info about things
There was a surprise this morning in my mailbox. Blizzard decided to send me an invite for Starcraft II closed beta. At first I thought that it was a spam, but reading through I got really excited. It’s been only two and a half weeks since the beta started.
SCII Loading Screen
SCII
Building Ax84 Hi-Octane is quite easy, because everything is well documented. You can also buy a package containing all the major parts – tubes, transformers, and a chasis to hold it all together. Then all you need to do is carefully follow the documents and assemble the circuit together. All projects are quite simple and with basic soldering knowledge could be accomplished. Although, word of warning, that you must be very careful while testing the amplifier, because of the high voltage (~250V), which can easy turn out lethal.
Since I didn’t want to buy anything off the internet and waste any money on shipping, because I live far away from the United States. I needed to look for alternatives, so I searched local markets and shops for similar parts I could use. Most of the materials I found were produced in Soviet Union, so I used different stuff than in schematics. Like EL84 tube was replaced by 6P14P. The biggest problem was to find the transformers, especially the output transformer. At the end I had to wind the output transformer myself. Yet alterations did not stop there. I also wanted to add a feature that would let me switch between the clean and distorted sound (known as channels). Later on I added spring reverb too.
In the end, I have an amplifier that suits me just fine – sounds wonderful and is versatile (tone wise).
Front panel
Front panel with an On, Standby and a reverb control at the top. 2 pairs of gain and volume controls. Tone – bass, middle, high – pots.
Back panel
Holes on the top for ventilation. Back panel with reverb in/out. Pedal switch. Loudspeaker connector for output. And fuses below.
Next article will be about tubes, what did I use, a little comparison between, other alternatives.
Today, I finally recorded some sound samples of my self built guitar amplifier – Ax84 Hi-Octane with spring reverb.
Recording quality isn’t the best. There are clipping in some places because of the cheap microphone I used.
Clean
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Clean with heavy reverb
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Half-way distorted (Bluesy tone)
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Distorted, scooped tone (middle frequencies cut out)
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Next up, some pictures !
Today I finally tried Awesome, a well-known tiling window manager. I must say that I like it a lot, and I’m gonna be using it for some time. Awesome is truly awesome.
awesome is a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. It is very fast, extensible and licensed under the GNU GPLv2 license.
It is primarly targeted at power users, developers and any people dealing with every day computing tasks and who want to have fine-grained control on theirs graphical environment.
To begin the Awesome journey I went to Awesome Wiki that has everything for beginners, like myself. The setup itself was very fast and just by copying the sample configuration file, I was up and running Awesome window manager. Without making any changes to configuration, I must say that Awesome is pretty good out-of-box. It has nice pop-up menu which reminds me of Openbox, a panel/taskbar, a system tray and space for widgets – everything that a window manager needs.
If we look at the configuration file, we see that it is pretty straightforward. The Lua syntax is simple and understandable. Making adjustments and adding new features is pretty easy. Thanks to the well documented Awesome API documentation.
Since I have a dual-head setup, it is important for me to know how a window manager handles two screens. By default configuration Awesome creates two screens, each with own workspaces, which are called tags in Awesome.
Without any customization to the default configuration file Awesome handles things quite good. For example, I can watch videos (from vlc, mplayer or flash) in full screen no matter what the layout is, which I couldn’t do in Xmonad. Of course this could be set in Xmonad, but Lua syntax is understandable than Haskell’s. Although it doesn’t have a debugger like Xmonad, you can check the syntax for errors with awesome –check.
Awesome - January 2010
I must say that Awesome is very user-friendly, it is fast, customizable, visually appealing, works very well with default configuration, seems stable and even can be fun. It is great for beginners.
In these series I will write about, how I created my a guitar amplifier all by myself (with help from father and the internet).
Ever since I bought a guitar I wanted it to sound good too. After buying a cheap Marshall MG30dfx, which sounded quite bad, I decided that it would be easier to build a tube (tubes > transistors) amplifier myself, instead of buying one, cause they expensive. What I wanted was a standard tube amplifier with gain, tone and volume settings. So I searched the internet, and found that the best option for this would be Ax84 Hi-Octane project.
The Hi-Octane is like a juiced up rock and roll amp from the 80′s… only smaller. Like a P1 but with an extra preamp tube, this is a good choice for someone who wants more distortion and has built an amp or two before. Tone goes from cleanish to semi-saturated distortion, depending on gain settings and guitar volume setup. Responds well to pedals and retains your guitars tone.
AX84 Hi-Octane amp with spring Reverb
This amp is small and good for home use, since it’s output power is only 5 watts, and still that is a lot, especially when distorted. As far as sound goes, it has nice “warm” clean tone, more distortion gives a nice Blues tone, and, distorting the sound further, I can get nice crunch for metal like music.
Ever since I bought my laptop, Linux has had problems with its touchpad. For example, Arch recognizes it as an PS/2 mouse instead of Synaptics or ALPS touchpad. Because of this, when I switch off the touchpad with its off button, I can’t turn it back on again.
So after doing some research, I discovered that there is another way to do what I want. That is to load/unload responsible module with modprobe.
I made a simple bash script that does this, and mapped a keyboard shortcut. Also I needed to change the sudoers file, so that I can use modprobe -r psmouse and modprobe psmouse without giving the root password. Works like a charm.
#!/bin/sh
if lsmod | grep -q psmouse
then sudo modprobe -r psmouse & echo 'Touchpad turned OFF'
else sudo modprobe psmouse & echo 'Touchpad turned ON'
fi
Recently I heard about Bluetile. So I gave it a shot.
Bluetile is a tiling window manager for X based on xmonad. Windows are arranged automatically to tile the screen without gaps or overlap, maximizing screen use. Bluetile’s focus lies on making the tiling paradigm easily accessible to users coming from traditional window managers by drawing on known conventions and providing both mouse and keyboard access for all features. It also tries to be usable ‘out of the box’, requiring minimal to no configuration in most cases.
Its been some time since Google announced that there will be extensions similar to the ones that Firefox has. Few weeks ago they released a build featuring the extensions. Very quickly people started developing them and even sites for extensions showed up (http://chromeextensions.org/).
But only today Google officially launched the beta version of extension channel.
I have always been interested in computer programming, more specifically in software programming. I have some PHP knowledge, in fact it was my first serious programming language I learned, not counting QBASIC, that I learned in school decades ago. However, I don’t really enjoy creating web applications, I think that I can do more things in the operating system (there’s bigger freedom) than in the browser. However browsers are slowly becoming our system, but that’s a different topic.
Anyway, Python was the language I choose. To me it seems very simple and can do powerful things.
It’s been over a year now that I have slowly explored it. There are multiple books to start with, and surprisingly they do not cost anything, at least the .pdf version. One of those that I used to introduce myself with Python, was Byte of Python. It covers almost all the essential things and has nice comparisons with other languages, so everyone can learn something new. Then comes the Python documentation, which is a really good resource working on a projects.
After learning the basics, there are lots of places to fulfill your knowledge – like solving problems with Python in Project Euler and The Python Challenge. The last one is really great, because it specifically designed for Python. Each challenge has taught me something new.
Recently I decided that I would like to start a project of my own. The idea is to create application for audio file organization – Awesome Music Organizer (AMO). This would serve many purposes. Learning Python, collaborating with other people (if there will be any) and I haven’t found a nice music organizer in Linux that could do everything I want. So I have added more information on the AMO page.
xmonad
For over a year now I have used Openbox as my only window manager in Linux. It is lightweight, stable, easily customizable and fast, yet somehow I was interested in something new.
Xmonad is the first tiling manager that I installed. I chose Xmonad because it seems to be the most popular out of them all. It has great documentation and community.
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