Not only is mine bigger than yours, it has more style.

I hadn’t exactly forgotten that you people out there like to see pictures in my blog posts; it’s just that I didn’t have any pictures relevant to the things I’ve written about in the last few days. (Not that I’ve ever before let that stop me putting in a silly picture.) Anyway, here you are:

 

Now. Which would you rather have, a Kindle containing the texts of 100 favourite books, or the 100 favourite books in old-fashioned codex form? I think if one collected a sufficient number of answers to that question, one would find a relation between answer and age. (It’s called a ‘statistically significant correlation’). I would most certainly prefer the books, even if I were going away somewhere and luggage was limited.

Oh the picture? Well it’s not entirely irrelevant to the above. It shows a Hammarlund SP-600 Radio Receiver, sadly now defunct. (It would take about a year’s full-time work, with the use of such things as signal generators and oscilloscopes, and access to a large range of vintage electronic components, to get it running properly again.) The little thing on top? A Sony ICF-SW07 Radio Receiver. It does almost exactly the same thing as the Hammarlund. If only the Hammarlund were working, in fact even though it isn’t, I know which I’d rather have.