I had a friend ask me today what I would recommend on a $300 budget for a guitar and amp. Someone else said the guitar is more important, spend more on the guitar. I’m not entirely sure I agree with that.
In my opinion the amp is more important and is what will keep you playing. A shitty, tinny sounding amp is going to make you want to bin both your guitar and amp. Try this: go to a Guitar Center, find a shitty $150 squier brand guitar, go plug it into the smallest amp in the store. Sounds shitty, right? Now go find the biggest, baddest amp not sealed off behind glass. Go plug that guitar into that amp. Sounds amazing!
The amp is as much a part of the instrument as the guitar. Ten years ago a $150 guitar was something that would shred your hands apart and sound horrible, go out of tune and eat strings like no tomorrow. Nowadays brands like squier are producing incredible guitars for under $200. Hadlock’s rule for amps is “Buy an amp that is 60% the cost of your guitar, or at least $140, whichever is higher”.
Anyways, recommendation:
Guitars:
Yamaha Pacifica (Fender Stratocaster knockoff) – $179
—-Second option, Squier Stratocaster (Fender Strat knockoff) – $179
—-Third Option, find something pretty that you like from Rondo – $119 to $400+
Amps:
Vox VT15 amp, 8″ speaker, lots of built in effects, very easy to use, proper 8″ speaker, includes an analog “tube” in the preamp – $169
—-Second option, Crate 15 watt amp, full size 12″ speaker. Supply your own effects pedals. – $99 (I own one of these)
—-Third option, troll craigslist and lowball someone on a good looking amp that gets good online reviews. Continue reading →
For whatever reason they decided to break window buttons in the gnome GUI for Ubuntu 10.4. I dual boot Windows and Ubuntu and can’t be bothered to have such inconsistencies. Here’s how to “unbreak” this.
push Alt+F2
type ‘gconf-editor‘ without quotes, push enter
go to apps->metacity->general->button_layout
delete the old value field, replace it with this: menu:minimize,maximize,close
I spent about 4 hours trying to get this damn Netgear WG311v3 to work this afternoon with my new install of Windows 7 64 bit. Either there’s an issue with it working with > 2gb of ram, or it’s an unsigned driver, or both. Anyways, after several hours of furious googling and finding nothing but people talking about the problem, I found an excellent writeup on the solution here. It works! I’m going to quote it in case it goes down, as this seems to be the only solution currently. The files you need are here. In short, you are installing the Win7 Netgear drivers, then “updating” them from inside the System Manager with an old unsigned Vista 64 driver (driver linked to above) for the same wifi chipset (Marvell 8335). Relevant information is after the cut:
Continue reading →
Posted in computing
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Tagged 4gb, 64 bit, drivers, fix, how to, libertas, libertos, marshall 8335, marvell 8335, netgear, solved, wg311v3, windows 7
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Well I finally jumped in and bought my first legitimate copy of Windows. Newegg had a great deal on Win7 so I picked up a copy of that, along with an additional 2GB of ram and a much larger/faster primary hard drive. That should all arrive monday afternoon. I had picked up some weird virus that would redirect me to random websites. I could live with that until Win7 arrived on monday. Well this morning, Sunday, about an hour ago it redirected me to some lovely drive-by spamware site. So here I am, the day before Windows7 comes in the mail, reinstalling WinXP. Lovely.
I was a bit wary about Win7 after the whole Vista issue, but after putting my mother on it for both her desktop and laptop with zero problems, and my buddies all seemed to like it on their computers. I was going to wait for Win7 SP1, but it seems that I’ll be upgrading 6 months earlier than I’d hoped. So we’ll see how this new version of windows goes.
Steam is rumored to have a Linux port in the works; I plan on dual-booting Ubuntu 10.4 and Win7; Apparently TF2 runs all right under Wine already. We’ll see how that goes – my buddy, a big Linux nerd, says Win7 is so good he hasn’t booted into Linux on his desktop in months.
One joke I’d been telling my buddies is that I was buying Win7 for the Virus/Firewall. That’s partially true; a virus scanner costs about $35-50, but it’s included free in Win7, including updates for 5-7 years. Well anyways this blog post was meant to kill some time while XP installed, it’s done now, time to find drivers for everything…
For as much as I hate tech journalism, I sure do read a lot of it. Google’s “Fast Flip” feature turns up a lot of good, or at least interesting articles. I was dubious Palm would even find a buyer, particularly at full price, let alone in less than a month. To say the least, I was dumbfounded when I heard that Hewlett-Packard had bought them for full price, less than a month after Palm had officially announced their intent to sell.
I don’t need to enumerate why it’s a bad idea – anyone familiar with consumer electronics can tell you HP’s track record with mobile consumer electronics (Journada exempted). Rumbles of the rumored iPad prompted marketing from many companies to order R&D to develop competitors. Competitors built netbooks with touchscreens, running Windows 7, and showed them off in advance of the iPad, expecting some sort of thin client version of OSX. People bitched and moaned that TabletPCs had been tried and failed before, but PC makers weren’t going to be caught off guard without a competing product.
The iPad debuted, instead with the iPod Touch/iPhone OS. No OSX, not enven OSX app compatibility. Just syncing with iTunes. PC maker R&D departments breathed a sigh of relief, shelved their ill conceived prototypes ordered by marketing, and went back to building potentially profitable products. HP even announced they were cancelling the Slate tablet product that Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, had demoed personally.
So how did HP end up buying Palm?My guess is that HP is trying to brand themselves as “another Apple”. Simply going “linux” isn’t going to work out, at least not as a complete solution; and Microsoft would bury them, but purchasing Palm for their WebOS might allow them to build up the brand enough to inspire consumer confidence in their mobile offerings and uptake in HP consumer computer purchases down the road. Apple has fierce brand loyalty, and has also achieved excellent consumer lock in through impressive mobile devices, which has given them considerable growth. It’s certainly a long shot for HP to achieve even a fraction of what Apple has done, but it’s really the only road map I can see a bench warmer executive at HP, probably from a third-rate MBA program pitching, and successfully selling. It doesn’t matter if the initiative lives or dies in the long run, he gets a raise and a bonus anyways, with guaranteed job security for the next 3-5 years. 1 billion dollars for HP is “too big to fail” money.
Posted in computing, linux
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Tagged 3com, apple, bad ideas, buyout, consumer electronics, hewlett, hewlett packard, hp, ipad, mobile, packard, packard-bell, palm, slate, too big to fail, webos
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Google Analytics
has this neat feature that will show you a world map of where every visitor to your site is from, in many cases allowing you to drill down to the actual city they are from. I was amazed that I had visits from nearly 50 countries by the end of the first week of using Google Analytics, and it started to taper off from there. Wikipedia lists 193 widely recognized sovereign states, so when my site has been visited by 81 of them, I consider that somewhat of an achievement – many of the others are tiny specks of land occupied by less than 50,000 people. Anyways – watching my map fill from mostly white outlines to mint green or dark green has been interesting to watch. The countries that never filled in with a shade of green hasn’t been terribly suprising. I created a negative space map of the few countries that haven’t visited my site yet for you to see:
It’s obvious that most of Africa is well represented, along with most of the “near east” – the “stans”, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, some odd outliers like Mongolia, Papua New Guinea; I have visits from Saudia Arabia, but not Yemen or Oman. The patchwork on the left of the map is Ecuador, the Guianas, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, along with Cuba. To the north is Greenland and Iceland, which combined I think have a population of less than half a million. To the east of India is Bangladesh, Laos, Bhutan, and Cambodia.
So that’s based on 50,000 hits to the site over almost five months. I’d love to the number of countries on that map shrink, but I am pretty sure the DNS server for the country of Chad has been down now for several months. Some countries may be slower to “come online” than others. When you’re having trouble feeding your population, internet isn’t always a top priority.
Valve pushed out their new GUI for Steam today. It has some flaws, but it’s still a very serviceable interface. It looks basically like the Steam Beta, but now it’s mandatory. What might sound strange, however, is the Steam Chat sound is much… different. And a whole lot of awful. Anyways, looks like it is possible to revert to the “old steam” ding noise when people message you. These instructions should work for the most part when the Mac version is released. First you need to download message.wav, open it’s properties, and select “read only”. If you don’t set the sound file as “Read Only”, this will not work. Then:
Here are the steps:
- Grab a sound.
- Go to Steam/Friends. (c:\Program Files\Steam\Friends or similar)
- Replace message.wav with the new sound. Name it message.wav again.
- Set it to “Only read”, or “Read Only” in the file properties (right click file in Explorer or Finder -> Properties).
Now restart Steam, with your new Read Only message.wav in place. Should work perfectly. If you don’t set the message.wav as Read Only, Steam will overwrite message.wav with the “new” sound. I’ve zipped up some of the other messaging sounds here for posterity, in case Valve changes those as well down the road.
Also: For a lo-fi, old school feel, starting Steam with -no-dwrite should get rid of the font aliasing everywhere
Posted in Games, computing
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Tagged beta, chat message, chat sound, fix, Games, gui, message.wav, steam, tf2, valve
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I’m no railfan (at least I don’t claim to be) but transportation infrastructure is just damn cool, especially when it’s in your own backyard. The first time I used light rail was traveling to my high school graduation, to the now demolished Reunion Arena. The Red Line had just opened an extension to Plano that previous December. I took the DART rail all the way to Union Station, and walked through an underground walkway, popping up at graduation. Pretty neat. Since then the Blue Line has been formally opened and expanded, and two blocks from my last house, the Green Line opened up. Now the Orange Line is scheduled to open here in 2012. The green line is supposed to expand to Carrolton, where it’ll meet up with Denton’s “A-Train”, taking students and citizens north across the lake into the core of downtown Denton, and a bike ride from TWU and UNT.
Anyways googling about it I came across this interesting image. It’s all the current passenger rail, plus future planned routes and expansion options. I can’t really see the rail system getting any larger than this though. Click for larger:
Click for larger. The black is the existing, or at least “paid for” sections of rail. The red is the suggested areas. Of note, is the red McKinney and Frisco lines. Neither of those cities are currently DART members, and McKinney only marginally qualifies for DART service, as the rail line would have to cut through Allen, which does not want to be part of DART, and recently Plano has made some minor in inquiries into pulling out of DART. I can see a need for rail service to Frisco, but barring some significant federal grants I don’t see there being enough ridership in McKinney to warrant 20 additional miles of rail. The density and the population just aren’t there.
Also of interest is the “Cotton Belt Line”, which would run from south central Plano, through Richardson (stopping at UTD), the Addison Transit Station (+ Addison Airport, and Addison Field) before terminating at DFW, along with several other stops. West from DFW and the Western terminus of the Orange Line the Cotton Belt Line would extend through the rapidly expanding northern suburbs of Fort Worth and down through downtown Fort Worth. I find it rather unlikely that we’ll see most of the other extensions built out in our lifetime, although it would be interesting to take a train ride from Cleburn or Waxahachie all the way north to Denton, Frisco or McKinney. Maybe support for these lines will muster as the price of gas skyrockets here as we dig our way out of this recession.
I had a friend ask me today what I would recommend on a $300 budget for a guitar and amp. Someone else said the guitar is more important, spend more on the guitar. I’m not entirely sure I agree with that.
