Author: mrguitar

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2026 Strat Wiring and Pickup Swap

Every few years I get an itch that needs scratching. As a perpetual optimizer, I often ask myself, “what could be better?” The answer came back this time as this guitar could be “more Eric Johnson” like. Let’s be honest here, I have several strats, and at this point, that’s really why I still have this guitar. The Dimarzio HS-2 (wired as a single coil) in the bridge is brilliant, but after spending time with my seafoam green strat I find myself wanting more traditional single coils in the neck and middle, a la EJ. I still like the sounds of the previous Area 58 & HS-2 I had in the middle and neck respectively. Over time it became apparent that some of the glassiness was lost in the 2 & 4 position, and I felt like I would enjoy more vintage style pickups.

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RHEL 10 on my Laptop with image mode

WooHoo! RHEL 10 is here and it’s time to get moving with an image mode setup for Red Hat Summit!

Last week a buddy at work got a new laptop and wanted to install RHEL 10 using image mode. I thought to myself, “that’s great idea, why haven’t I already done this?” I really like using Fedora and getting exposed to the latest and greatest open source tech, but I also really value the stability and curation that happens with RHEL. Since virtually all of the applications I use are on flatpak, and any “fedora-ish” things I need are available via containers, why not have a bullet-proof OS using image mode?!

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Adventures with bootc: Upgrading to Fedora 42

Twice a year, I eagerly await the new Fedora release and typically move to it on my systems during the beta phase. I was particularly excited about trying this with F42 because my setup *should* let me change the tag on my image to from :41 to :42 and then all of my “child images” should get automatically rebuilt, and then all upgraded. I’ve been a user of various rpm-ostree distros for many years now. I typically tell people that once you go through a major upgrade, that’s it – you’ll never go back. As you might imagine this post probably wouldn’t exist if everything was smooth sailing. Don’t get me wrong everything worked out fine, but I thought it might be helpful to others if I documented a few things about my experience.

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GPU Drivers & bootable containers (bootc)

I’ve been loving my new desktop setup for about ~four months now. I also think it’s pretty nifty that this system has only booted anaconda and containers! The integrated graphics were pretty impressive, but the simple, occasional CAD work I do quickly exposed the weakness in this area. I also want a setup that can offload some AI models to the GPU. I had heard that it’s painful to buy a GPU right now – that’s an understatement. As I write this, NVIDIA is in the middle of releasing the 50xx series and scalpers are working hard to buy them all. Anyway, I settled on a cheaper one from Amazon, until the stars align for me to get something like the 5090.

Th 4070 is pretty awesome for any graphics needs I have, but really isn’t enough memory to be useful for AI

If you’ve ever used Linux with a “team green” GPU, you’ve no doubt run into the fun world of drivers on Linux. We’ve known that using image mode & bootc would be a powerful tool for managing dependencies like this, but this is the first time I had the opportunity to get hands-on. This post will walk through some of the possible scenarios for handling GPU drivers on Fedora, CentOS Stream, & RHEL when building bootc images.

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bootc for Desktops?? Tell me more!

bootc is ridiculously amazing for headless servers – everyone knows that! It’s also a great fit for appliance-style graphical kiosks. What about a daily driver like a desktop or laptop? The TL;DR is it’s amazing, and I thought I’d share my experience.

So clean. So organized. Pro tip: input-leap works great w/ Wayland is seamless for using the same mouse and keyboard across all my systems.
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Bootable containers on the Raspberry Pi 4

After moving my home server to fedora-bootc, and gitting a really nice git workflow in place, I remembered that I have this Raspberry Pi 4 sitting around collecting dust. This was a really nice system that I bought to run Octopi to manage my two Prusa Mini printers. Now that I’ve upgraded to the MK4, I don’t feel the need to use Octoprint any more. …but having a useful aarch container host on the network *is* appealing to me especially since I do a decent amount of container work on my M3 Mac using Podman Desktop. Fortunately, it’s pretty simple to get fedora-bootc working great on the Pi4. So grab your RPi, blow the dust off, and get ready to get some value out of it.

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Automating bootc deployments using git

My last post walked through my migration to using fedora-bootc on my home server/NAS. In this follow up, I’m going to show you how I’ve automated the OS upgrades. I should note that while I’m a huge fan and believer in Git-Ops conceptually, I’m a noob at using the technology. Please leave a comment or ping me if you see improvements that can be made. I suspect there are many! Anyway, let’s dive in.

Here’s a glimpse of the result of going through everything in this post.
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Migrating my Fedora Server to fedora-bootc

Earlier this year I put together an upgraded home server. In all honesty, I’ve been loving it. Not only has the hardware & disk layout worked really, but deploying all my applications as containers has made everything just work and I haven’t had to put my hands on the system once. Everything is self updating. ….until something inevitably breaks, but I’ll worry about that later. ;)

My goal from the beginning was to deploy this using bootc, but due to some time pressure at work that wasn’t possible. I finally made some time and successfully moved the system over to fedora-bootc, and I’m going to share my experience for others considering doing the same. Keep in mind that I don’t expect details of this post to age very well as the tech is moving pretty fast.

Yes, I put this blog post together from a presentation I gave!
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Blues Breaker Clone

I finished putting together a General Guitar Gadgets MBB kit over the holidays. I had ordered a case from Pedal Parts Plus but sense it hasn’t shown up in weeks, I used the original case for one of my GGG tube screamers. The wiring is really sloppy on this one. I’ll definitely clean that up when I move it to the permenant case. Anyway, the pedal sounds great and I couldn’t be any happier with it.