A Geek Goes Flying

🐦‍🔥 (or maybe 凤凰 ?) I haven’t played the MH-100QMNT all that much. I thought about selling it, but realistically I won’t get much for it , and I  have  been getting back into “super strats” more lately. This thing is cheap (made in China, and I paid $170 for it including a ratty but functional hard case), but capable. And I could use a lessons / rehearsal / gigging guitar I don’t care  that  much about. I started imaging loading it up with higher end Seymour Duncan pickups etc., but then, brakes screeching, thought: Why would I put $400+ into a maybe $175 guitar? Decided to see what I can do using only budget components. Carefully selected budget components, but budget pieces nonetheless. This project took longer than I thought it would, both because not everything was delivered with Amazon speed (the pickups and other electronics took ~7 days to arrive), and because this was my first time doing an electronics project like this.  Tuners & Bridge and other...

Kill Your Television, Burning Man ’97 This Slate piece put into words what I’ve been trying to: The reason TV characters felt real was because we spent real time with them—a standing date, week in and week out. They were in our homes more often than anyone but our immediate family, and they, usually, aged as we did, whether or not the show acknowledged it. Buffy started sophomore year one season and junior year the next; John Carter went from raw med student to seasoned chief resident. We knew on some level that the barflies from Cheers weren’t really our drinking buddies, but they served the same function—a group of lively, funny, unpredictable oddballs you always knew where to find. They were, in the words of another classic sitcom, there for you. Streaming shows, by contrast, turn up when they feel like it—dropping by months or years later, sometimes without even the courtesy of an advance announcement. Rather than a steady, manageable commitment, they take up hours at...

Patent drawing I see a lot of confusion regarding locking tuners online. A lot of people seem to think locking tuners will provide additional tuning stability, or are redundant when a guitar as a locking nut (a la Floyd Rose). E.g., one person claimed: “Tuning stability is why they were invented.”  So, um, yeah. Not exactly. Or at least not completely. The first locking tuners were invented by Robert Sperzel, who was granted patent 4,625,614 . The main benefit Sperzel lists in that patent is that his invention “provides a tuning device having a string post which is rotated through a short distance to quickly and easily tune a string of a musical instrument to a desired pitch [...] by rotating the string post through a short distance.” His invention was intended make string changes less of a pain in the ass, faster and easier compared to existing tuners, which he describes: “The string post of the tuning device [then in use] must be turned through several complete revolutions ...

Ditching the NUX for wireless (it’s fine for what it is, but I don’t need to be maintaining multiple sets of tones, cluttering my brain with multiple interfaces, etc., when that time/space could be better put to mastering the Fractal learning curve ). I’ve already shifted to using S/PDIF to my home stereo  but now I needed a wireless rig (dogs), and to keep everything bundled together and allow for “two cable” operation. This achieves that. Final form, at least for now (July 2026) The pieces Temple DUO 24 pedalboard, which may be overkill given the devices I currently have, but it’s at least not cramped (the 17 would have been), and gives some room for growth. Fractal FM3 , which needs/provides: Power (120V IEC) XLR output(s) for the FRFR / front of house S/PDIF output for the home theater Wireless in for the instrument Audio input for accompaniment tracks etc. Line 6 Relay G75 , which needs/provides: Power (9V⎓500mA) 1/4" output to the FM3 Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus , which n...