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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)

ryugreen put up an awesome post-build (with pictures!) on the Stella Amp forum, go check it out!

Where the amp really shined for me was when I plugged in my korg synth. It's a batter poweredc portable synth, and combining the two gives me a great portability for an electronic instrument. It has plenty of volume and with the 6.5" two way i used, lots of bass and mids to help out with the range of the synth. Very impressed.

Getty Images completely redesigned their watermark, and the new design is amazing. It gives credit to the photographer, in the image itself, and it has a link where you can find out more about the image at any time.

Now, compare this to the old Getty Images watermark:

I have no idea who this person is. I have no idea who took the picture. I know it's a Getty Images picture but I have nowhere to go for more information because if you think I am going to spend even half an hour combing through their archive looking for more info you are out of your mind. I found this image on a Tumblr blog, so I can't even get any clues from the file name. I did a Tin Eye reverse image search and it came up with zero results, I'm guessing this means that Getty Images is blocking its images from image search engines. But it also means that if I want to use this in a design or a campaign I'm completely stuck and it's not worth my time to find out more.

The old watermark is huge, and it is RIGHT on top of the middle of the image; horribly distracting. Also notice the new watermark has NO mention of Getty Images at all. No logo, no text. I don't know about you, but I tense up when I feel like someone is trying to market to me. The old watermark is all about The Brand. When I look over to the new watermark, I actually feel myself physically relax.

The new watermark also has a striking visual design (although I'm sure we're going to see a TON of copycats.) I immediately got it, whenever I see an image like this I'm going to think Getty.

Finally, do I even need to point this out? Putting the link on the photo is a genius move. I cannot believe no-one else has thought of it. The old watermark was ugly and designed to keep you from sharing or using the image. The new watermark looks great, and with social media, each one of these images is like a little advertisement for the image itself. Any time a Getty Images picture goes viral, that link, embedded in the photo, is going to bring people directly to a place where they can license the photo. The photographer is going to get credit too, it's a win for everyone.

Check out Getty Images' statement on the new watermark.

A few months ago when I was stuck in traffic, I noticed the car in front of me had a license plate that said LM4250.

"Huh," I said to myself. "That guy really likes his National chips. What's an LM4250?"

I looked it up when I got home, and the LM4250 is a low power precision op-amp. "Maybe he's the guy that designed it, or he did some important work on it. That's pretty cool!"

Then we moved to the new house, and I started seeing a LOT of LM license plates. LM4105, LM4216, etc. What the heck was going on?

Eventually I figured it out. Near our new house is a Limousine company that specializes in "regular" sized limos instead of stretch limos. They have a whole fleet! And as I drove past it one day, I noticed that all of their plates on the cars are LMxxxx -- LM for Limousine, presumably.

Sadly, not all of the plates corresponded to actual part numbers. Still, it's fun when every now and then you see a DC/DC step down controller parked at the curb:

Earlier I mentioned that I would do a more thorough writeup of my solar powered Stella amp. Over the weekend I finished that up and I posted a a new project page for the Solar Stella, with a ton of photos and a video demonstrating how it sounds, so go check it out!

One thing I like about hand drills is that I can pause the action whenever I need to in order to take a picture:

This is one of the amps that I took with me to the Maker Faire.