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Phil Graham (@Roadstead) wrote in on twitter with a question and a comment. My reply was just a bit long for twitter, so I thought I'd answer it here.

Going to build my brother in law a Stella. Have you played with diode pairs or bridge between trim -> level or trim -> ground?

No I haven't! One of the things I did when I designed the front end was to put a little op amp distortion in there. Playing with diode distortion is on my list of things to do. I know a lot of theory behind it but I haven't played around with actual circuits before.

If you get something working that you like the sound of, let me know! Make a video of it if you can, and I'll post it here.

Also, you could add a cap in series with R1 to bleed off some of the higher harmonics like the miller capacitance does

I also have not played around with adding a tone circuit but if I did want a tone circuit, that's pretty much where I would put it. Except I would put it after the trim and level pots and before R1, or before the two trim and level pots entirely. I did experiment with a funky tone circuit that was integrated in to the entire backend, and it should have worked but it did absolutely nothing. So I got discouraged, but I should really dig that out and see if I can get it working. The idea was that it would cut the higher harmonics even if the back end amplifier was distorting, which sounded awesome on paper but in real life did not work at all.

A leaky dishwasher while we were on vacation lead to some flooding in our basement. The flooding led to moisture and the moisture led to mold!

The worst of the mold damage was confined to my electronics workbench and my collection of antique cameras, of course.

Cleaning up the mess has taken up every bit of free time available over the past week. Of course I had just recently moved my shipping operations to the basement, so that's where all of my stock of kits was, and everything. It will be a while before I have more kits in stock. More information can be found on the status page.

If you want to be notified when Stella amp kits are back in stock, sign up for my email list!

I went on vacation recently, and took the Solar Stella with me. Most of the time it sits on the shelf in the living room, and I haven't really taken it anywhere. I figured this would be a good chance to test out the ruggedness and build quality to see how well it holds up. Plus I didn't want to worry about batteries, which is why I built the thing to begin with.

I did find a couple of issues with it, using it on a daily basis, shlepping it in and out of hotels, taking it to the beach, trying to keep it out of the reach of my toddlers. I'm still investigating one of the problems I had with it (I know what's wrong, just have to figure out how to fix it), but in the meantime, I'll post a few photos I took as I move them off my flash cards and get them edited.

About thirty minutes ago, I was sitting at my desk. It's a hot summer day, I'm upstairs, and sweaty. My iPod nano was sitting on the desk, connected to my Apple Cinema Display, happily syncing and charging.

I shifted my arm to get a better angle with my mouse, and suddenly OW!

That's odd. The sharp edge of the iPod nano must have hit some nerve in my arm. I picked up the nano and a sharp jolt went right through my hand. Yeeeowch!

That's an electrical jolt. Why is my iPod electrified!? Is my charging cable frayed or defective somehow?

More importantly, what am I connected to? I'm sitting in a plastic chair on a hardwood floor. Current should not be flowing through ME. Then suddenly I realized: I've got my Macbook Pro sitting on my lap, charging.

Now, I am wearing pants. I'm not even in shorts! But it's hot and sticky enough, (and my arm was definitely sweaty enough) that I conducted a current from my iPod to my Macbook.

The Macbook is plugged into the socket on the near wall, and the Apple Cinema Display (which was not connected to my Macbook in any way) is plugged into another socket across the room. Those two sockets must be on different household circuits for there to be such a potential difference! (Either that or my Cinema Display is electrified!)

Yikes!

Being a good electronics geek, I tried to measure the potential difference and I couldn't do it. I don't know why, but the probes on my meter just wouldn't make a good connection with the metal on the Macbook. Even when I tried to measure resistance from point to point on the metal case, it measured Inf. ohms. But if I angled an LED just right, I could get the LED to light up, with one leg connected to the Macbook and one connected to the metal case of the Cinema Display. Pretty cool!

A few minutes later, I had another, more serious realization: I just took an electrical current across my heart. Several times, actually.

Now, as far as I know I have a strong heart, and don't feel any ill effects. But if you do have heart trouble, be careful with your metal cased Apple products!

But man, can he play the drums:

I wrote an article about my new Strat clone, and my quest to add tuning stability to it: Jenga blocking a tremelo.

First off, I'm starting something new. I've arranged with a friend of mine to pre-build some Stella Amp kits! So for an extra assembly fee, you can get the board pre-soldered. All the wires and potentiometers and such are not soldered. If you want one of these you will still have to solder on the pots and the input jack and the like. If you are unsure of your soldering skills or if you just want to save yourself some time, you can pick one of these up.

I want to be clear, this is just the board with all of the components that will be assembled. It won't come with a speaker or a cigar box, and it certainly won't be ready to play. You'll still have to put some DIY elbow grease into getting it to work. But if your favorite part of making an amp is the woodworking or the exterior decoration, and you find the the actual electronics assembly tedious, then this will be a way that you can outsource some of that tedium.

Oh, and if you want to sell assembled Stella Amp kits on ebay or something, I do offer quantity discounts on kits. Unfortunately, I don't have any way of making that quantity discount happen automatically with my shopping cart software (although that feature is on my massive list of things to do). So if you want to order a bunch of kits, drop me a line at support@crazybutable.com, let me know what kind of volume you are interested in, and we'll talk.

Finally, I wouldn't normally tell you all this, but I just bought a postage scale. That means I can start fighting with my shopping cart to offer shipping based on weight. Once I can ship based on weight (instead of stuffing everything in USPS flat rate boxes), I can offer things for sale in the store that don't fit in the standard flat rate box. Things like speakers and cigar boxes. But that's all coming in the future, and I don't even know how far in the future it's going to be because I don't know how hard it's going to be.

Interesting times!

It's mulberry season (at least at my house) and before it's over I want to give you the results of a few experiments we tried recently with mulberries.

The first was fresh mulberry green tea. I took about a teaspoon of fresh mulberries, a teaspoon of green tea, muddled the mulberries in with the tea, and cold brewed it overnight in the fridge.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it came out bright purple, and it tasted weird. The green tea flavor and the mulberry flavor were definitely competing for attention, and neither of them could win out. It was very odd, and by the end of the cup, unpleasant. This is unfortunate because I dried a whole bunch of mulberries for putting in tea, because I was so sure it would work and taste awesome.

Maybe dried mulberries will work better? The dried mulberries smell amazing. Or maybe black tea is the way to go. Further experimentation is needed.

The second thing I tried was watermelon / mulberry popsicles. These were much more successful. Take about 2 cups of watermelon, de-seeded. Add about 1/4 cup of mulberries, de-stemmed (yes, that is difficult.) Mash them together with a potato masher. Add about 1-2 tablespoons of lemon juice. The popsicles were cool, refreshing, and everyone loved them except me, because I hate watermelon. (Bet you weren't expecting that twist! I made a lemonade/orange juice popsicle for me.)

At any rate, all six of the people who tried the watermelon mulberry popsicles said they were great. I tried just a smidge of one and I could tell that the mulberry and the watermelon flavors blended together very well. Highly recommended.

I got a great deal on a used MacBook Pro a while back, and it's a great computer and I love it, but the problem is it doesn't have any built in hardware acceleration for video. So if you are watching a long movie or doing FaceTime or watching a youtube live stream, or whatever, it *really* heats up.

This is a problem when you don't have air conditioning, because it REALLY starts heating up!

I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but I have this flexible cold pack, like for wrapping around ankles and the like. I put that on the table, and put a double folded towel on it, and put the MBP on top of the towel. I was thinking that maybe it would take the edge off, but it worked much better than I expected, it cooled everything way down, super fast.

Since the whole computer is one piece of aluminum, the whole body cooled down to a comfortable 72 degrees or so. If it was any cooler, water would start condensing on it! (It's 88 and super humid at the moment).

So this is great, I'm covered for the summer now. (In the winter, of course, I want all that heat.) Now I just have to come up with a cooling solution for the power supply.

I love this iPad rendition of Thunderstruck, mainly because it gives a different view on how complex (and melodic) the guitar part is:

(via The Loop)