Konkordski

Fast Lane was an excellent British high-performance motoring magazine published 1984-1994.  That era coincides with arguably the greatest period of sports/super cars and almost every issue is packed with iconic, now classic cars.  A more popular rival to Fast Lane was Performance Car , which survived until 1998 when the publisher pulled the plug and the staff relaunched it as Evo . Although I was too young to buy many issues when new, I've since collected 30+ issues thanks to eBay.  One issue that my brother bought new was the April 1989 issue which came with a free cover-mounted cassette tape.  The tape contained in-car sound and commentary of several cars being driven at Donington Park circuit and a major coup for this experiement in multimedia was the inclusion of Nick Mason's Ferrari F40. So what prompted me to revisit this now?  Well in his latest video, modern day journalist Chris Harris (former Evo writer who now creates reviews for a YouTube channel called DRIVE

I've been a fan of these watches since I got my first in 1995 and I later bought four more as NOS (New Old Stock) around 2004/5. In fact I've worn these almost exclusively since as the stretchy bracelets are very comfortable and they're a very tough and reliable watch. Faults are relatively minor: They're very thick and the face can scuff up over time (but polishes up easily with T-Cut) Bezel rings can snap when removing to clean, as I found to my cost the other week! At least half of the designs are garish/ugly and even the more masculine ones still look a bit childish in formal situations The chrono hands can get stuck through lack of use but agitation with the buttons in counter reset mode eventually unsticks them A brief history is as follows. Swatch diversified hugely during the 90s and brought out many new classes of watch beyond their basic 80s models. Around 1990 they introduced both chronographs and the Scuba line (a chunky divers style watch).  F

Every owner of the JVC XM-R70 MiniDisc recorder knows it is a very nice player/recorder but there are terrible problems caused by the disc tray lid/door. It doesn't close tightly and if you press or shake the player it can trigger the open/closed microswitch. This resets playback and/or you lose unsaved TOC changes. Originally when I bought the player in 2005 I fixed this by adding a ball of glue on the lid (see below in green ). Looks ugly and worked but after 8 years the glue has gone yellow and brittle. So I decided to open the player to find a better solution. This first picture shows the problem and my first solution. When the lid closes it pushes a steel arm ( red ) which rotates and presses a microswitch ( blue ). Unfortunately there were very poor tolerances such that the lid does not close tightly and the steel arm remains loose, often not even touching the microswitch. My new solution is to bend the steel arm so it's always in contact with the switch and fully pre

Dusting off my MiniDisc player recently I remembered I'd recorded some BBC radio documentaries a few years back titled The Record Producers .  These were usually broadcast on Radio 2 on Bank Holidays and I managed to catch the first few live on first broadcast. Hunting around for other episodes I found a nice collection of later episodes here: http://bigplansforeverybody.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/record-producers-ultramegasuperpost.html However most of the early episodes I had weren't available so I set to work.  Considering these have gone through three different types of compression (DAB > Analog > MiniDisc > Analog > MP3) they turned out much better than expected: Trevor Horn (2006) - http://www.mediafire.com/?hj4bzbfhjbacw45   Tony Visconti (2006) - No link, gets taken down as has been released on iTunes Bob Clearmountain (2006) - http://www.mediafire.com/?jzcos513019bp1b Hugh Padgham (2007) - http://www.mediafire.com/?iagtnddhrp8w06x I haven't