I was poking around YouTube and found a great channel and project, you should check them out! The Pickin’ On channel is filled to the brim with great acoustic bluegrass interpretations of some of the best songs around. From Nirvana, to The Guess Who, to Lynyrd Skynard, they’ve done it all! Check out one of my faves:
Happy Independence Day USA! I hope everyone enjoys their day off, but pauses to remember those who have served and do serve to keep our country safe daily. Thank you to our military, police, fire, emergency, and medical staffers work tirelessly in service to their fellow Americans.
The parts have arrived! It’s time for assembly. PCB and Parts are here! The printed boards from OSHPARK arrived recently and so did the components. Below is a list of the components I selected for this board. Item Mfg Qty Description Enclosure Hammond 1 Aluminum enclosure for stompbox Resistors Elegoo 1 525 pack of assorted resistors from 0-1M Diodes MclgclM 1 100 pack of assorted diodes DC Barrel Jack ThreeBulls 1 12 pack of 5.5mm x 2.1mm Op-amp Fairchild 10…
I’ve always wanted to build a guitar pedal from scratch. Why not start with the easiest of all: a clean signal booster In this series, I will detail how I have built my own clean boost guitar pedal. I will detail the schematic, what parts are chosen, the circuit stages, and how they operate, as well as following through to the finished product. The Beginning A clean boost guitar pedal should accomplish a few things: Take an AC signal…
The concept of computing has been around almost as long as the mathematics from which it derives its usefulness. The world of computing as we know it today only began in the last century or so, and really only since the invention of the bipolar transistor. Fast-forward to the modern era of computing wherein we have unfathomable computing power surrounding us daily. Computing platforms and the related technology is driving advancement in every industry across the globe. From research to…
There’s a new SSL/TLS certificate provider in town, and I think you should go check them out. Let’s Encrypt is a group run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and funded by the biggest names in tech. Mozilla, Chrome, Cisco are all on board to name a few. Let’s Encrypt is a fully automated Certificate Authority (CA) that can help server admins and owners secure their client’s communications. It uses the ACMEv1 and ACMEv2 protocol to achieve certificate creation, retrieval,…
AI or Artificial Intelligence has been making headlines the world over the past few months. It’s time we all learn a little about how AI began and what role neural networks plays. Artificial intelligence, also sometimes referred to as machine intelligence (MI), is a burgeoning field of Computer Science which has ties to many, many other fields. AI is the application of neural networks in various forms to allow a machine to imitate or give the impression of natural…
Distributed computing is the new norm. Multi-service architectures surround us daily. Our computing needs are served from many different independently operated services, and all implemented using different underlying technologies. When these independent units bring only one small service or set of services, it is called a microservice. While there is still some industry discussion about the exact properties of a microservice, one thing can be agreed upon: microservice-based systems enforce modular design by default. This begs the question, if…
The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) spec has been around since the early 1980s. The introduction and wide adoption of the standard has allowed multitudes of musicians, musical enthusiasts, hackers, programmers, and geeks/nerds of all varieties to create, modify, update, and generally hack this awesomely simple protocol into many instruments and tons of other stuff (see these crazy but cool MIDI interfaces). A New Spec These days the MIDI spec can be be found implemented on tons of hardware, from…
I often find myself using a calculator in my day job to convert large numbers between base-10 and hexadecimal. Windows’ built-in calculator can do it, but painfully. Linux Mint’s calculator is better, but only marginally so. Enter SpeedCrunch. SpeedCrunch is so incredibly feature-packed, and has such an intuitive interface, that I could hardly believe that it’s a free tool! Working with numbers Using the built-in functions hex and bin, numbers are easily converted into various representations. Very useful for programmers.…