Spoon masterclass #1

Luanda 2009 Kuduro rave style!

Worldwide known, thanks to Buraka Som Sistema, Kuduro gets it right when it's about dancing. Actually there is some stories around that this dance style has been originally inspired by Jean-Claude Vandamme... Just browse Youtube for some gems! They appear as fast as they disappear. So be quick. Some cute ones below...

Burakas here!

CALL OUT!!!

"To challenge someone in some way. Or to put someone on blast:
I don't think you've really lost 300 pounds - you just say you have. Produce some Before & After photos. I'm calling you out!"

Hey guys, you're now reading us from all around the globe (yeah, the line is circular and slides along the equator, globally), as well as listening to our music, apart from Antarctica, or really deep into Sahara, or North Korea and China (though we know you're out there m8z!).

So why not submit some stuff you want us to post, so that the other parts of the planet can share the knowledge?

Send us emails guys, or post your intentions in the comments, we're all up to learn some new things!!!

p.s.: we're not suffering of a lack of things to post, at all, there's shitloads more to come, but we're expecting, and would really really, really, love some global participation and common sharing....

Come on the crew!!!! Let's rave!!! And scroll down the page!!!

THE MORE, THE MERRIER!

Original Mellotron demo

Oh my g... You gotta watch this till the end!

Welcome to:

Our new readers from Dominica, Slovakia, and Denmark.

And oops, we forgot to mention Spain in the previous post...

Amazing restoration project...

Between 1938 and 1942, the Hammond Organ Company was selling the Novachord, considered by some as the first real polyphonic synthesizer available on the market.




It's 72 notes polyphonic, amazingly ALL TUBES!!!
It has oscillators, filters, VCAs, envelope generators, and
a frequency divider...





A bit more than a thousand units were build, it was huge, heavy, and very fragile. Imagine yourself getting your hands on one these beast, and having to restore it: 72 notes, all tubes, really old components with toxic stuff in them...

Phil Cirocco at CMS got one, but as he says: "the sheer number of components and it's complexity, make properly restoring a Novachord, a Herculean task..."

Well, he managed to do it!!!

This guy is completely crazy, or a Genius, or probably both...

You'll find some sound samples at the bottom of the page, recorded right after restoration, and they are properly amazing, mind boggling, unbelievable, incredible, whatever you call them.
Scroll down a bit more and you'll find his conclusion about this job, it's truly freaky.

Oh, and Phil Cirocco is considered to be the foremost ARP guy in the world...

A pretty rare cutting lathe

When he was young, Les Paul (the legendary Gibson guy), was cutting acetates in his bedroom on portable devices such as Presto lathes.
There's many different Presto models and cutterheads, but a very interesting one is the portable system designed by the BBC during WWII.

But Les Paul didn't only design guitars and cut records, he also designed a cutting lathe...

It's the Arcturus:



Just click on the pictures for a much better resolution.



Very little is known about this machine, but what we know so far is that the turntable platter is a Cadillac flywheel!!! And that it also has wood bearings... Mounted on this lathe is a very very rare Van Epps cutterhead, extremely little is known on that one too.

Apparently Arcturus Company was (or is?) based in Los Angeles, hard to find info about it...
Could anybody help?

A space beacon called Oscar

Oscar-1

Since the very first OSCAR satellites (OSCAR stands for Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) were launched in the early 1960s, AMSAT's international volunteers, often working quite literally in their basements and garages, have pioneered a wide variety of new communications technologies that are now taken for granted in the world's satellite marketplace. These breakthroughs have included some of the very first satellite voice transponders as well as highly advanced digital "store-and-forward" messaging transponder techniques.



Beacons. Early amateur satellites carried only one-way radio beacons which sent down telemetry information about conditions of satellite equipment and the space environment to anybody interested in receiving the data. Hamsats of the 21st century still have such beacon transmitters, alongside their high-tech two-way communications transponders.



However, the thought of a "repeater in space" developed and launched by a group of "know-nothing Hams" working in their basements and garages wasn't always looked upon with favor. While details of the incident are sketchy, it's reported that the builders of TELSTAR I, the first commercial telecommunications satellite, were quite upset to learn that a "rag-tag" group of Hams were also working on a telecommunications satellite called OSCAR III as TELSTAR was nearing completion. For a while, it appeared that OSCAR III might possibly upstage their multi-million dollar TELSTAR effort by beating them to orbit! In fact, it's also reported that TELSTAR's builders did eventually change their public relations approach to include the word "commercial" in subsequent references to TELSTAR I as the "world's first telecommunications satellite".



History of amateur satellite site.
List of amateur satellites.
More at project Oscar page.

Selected references taken from the Amsat website:

Davidoff,  Martin,  The Satellite Experimenter's
       Handbook  Newington, CT: The American
       Radio Relay League,  1984.

Jansson,  Richard,  Spacecraft Technology Trends
        in the Amateur Satellite Service,  Ogden, UT:
        Proceedings of the 1st Annual USU Conference
        on Small Satellites,  1987.