welcomes careful drivers
It’s new! It’s very slightly improved! Welcome to the website.
Built on a flat-file CMS back end called PivotX. There’s my bloggy stuff, old bits of music and some photographs. If you’re looking for Hot Cold Ground, click here. …A colleague has bought their partner an iPad for xmas, along with a Wacom Bamboo stylus. I loved the stylus, and wanted one for my smartphone, but didn’t want to pay for it. A bit of Googling revealed some home-made versions, with an old pen and some damp sponge, but they felt a bit ‘bodgy’. So I thought I’d have a go.
The base for my device is an old tyre pressure gauge I got free with a bike magazine years ago. It has to be a metal case as the capacitive screen responds to tiny electrical charges from your sweaty fingers. The nib also needs to be conductive. I found a bit of conductive foam in the memory-slot hatch of a broken laptop, but you see these little pads everywhere (well, if you dismantle electronic things often enough you do).
The finished stylus in action! Free painting app for Android – Sketchbook Mobile Express. Next, find a clip and a nice top bit to finish it off!
Nice end plug and protective lid from an old felt-tip pen. I’ve also glued in a cut-up allen key for extra weight. It also now has a pocket clip (not pictured!)
Here’s a PPT to WMV, uploaded to (and hosted by) Google Video just like uploading a picture.
This works for Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, however if you’re a page admin it will hide some useful links. The process basically hides the CSS element which governs the right-hand column, so it’ll only work until Facebook does another re-write (in about 10 minutes, by previous experience).
Both browsers use the Adblock Plus extension/plug-in. To get it go to:
To configure it in Firefox, click on the little ABP icon at top-right and click Preferences. Then click Add Filter…
In the New Filter box, type facebook.com###rightCol and hit apply. Refresh your Facebook page and hey presto!, it’s gone.
In Chrome, once you’ve added the extension, go to the spanner icon, tools, extensions the click Options for Adblock. Click Add your own filters tab and add the same text. Job done.
As I mentioned earlier, it kills the whole column which in Page administration contains some useful stuff, so you’ll need to disable this filter temporarily to see these.
Done some testing in a ‘real’ environment now, and it’s a qualified success. It handles the FX send and return plus the channel control without a problem, even over 10m of cat5. However the disappointment is that as soon as I add the input from the guitar it squeaks and feeds back like a bastard. It just about copes over 1.5m but is unreliable over a longer run. If I had any electronics knowledge at all there’d probably be an explanation.
So I will be using it live, as I hope it’ll reduce setup/breakdown times. Pics of the final setup to follow…
The stage end now looks like this:
In a metal box for protection from drunken dancing audience members with uprated jack sockets.
Inside view:
Next week - testing live!
Moved into phase 2, here’s what I have now:
Basically a Cat5 socket connected to 4 bits of guitar cable with jacks on the end, and;
and a Cat 5 socket connected directly to 4 jack sockets.
My stage guitar rig can be a bit of a bind when setting up and breaking down – it’s configured thus:
Guitar plugs straight into amp
Effects send to Boss GT8 pedal
Output from GT8 to effects return
Additional cable from GT8 to footswitch allowing GT8 to switch channel
So all in all 4 cables involved. I wanted to try & cut down, initially by using a 4-pair multicore, then I could bring the guitar input down to the floor, keeping to a single cable run.
But multicore can be a bit expensive, and I’m an IT network technician with access to lots of Cat5 cable, so I started to wonder… Could I run the whole thing over Cat5 UTPnetwork cable, put a RJ45 socket at either end then all I’d need is a patch cable of the correct length.
No-one as far as I can see on several Googlings has tried it, so the only way to find out is to experiment.
Today I have this:
which is an old guitar lead soldered to one pair of a bit of Cat5, punched down onto a socket module
and this
which is Cat5 cable punched down into a module with a jack plug on the end
Plug in the lead to my guitar, plug the 2nd bit into an amp*, connect with a 5m patch lead and… bingo! It works! No apparent loss of signal strength or quality.
*I did use a proper amp to test – the mini-Marshall is just to show schematic!
Next step is to put in the other channels and see if there’s any crosstalk, hum or interference with the FX loop running backwards & forwards. Watch this space.
