-1800 did that many people even live on the planet at one time. There is definitively more people living in poverty at the moment than ever before.

India had to come a long way, but percentage wise MORE people used to live in poverty in India after independence right up to the 80's, when free market reforms were enacted. India's economy has been booming for decades and more people have been lifted out of poverty then ever before. Of course India's population is also booming, which is masking the massive gains that have been made. And that is also excluding the fact that India has not had a famine since 1972. Same with Africa, because of a booming population that masks the massive gains that are being made in lifting more people then ever out of poverty. Overall populations go up, including the total number of poor people, but as a percentage of the total population poverty goes down. If those countries had their population growth in check poverty would be dropping really hard. It's really two separate issues, poverty and population growth.

Through human history there has been an endless progression of culture pessimists and doomsayers, and yet history has proven then wrong again and again and again. We are far more resilient, resourceful and willing to do what it takes then what the naysayers keep on saying. I've experienced too many scares and so called endings of the world to fall for that again. We will make it work. Faith manages!

The U.S. Government is statutorily required to buy something off the shelf if it can, and it can and does get sued if it doesn't buy an off the shelf product that meets its needs.

Bu tif you go to a manufacturer and tell them that their off the shelf hammer is not good enough and you need three hammers with these exact specifications that are durable enough to do something in particular, they're going to cost $1000 each because you're paying a room full of engineers to make something bespoke for you. This happens a lot with military equipment: It doesn't exist, so you have to pay someone to make it, but you also won't let them sell it to anyone else, so you pay for their R&D as well.

NASA is not motivated not by profit but the desire to continue exploration. Its justification for the next mission is the success of the prior. Private industry has decades of experience trying to skirt safety, environmental, and every other expectation they can to please their shareholders. I don't want the kind of folks who hire the Pinkertons to spy on their workers or get a couple million dollars in exchange for failure in charge of the safety and success of pure scientific exploration whose achievements become part of the public good.

NASA is also a government bureaucracy and they cannot make ANY good decisions because they are not driven by a desire to get the most maximal result (profit in the private sector) but politics. We've seen that with the Space Shuttle, which turned out to a money pit of limited value, as its far cheaper to send satellites into space with an unmanned rocket then it is with a reusable huge expensive space plane. But that shuttle sucked the budget out of NASA, eating up so much that its exploration missions were kept on a very tight budget. For the money wasted on the Space Shuttle we could have send a LOT more probes to Mars, Venus, all the other planets. Science could have been extended so much further, if it weren't for NASA's obsession with maintaining a manned space delivery system. And its not like the government safety record is so much better, because they lost half of their shuttles, including their occupants. And even in the military we see gross neglect of safety and concern with well being and health of soldiers. Exposing them to toxic materials and munitions and covering up any potentially harmful information. Harmful to the government that is. Governments aren't the solution, they are the problem. You say Pinkertons, I say FBI and NSA. And if one company takes risks with safety, I can usually go to a different company. If the government takes unnecessary risk or does other things, I can't go to a different government.

... I never realised how much the movie 'Independance Day' influenced me. (I'm thinking of the Jewish father saying to someone, "What, you think they spend $600 on a hammer, $1000 on a toilet seat?" when they ask how the secret alien research facility was built.)

Hollywood is a poor source of information, and especially history. And sadly these days a poor source of entertainment as well. Just look at the disastrous Oscars ratings. I'm currently watching old Babylon 5 episodes and its writing blows ANYTHING recent out of the water.

Space research is cool, but the most pressing issue is to get humans living in space and other planets. Off this one at least, cause this one is rather unique and should be saved. First step, industrialize the moon so we can get more space infrastructure in space at a much reduced cost. Start cranking out O'Neill cylinders so we can park our people there, and colonize the solar system. And once we got the solar system covered, next stop, other stars. We have to get out there or else EVERYTHING we've done here, all our art, history, suffering, achievements, they will have been for nothing as the sun inevitable will get hotter with time and make Earth unlivable.

And for those culture pessimists who think we are so bad as a species, we've NEVER been as enlightened, cultured, humanist and peaceful as we are today. We have less wars then ever before, less people are living in poverty, or suffer from malnutrition before, racism and sexism is at an all time low. Quit listening to the media and activists, they lie, all of them. Quit listening to university professors, they have always been doomsayers. Instead of scaring our kids with gloom and doom we should be motivating them with positive role models. Instead of telling people you do this or else, listen to people who say we're going to do this, because!

There's so many pedals I managed to troubleshoot with a multimeter that gives you a noise when you have continuity, an audio probe and a delay pedal that can also loop a riff, so you can trace your signal through the circuit.

Next door neighbour gave me an old Zippo lighter. It was dry, and, once re-fueled, only lit itself after twenty or so goes with the flint wheel. (I should add that I do NOT smoke, at all -- I intend to use it for lighting the fireplace in winter.)

I pulled out the old packing and the old wick... the wicks are supposed to go in a roughly S shaped serpentine manner through the packing. Whoever did this one originally just had a very straight 'tick mark' spiking through the packing, which also looked very manky. I put new packing and wick in (according to interwebz instructions), added more lighter fluid, and now it lights every time, no worries!

I don't think I'd be able to ever show it to anyone, though. It's one of Zippo's old ones with graphics on the side... the old USA Confederate flag, the one with the 'X' across it.  but at least now it does a good job of lighting my fireplace.

Technically of course the Confederate flag is not a USA flag but one of the Confederate State of America. A different political entity.

One thing I like about the current store is that it doesn't require clicking through to see what stuff is. It's all there on the list.

Oh, total agreement on that. I effin' HATE webstores that make you click through endless pages. EVERYTHING ON ONE PAGE, DAMMIT!

Poor you. Welcome to the wonderful hell of finicky tubes. 

I use to fill the cart and write a note with all the components, and for every components the name of the project where I need it.
But since the cart of the Tayda is multi-page is very hard to read it, especially when you have 3, 4... 6... pages. It's hard to check if you have included the 10k resistor without check every page!

How much do you order? Or have they changed the layout? I never had multi page carts. Mind you, I never placed orders bigger then $40, from which I could build 2 pedals, because anything more meant Tayda would ship it in a box, instead of the envelope. And the envelope snuck through customs 99% of the time without getting slapped with import highway robbery. The box on the other hand, customs hell. It was cheaper for me to place 10 orders of $40 with separate shipping then it was to order one giant $400 order and get free shipping as it were. Strange world we live in.

I don't know why I haven't seriously thought about this before, but nearly 100% of the time I play guitar, my volume and tone knobs are turned all the way up, so it doesn't matter at all what the pot tapers are.  I really should build myself a guitar that has no knobs. (Or, alternatively, I should learn how to properly use the knobs I have.  )

Me too, but sometimes its nice to play with the volume knob for volume swells. And the most useless knob on a guitar that makes it sounds muddy can be fun if you pair it with an oscillating fuzz with no buffer in between. So I keep them on.

I have heard on guitar forums that pickups are designed to have a knob.... it's usually in the 500k vs 250k discussion

Volume pots shave off a little high of the signal, 250K more so then 500K, and 1M barely at all. So people like to use a 250K pot together with single coils, to tame their highs, and 500K with humbuckers, as they could use a little more highs. I reckon it's most a matter of taste. One person's ice pick is another person's clarity and one person's warmth is another person's mud.

I heard the Boys went woke. These days I only watch classic shows, currently rewatching Babylon 5 again, it's effin' awesome watching a show that's not preaching at me.

The key to ordering from Tayda was to use spreadsheets and then meticulously note it down. I used to have an excel spreadsheets with every item that was on offer on Tayda that I could possible use to build pedals, with prices, so that I could create pedal parts list way before ordering them. To be honest, that was sometimes the most fun part anyway. And always order enough parts so you end up having shitloads of spares. Resistors always come in 10's, but caps I also ordered in 10's or 5's. Same with transistors and IC's. Eventually I would up with so many parts, if I forgot the odd part I could always finish it. Which was basically the best thing about ordering from Tayda. Creating stock on the cheap.

My bandmate sold me his ts9 (reissue with jrc chip) for dirt cheap and I did landgraff mods to it, added LEDs for clipping. Does the trick with my blues Jr. Sometimes you just need good generic crunch. Now are the mods worth the landgraff prices? awesome, but nah. Buy a couple caps and a couple LEDs and go to town. Ibanez/Maxxon pedals are cheap and plentiful and easy to mod (along with many PCBs). I always called TS and TS style drives the swiss army knife of dirt/crunch. Need some? use a TS.

Same goes for the Boss overdrives. And modding those was what got me into this obsessive compulsive disorder.