Al's Blog-o-Sphere

From CES, the mega-trade show in LasVegas where the electronics industry shows off it’s new stuff. Kind of like the Detroit Auto show, but for gadgets….

It’s the latest in high-end audio equipment, a CD player with …wait for dramatic effect… vacuum tubes!

Wow! It’s tremendously expensive – it must be good!

Yes, there are still plenty of people who wax nostalgic over the “warmth” of the sound produced by tube amplifiers. Probably the same people who like vinyl records over CDs, so why a CD player with tubes? Who knows.

Actually, it’s just a version of the Primaluna Prologue 1 tube amplifier with a CD deck integrated into it… Darn, I thought they’d figured out how to run a CD with tubes…

Probably because noone else makes it and some people will pay huge amounts of cash to get one. The amp alone goes for $1200. Price of the one with the CD player wasn’t known.

Not in an article about podcasts, or local music, but in an article on Blog Spam. Well, as they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity! Continue Reading…

I’ve set up a photo management program called Gallery to organize the photos for all my blogs/webpages from now on. You can visit the new photo page here.

There is a permanent link to it in the sidebar on the right too. I even created a new category called Photos (how imaginative!) to put it in. The other link to the Opera page is still good too, but I am gradually moving what is there to the new page as well.

I’ve been upgrading to Firefox 2 here, one computer at a time. There are some differences, but most of them are minor and really don’t change the feel of the browser.

So I really haven’t thought about the change. But one difference just caught me by surprise: the built-in spell-checker. Continue Reading…