THE GREAT MULLARD MAGIC BLOG

Take a look at this wonderfully howl-worthy cinema advert, made by Mullard for the Australian market and screened during 1937. I am not sure which part I like the best, could it be the tramp like persona at the start of the film which reminds me of how I look when I get up, rush to the iMAc to see what orders have been placed, there again could it be the camp persona right at the end of the film.     All of these well observed and beautifully acted tableaus feature Jack Davey who, although a Kiwi, rose to...

Assumed to be long dead by many and certainly so in a domestic setting, the end of the Sony Betamax tape format is nigh as Sony will officially end production of the tapes in March, 40 years after the product was introduced into the domestic market. Interestingly, Sony made its last Betamax video recorder in 2002 some 14 years hence. So please, be on notice that as of March 2016, brand new Betamax cassettes with model number EL-500B, 2L-500MHGB, 2L-750MHGB as well as the L-25CLP cleaning tape will no longer be available.     Sony first launched its Betamax products...

Vinyl revival is a term that is frequently bandied about by the media on radio, TV as well as the music press to describe the renewed interest in listening to vinyl gramophone records that commenced at the start of 2007. Currently, vinyl records make up approximately 5% of overall music sales with digital downloads taking the largest slice of this market. That said, a total of 1.4 million vinyl records had been sold in the UK during 2015, volumes not seen for at least 20 years!!    So, what is a vinyl record, well, it’s a record made out of polymerized...

My 7 year old niece Ellie was bemoaning the fact that the family telly only had one remote control and isn’t it a pity that she couldn’t switch channels using her ‘tablet’ !@£$.     There then followed a “kids of today speech” where both nephew & niece were astounded that tellies were black and white, had an 18-inch screen only three channels and no such thing as a remote control back when I was their age.  This little dialogue got me thinking and so led to this blog entry on the subject of remote control in general as well as remote...

My 11-year-old nephew Mikey was smiling at the array of master and slave clocks in my shack.   Mikey did once proudly tell the curator at the Malta National War Museum at Valletta that “Uncle Steve has an RAF sector clock” but this time his interest was piqued by my ship’s radio room slave clock pair which are a Seiko QC-6MS and a Citizen TX5 5S being driven by the Power Station Synchronome master and he was asking why these clocks had different sectors to the RAF clock so as I was telling him why, I realised that others may appreciate the...