A Geek Goes Flying

First I put together a pedal board to support my NUX MG-300 MKII. I ordered a Ghost Fire Standard 1.0 from Amazon, which USPS routed to Torrance for some reason (30+ minutes away), and it never got here. So Amazon shipped another one, which arrived. Cool.  Then I needed a volume pedal, as the volume control for the NUX is buried in menus and, patched into the FX RETURN input on my Marshall MG50RCD combo amp , or the AUX IN on the back of my Roland MicroCube  (which runs perfectly hanging off the DC output from the ISO Power Block , I had no volume control on the amp. I ordered a HOTONE on sale. That was also routed by USPS to Torrance. (?!?!) So Amazon sent out another one. That one went out UPS, though the tracking number Amazon provided has never been recognized by the UPS website. Amazon’s own tracking shows only “carrier delay” in Lodi (half a state away), 11 days ago, no update since then. So they sent another one! That one finally arrived. Then as I got into working wi...

I’m a big fan of Homebrew , and install it on every Mac I setup. Including my totally rebuilt MacBook Air M2 (AppleCare+ FTW), which came back to me running Tahoe. I was lowkey shocked to see this on the Homebrew website: “Homebrew supports macOS (Sequoia 15 and newer)...” Damn. I have a 15" MacBook Pro still running Monterey I want to upgrade at some point to whatever makes the most sense for that old warhorse; I was kind of thinking Sonoma, actually. Sequoia will probably run fine. (The only note on the OCLP page is that it has legacy Metal support, which, so does like half of my machines.) But still. Feels like they dropped support for macOS 14 and earlier really quickly. Intel support has apparently also been moved to “ Tier 3 ” support and is considered legacy, even though macOS X86_64 still represents about 14% of the users (with Apple Silicon users about 60%), for the 30 days 9/12–10/12/2026. Can shit stop moving so quickly, especially when it’s not strictly necessary? Th...

Ghost Fire board with gear mounted The rehearsal rig  To avoid lugging around my gargantuan FM3 setup (and cram it into a tight rehearsal space), I setup my NUX MG-300 MK II with some appropriate presets, added wireless with the B-5RC kit , and proceeded to hook it up to my 50 watt Marshall G50RCD combo amp, via the FX RETURN input (to avoid additional coloration, etc., from the pre-amp). Problem: Now I have no volume control, except the one on the guitar itself. I’m also not wild about constantly connecting/disconnecting the DC input on the back of the NUX (those 5521 barrel connectors wear out and/or break off, AMHIK.) So, being me, I decided to build up a small pedal board for this setup.  Asked ChatGPT¹ to find me a reasonably sized board that would accommodate the NUX and a Duncan DVP1 pedal, which is ... large. 12+" deep. Ghost Fire STANDARD 1.0  seems like it will fit the bill, and I like that it comes with a carrying case and some hook and loop tape, etc. (thoug...

Updated the NUX MG-300 MK II to Firmware 3.0.0 Gen2 (scroll down on the NUX page). Also installed NUX Quick Tone V2.6.7.16 (macOS) (ditto), and setup a couple of presets. (An aside: I need to look into “scenes” more. Watching this video , it seems like navigating between scenes and presets would be clunky, but there must be some reason to use them...?) Playing with my first NAM A2 capture and this board, specifically, this Marshall JCM 900 . Before a NAM capture can be assigned to an amp block, you have to import it into one of the 10 dedicated slots, using this button on the top of the QuickTone app’s window: Still learning my way around, but suddenly glad I decided to keep this thing (and sell the MG-101, even if I did only get a few bucks for it). Added a B-5RC receiver/transmitter pair to use with this board at rehearsals. (I was eyeing used Line 6 POD Go Wireless units, which bundle a receiver and G10TII transmitter, but if I’m also going to be picking up the bass for some songs...

Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) “is an open-source project that uses deep learning to create models of guitar amplifiers and pedals with state-of-the-art accuracy,” started by Steven Atkinson. It uses machine learning to make a digital “capture¹” of analog gear such as a guitar or bass amp, a pedal, a piece of outboard equipment, or a whole signal chain. A NAM model is a snapshot of that gear at one set of knob positions. In contrast with earlier profilers like Kemper and ToneX that kept their formats closed, NAM’s trainer, core DSP library, and plugin are all open. That has let hardware makers build NAM playback into their own products, and it produced a very large community library of captures, mostly hosted on TONE3000.  In June 2026, TONE3000 and Atkinson released Architecture 2 (A2), the first new default network since the original A1. It comes in two versions. A2-Full is meant for DAW and studio use, and TONE3000 says it uses 30 to 40 percent less CPU than A1 while sounding more a...

macOS text file icon Markdown . More and more tools are using, and defaulting, to it. Microsoft Office doesn’t import or grok it natively of course (though, it should; it took me all of about 10 minutes to write  a basic parser ). It’s ubiquitous. Reddit has used  it for at least a decade. The  Things  GTD app family  added it a few years ago . Etc. But it’s not always the most convenient format to work with, especially if you’re under deadline pressure. So I made my life a little easier, and learned about Pandoc in the process. 1. Install pandoc Either from a .pkg file downloaded from  GitHub , or via Homebrew . I went Homebrew, ofc: % brew install pandoc -y 2. Create a new Quick Action in Shortcuts Open the Shortcuts program under Applications on the Mac. Click + to create a new shortcut. In the editor that pops up, in the right pane click the ⓘ at the top to show Shortcut Details, and: ☑ Use as Quick Action      ☑ Finder. Me, I also made...

Walled garden as an illustrative concept We have a practice management system we rely on to manage our cases. It’s pretty good. It could be a lot better. There’s an API, which should enable integration with other tools that can help it be amazing. But. They locked it down. Annoying. They’re pumping money into their own home-grown AI tools. They’re trying to upsell me on their solutions. They boast they’ve put / are putting “tens of millions of dollars” into their home-grown AI tech. Cool. But, uh: “OpenAI and Anthropic expect to spend nearly $65 billion combined this year just on the costs to train and operate their AI models.”¹ Our vendor was showing off their agentic offering, and how it could calculate litigation deadlines based on, e.g., C.D. Cal. local rules . “Great, what about a judge's individual procedures?” E.g., Judge Walter  issues a standing order with a requirement not found in the local rules (which, annoyingly, is only in his Standing Order filed early in the c...