A pure celebration of geekdom and nerd squads. As I said to my daughter just before recording this: "I'm like a super geekazoid, huh?" Her answer: "Yeah you are." Aha! Someone agrees with me! This episode stays in the technical domain. There's a lot to talk about in the world of computers and the components that enable them. We will be going from a discussion of Raspberry Pi to the Apple M1 creating a mighty hunger for some Apple Pie.

I received a parcel from across the pond today. It contained a Raspberry Pi Pico, the new $4 programmable microprocessor, arriving from the England. The Pi Pico intrigues me because I have already thought of some cool projects to use them for. One of the projects is a sweet Valentine's oriented couple's project: to merge my sweetie Sue's hobby (arts and crafts) with my geeky creations to create something interesting and fun. Now I just have to implement at least part of it by Valentine's day because I think this is a clever, unique, interesting way to bring our leisure hobbies together. How much more (super geek) romantic could something be? I am not joking about this either.

I had already been in the middle of several Raspberry Pi projects using Pi Zero W, several Pi 3bs, and a Pi 4/4GB RAM. The image for this episode shows some of the Pi boards, my soldering workstation, and peripheral components such as a hi quality camera, sound cards and synthesizers, a breadboard and other cool nerd toys. If you look closely, there's a yellow CD case from Symantec C++, a product I worked on while working at Symantec in the early 1990s. It's there as a reminder and behind it are some Jibo robots. I "stage" my work areas to always include something inspirational whether a book, product, picture, guitar, piece of some product from my 40 years as a maker, or pictures of puppies.

Many products are mentioned. None paid or asked for placement. This remains an non-monetized, unbiased, rant-oriented podcast series. But at the end I hint that one of the companies should consider sponsoring me in some way based on the plans I have to do business with them.

Music is just some pre-Super Bowl snippets from a 45 minute, high gain, loud, experimental jam. It was like driving a Mustang Cobra with 600 Horsepower on the verge of losing its grip on the pavement. This is why we love tubes. The responsiveness and added harmonic content is delicious and oh so satisfying. Apologies to Ms Sue. I played super duper loud pushing all 4 tubes in the recording chain to their limits and letting the Tele bridge pickup work it’s magic. Played on Liz The Firecracker (2020 Squier by Fender Affinity Tele with special upgrades) through Blackstar Studio 10 KT88 with new Genalex Gold Lion tubes for both the 12AX7 preamp and KT88 power amp. Another Gold Lion in the SM57’s signal chain pointed two inches off center of the Celestion, and an Electro Harmonix 12AX7 LPS in the Rode NT5 room mics signal chain. All tubes hand selected and modern Russian-made reissues of the classic British tubes.

Blah, blah, blah. My intros are longer than the episodes!