Guitars, Gear, and Open Source
All of my hardware has arrived with the exception of the new pickguard. I took some time to make sure everything would install as expected. The main piece of the bridge fits in it’s route beautifully, but unfortunately once it’s fully assembled it overhangs on the top of the route.
……almost perfectly blocked tremolo by mistake.
The stain is complete and now begins the long process of the satin clear coat.
After several coats of stain the neck and body are turning out exactly how I had envisioned. Each coat of stain raises the grain so it’s a slow process of stain, lightly sand, stain, lightly sand, etc. I’ve done 5 or 6 coats now and I’m getting close to moving to the next step. Hopefully tomorrow night I can start on the satin clear coat. Continue reading “Klein Copy: Part III”
Opps. I forgot about the contour for the strap button! Luckily this one is quite simple compared to the last ones I did.
Continue reading “Klein Copy: Part II”
The kit with the hardware laid in place
A few months ago I discovered that Alibaba distributes guitar kits for many, many, many different types popular guitars. Of course these are all Chinese knock-offs of the real thing, but they only cost a fraction of the real thing. I was leaning towards getting a Less Paul kit, but a good friend talked me into getting a Klein instead (he got one as well). For example an authentic Klein (when the company was still in business) would sell for between $2-3K (in early 2000 dollars). Currently on ebay they sell for between $5-10k. I had the pleasure of playing two different Kleins while I was in college and they are simply amazing instruments; worth every penny. However, I’m not in a position to justify that kind of money for a guitar.
….but for $89
Continue reading “Klein Copy: Part I”
The Dallas World Aquarium used to be the best place in the country to see bull sharks. Continue reading “Bull Sharks in Oklahoma”
…..okay so the tile of this should probably be XBMC/Kodi on the FireTV, but whatever.
It’s been over 10 years since I’ve cut the cable with ….cable/satellite, and 7 years since I’ve deployed MythTV and ditched Tivo. Disregarding some negligible hardware costs, I’ve been spending about $20 a year on television. Absolutely awesome! About four years ago I started supplementing local broadcasts with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon. This was great from a content and cost perspective, but proved challenging from a Linux/Flash support perspective. At first the best option was to dual-boot to Windows, but this had extremely low WAF, Wife Acceptance Factor (and even worse OSAF, or open source acceptance factor). About a year ago I picked up some cheap Sony blueray players that supported all the the streaming media capabilities we needed. They’re a great buy and I’d highly recommend these units since they offer a lot for ~$50. The problem this left me with is the fact that I have this old, power hungry, x86 computer next to my televisions, and the percentage has shifted to where we stream 70% of what we watch. I thought about deprecating MythTV, but honestly it’s just too good to ditch. Plus I already have the infrastructure (master backend server and tuners) and we still need something for our movies and broadcast shows.
Continue reading “MythTV on the Amazon FireTV”
So RHEL 7 has been out for about a week, not including the beta or RC cycles, and one of the changes is worth documenting. Unless you use a Satellite Server, the concept of registering to RHN is gone. That means no more rhn_reg or rhnreg_ks to get your updates.
Bring on subscription-manager!
She’s a beauty
I’ve had my RMC3 for almost 15 years now and I still love it. This really is one of the best Wahs on the planet. I love how it comes w/ a bunch of “famous” wah settings e.g. Hendrix, Shaft, Cry Baby, etc. It sounds silly but several years ago I really had to cover Shaft on a gig. All I did was plug-in Geoffrey’s settings and low and behold it was perfect. Pretty cool. Continue reading “New ROC-POT4 in My RMC 3”
GNOME3 doesn’t do the best job of handling monitors of a different size, especially when they’re setup vertically. Having said that, it’s almost a perfect user experience if the larger monitor is setup as the primary. When the smaller one is primary, at least in my case, windows do not maximize properly and resize while dragging between screens. I’m probably the last person on earth to learn about this but the primary display can be selected by dragging the top panel to the other screen under Settings -> Display. I still consider myself a KDE guy, but I’m enjoying GNOME a lot more now that I’ve set the larger screen to primary. I should probably RTFM once in a while.
I got almost ten years out of my 19″ Dell Ultra Sharp monitors, but the 4×3 resolution really started getting to me. I picked up two of the Asus VS247H-P 23.6-Inch LED monitors for $120 each on Amazon. They’re not the best monitors I’ve ever seen, but for the money they’re amazing. My favorite thing about them is they have three inputs: VGA, DVI, & HDMI. For the first time I have all my systems connected and I don’t have to fish for cables. While a KVM switch would be ideal, I don’t switch to the other systems enough to warrant the cost. I leave my primary desktop on the left one and dual screen my work laptop on the right. When I record I extend the desktop screen to the monitor on the right, as that’s the only time I need both on my desktop. Two other inputs go to my Lenovo testing workstations, and I have an extra HDMI port for embedded boards like the raspberry pi. I’ve had the setup now for four months and it’s turned out even better than I expected. With 4K becoming the new “HD” now is a great time to pickup a good 1080p-ish monitor on the cheap.
I decided to get Audrey a PC for her fourth birthday. She’s a little too young for it, but I really want to get both our girls exposed to technology at an early age. Another goal is for them to learn to touch type at an early age. Anyway, I didn’t really want to spend a lot of money on something that’s likely to get broken. I figured a netbook would fit the bill perfectly. Lucky for me my brother-in-law wasn’t using his old Eee PC 900, and gave it to Audrey for her birthday. To make this more fun I went with a Hello Kitty theme on the system. It’s running Fedora 19, XFCE desktop, sugar, KDE Education Project, and a home page of pbs.org.
I was reminded tonight that newer versions of syslinux (one of my favorites) has broken out libraries from the previous stand-alone modules. Traditionally, for setting up PXE environments all that was needed was pxelinux.0, memdisk, menu.c32, vesamenu.c32. The friendly folks on #syslinux directed me to http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Library_modules
Basically now you’ll need:
pxelinux.0, memdisk, menu.c32, vesamenu.c32, ldlinux.c32, libutil.c32, libcom32.c32
in the root of your tftp server.
All of these can be found under the bios directory when you download versions 5 or 6 of syslinux.
Enjoy!
I’ve been running Fedora for quite some type and it’s hands down my favorite bleeding-edge distro. Since I’ve been at Red Hat though, I’ve been using RHEL on my work laptops, and I’ve really enjoyed the experience and stability. So the past three years it’s been Fedora at home and RHEL at work, and that’s worked out perfectly. …..until now. Continue reading “Fedora 19. Making libvirt and firewalld play nice”
I should preface this post by stating that this is simply a list of the most influential guitarist in my journey as a guitarist. I’m not claiming this is the be-all-end-all or the best “of all time” top 10.
Favorite Album: Trio Volume 2
I first saw Tim play when I was a sophomore in high school and I’ll never forget that night. About a year later I bought his first CD, With the Distance, and it made such an impact on me that I traded ~80% of my CDs to start a jazz collection. Tim has an incredibly unique approach to the guitar. His bell-like tone mixed with long, complex phrases create an amazing sound that is a joy to listen to. He’s currently on staff at the Berklee College of Music and recently launched an on-line guitar lessons site. If you’ve never heard Tim play definitely look him up on youtube or grab one of his CDs.
I bought my last desk as a college student for $99 at Walmart. While it has served me extremely well, I’ve outgrown it in a lot of ways. I found it really frustrating looking for desks both on line and at retailers. There are so many out there and almost none of them do what I want. Especially not for what I’m willing to pay. Luckily a guy named Michael was nice enough to build exactly what I wanted from Ikea parts and post *all* the info on line. Not only did he build a micro-site located here about his project but he also answered several questions via email. He’s a very nice guy.
I’ve had my Tom Anderson Hollow Drop Top Classic for about eleven years now. It’s by far the best guitar I’ve ever owned. Over the past three years, I’ve found myself playing this guitar less and less as my tastes continue to evolve. In fact, my strat has been my main guitar for the past year and a half. Back when I purchased the Anderson I really gravitated to higher output pickups. Not so much any more. When I started playing teles back in 2004ish I realized that lower output pickups had a much sweeter & brighter sound. Conversely, hotter ones can sound harsh and darker. I’m not saying that all high output pickups are dark & harsh, but they certainly *can* be as is the case w/ the pickups in my Anderson. Continue reading “I ♥ Dimarzio Pickups”
I love mobile devices. You name it, laptops, smart phones, tablets, etc. There’s just something about a small screen that’s portable that draws me in. I still have very fond memories of my first monochrome PDA with 2 MB of storage. I also had a really great Windows mobile device, the HP 1910 made by HTC. Back in the day these things were amazing. …but they’ve started accumulating in my house. I need a better lifecycle for getting rid of old things I no longer use. Continue reading “How much is too much?”
After a four month wait I finally got my Naylor Duel 60 amp and 1×12 cab. ….It was worth the wait. The amp sounds incredible and is surprisingly versatile. It’s difficult to describe the sound, but overall it’s very smooth, thick, punchy, and responsive (how’s that for a generic tone description?). The drive channel is what put Naylor on the map as one of the first boutique amp companies in the early nineties. It’s a very Marshall’esq overdrive, but a lot fuller sounding. It’s hard to describe, so let’s just say it’s what I always wanted Marshalls to sound like. Continue reading “Naylor Duel 60”
Over the years I’ve had several sets of both Gotoh & Schaller tuners. When I built my last strat I opted for a set of Schaller mini locking tuners. I went this route because this was the only locking set that Warmoth sold. In hind sight that was a dumb decision. This marks the last time I settle for hardware over convenience. The Schallers did work OK, but after a re-string they take FOREVER to settle in and hold tune. Not only that but they felt cheap and the gears didn’t feel very smooth. Even though I wasn’t 100% satisfied with them I was planning to just tolerate them. That changed a few weeks ago when the high E string tuner on the developed a rough spot on the post. It basically sliced the string as it’s tuned to pitch. 100% useless; total garbage. I’ve never experienced anything like this before with a tuner. Continue reading “Gotoh Tuners > Schaller Tuners”