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.