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I like to experiment with materials, designs, and techniques outside of conventional luthiery to build low-cost, high-quality, fully-functional, and attractive electric guitars and basses. What I am not interested in is doing the same old thing the same old way it has been done for decades.
This site is arranged in four main sections:
- Home is where you are at now.
- Projects contains details on all the instruments I have built, and some other related subjects.
- Laboratory contains tools, techniques, and designs used in my projects.
- Blog - anything else I feel like writing about: carpentry, programming, music, etc
This site is aimed at the home hobbyist, and particularly the first-time builder. So welcome to the lab. See what's on the slab. I hope you find this site interesting and informative.
Navigating This Site
Main navigation is at the right left around here somewhere. First there is a "breadcrumb trail" showing where you are, with "up-links". This is followed by a list of child pages, or "down-links". Around that is a list of sibling pages, or "side-links". There is also an overall
Site Map
, as well as indexes for each major section. Finally, the search box works surprisingly well, or just hit the Random link.
If you are on a small 'mobile' device like a phone or tablet, the main navigation collapses to a button at the upper-right, with the rest at the bottom. The button opens a condensed popup menu. The mysterious unlabeled checkbox in the menu is a 'pin' that holds it open as you navigate between pages. You can force 'mobile' mode on a larger device by making the browser window narrow. In any case, the layout is optimized to make the best use of the available screen space.
History
This site was assembled from a mass of material I had previously posted on Talk_ass. This is seven years of material - over 200 pages and a gigabyte of images, and ongoing. Just getting it all back up was a huge task.
The new slideshow
A while ago, I took a look at the database tables, and realized that about half of the database was due to the slideshow plugin MetaSlider. MetaSlider crapped out thousands of entries across multiple tables. What bothers me is not so much the waste of storage space as the incredible inefficiency of having to retrieve all of that bit by bit from the database server. I did my best to minimize that kind of inefficiency, while the writers of MetaSlider did the opposite. In computer programming, more is almost never better.
More: Really Bad Programming ...
A while ago I said I couldn't find where the new Nivo Slider slideshow plugin (above) keeps its data. That's because it doesn't keep it anywhere. It generates each slideshow on the fly from scratch, with lord-knows how many database calls. I suspected that it was grossly inefficient, and I was right.
More: More Bad Programming II ...
I've been working on another website lately, but it uses the same code base as this one, so all of the improvements get carried over. The latest thing I've done is a complete rework of the slideshow plugin.
First, I stripped out a lot of fat - unused features, ugly themes, 'call-homes', etc. I hardwired some stupid options, added some new ones, fixed a few major problems, and made it much faster. Finally, I put the whole thing through the wringer and got rid of anything that was not strictly needed, everywhere - PHP, JS, CSS. My version is less than half the size of the original.
The result is a yuge improvement, both on the front end, and especially on the back end:
More: Slideshows ...
I have been hit by trolling internet lawyers before. It costs them almost nothing to send a letter, but it can cost you a great deal to receive it. I don't think Fender has a leg to stand on in this case, but they have two things in their favor: their own lawyers, and a piece of complete insanity known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.
All they need to do is find the right judge somewhere - anywhere - and this case is a go, and they will probably win. It could go on for decades in appeals, all the while damaging Fender's intended victims, so that Fender wins even if they lose.
Such is our legal system, and I want nothing to do with this, so I have taken down all my Fender projects until this shakes out. Sure, I only built a few things for myself, and I'm not selling anything, but for the price of a stamp they can reach out and touch me, and as I said, I've been there before. The American legal system is not about laws, it is about lawyers.
Fender makes nothing from sales of used guitars, but I say boycott all new Fender products. That includes: Bigsby, Charvel, EVH, Fender, G&L, Gretsch, Jackson, PreSonus, and Squier. If you want a new Fender-style instrument, buy a Music Man. Or buy used.
More: Fender ...
I cringe whenever I see a new major version number of WordPress - what did they break this time? But you can't hold back the tide, so with some trepidation I installed it on a test site, and to my surprise, I found nothing wrong. The changes are all on the back-end, and completely unnecessary, like animated menus. The people in charge must be six-year-olds in need of entertainment.
Then I tested the editor, and not at all to my surprise I found they had broken it in a way that shows just how little they test things or care. Fortunately I was able to fix it with a little more of my own code. That is the risk you take when you use a platform like WordPress. Someday they may break something I can't fix.
Of course, they also added support for AI. At least that is disabled by default, and it is going to stay that way. I am not even curious, crusty old curmudgeon that I am.
