kid radio - awesome school project by Paul Rubenstein, teaching kids in high schools in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan to build their own guitars and tin-can amplifiers. Man, I wish I did this in school. [via]

Google launched this Google Browser Sync tool for Firefox. It's mean to keep your settings in sync between multiple copies of Firefox. At first I was excited because only weeks ago I had the idea for something like this as setting up Firefox on new Windows installs is annoying. But it doesn't sync your Firefox extensions! Weak.

The 50 Dumbest Rock-Star Extravagances is a fun read. I don't know if bailing yourself out of jail should really be considered "dumb" though. Also check the rock star finances sidebar with Harvey Gettleston. [via]

CCHits - it's a Digg-style interface for Creative Commons licensed songs. It's a little sparse on the voting, but you can check out the highest rated stuff here. My track Dirtbag's on there.

Apparently if you buy a new Renault Megane car it comes with a built-in mp3 player. And included on that mp3 player you will find the song Making Me Nervous by yours truly. I believe that's the most expensive way I've ever seen to get a copy of my song. Sweet! [via]

I tried to switch from Bloglines to Rojo for my main RSS reading. Someone I respect but can't remember the name of mentioned they had been lured away from Bloglines by Rojo so I thought I'd give it a shot. In the interest of improving Rojo, here we go:

• I had already made an account a long time ago, couldn't remember my password. The password retrieval didn't work. I sent them an email and got a response back pretty quickly, verifying the password retrieval was broken. They got me a new password in a few hours though, not too bad.
• Right off the bat I want to like Rojo. It's very slick and seems to have a lot going on for it. I fantasize about all the awesome ways it's going to help me read and manage all my feeds with its web 2.0 goodness.
• I import all my feeds. Very easy. I don't like the page layout though -- I'm a brutal RSS skimmer and the headlines are too faint for me to skim very well. I whip up a Greasemonkey script to embiggen and embolden the entry titles and am happier with it.
• I really like the "Add mojo" idea (it's very similar Digg-ing something, but inside the RSS reader). Not many people use it though and also I don't know what adding mojo to an article actually does for me.
• I feel confused by the entries that are rolling in. I realize it's set to sort stories by "RELEVANCE". What the hell does that mean? I'm an info-nerd, I just want everything in chronological order. I switch it to stories sorted by date.
• Stories sorted by date is still weird compared to Bloglines. I really want the stories sorted by date and also by the category I've put them in. If there are five new Boing Boing posts I'd like them grouped together rather than mixed in with all the classified ad feeds I subscribe to. As I cruise through my news I feel sort of lost, unaware of the context of what I'm reading. Is this written by someone I know? Etc, etc.
• To make matters worse, a lot of the feeds I imported are labelled as "Untitled feed".
• I don't like having to go through pages of items. Bloglines lets me scroll through everything that's new.
• Marking as read is weird and clunky. The Mark All Feeds Read should be over near the feeds. I turned on "Automatically mark a feed as read after viewing that feed" but that doesn't work for reading new items? Also when I'm paging through the new items I have to remember to hit "Mark Page Read" before I hit "next page". Bleah.
• The new item counts on the left seem to always be out of sync with reality.
• Some feeds (like Negatendo's Livejournal for instance) just show html craziness.
• Site could be more responsive, it was a little slow earlier today when I was trying it out.

It's a bit prettier than Bloglines (though more cluttered) and certainly more web 2.0-ish. If more people used it, I might be sucked in more by the Mojo feature. An RSS reader and Digg functionality go together nicely (for me at least). But the confusing feed order probably means I'm headed back to Bloglines for the time being.

I sanded the guitar over the past couple of days. Before:

After:

 

Not pictured: me using my 26-inch pythons to remove the bridge screw sockets. Train, say your prayers and eat your vitamins.

So there's actual wood grain going on there, sweet. Anyway, sanding by hand sucks. I got most of it done but borrowed one of them oscillating sanders to get rid of the really stubborn stuff. Also doing the little rounded tips at the end of the guitar was a living hell on ice.

I ordered some Golden Age Humbucker pickups for it. They're cheap and they have really decent ratings at Harmony Central. I'm too poor and shoddy a guitar player to buy really nice ones so hopefully these'll do. I can't imagine much worse than what was in there before. Can I also say I care so little about "classic tone" that it's ridiculous. I've been reading a lot about pickups and everyone's bizarrely concerned about how "classic" their tone is. When someone tells me their pickups sound like they're from the 50s I think "oh, you mean crappy?"

Thanks to Paul Roub for pointing out that I could ditch my big ugly pick guard and use plastic mounting rings instead. I love the internet.

So next is to treat all the dings and notches and fill the holes in the body, re-sand lightly and then put some sealer on it. I still haven't found where they sell Krylon spray paint in Ottawa, but I'm a ways off from actually painting. Getting closer though...

Other parts in this series: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

What to paint my guitar. A normal person might have thought of this before they stripped it down, but not me baby. Anyway I fudged up a little photoshop thing to help me try colors on. Here are some quick ones I did:

Oh I lack the talent. Anyway here's the Photoshop PSD file if anyone wants to, uh, remix it. The source for my guitar, if you will...

Daisy Rock Guitars - I don't know why I'm painting my own guitar. The butterfly series is perfect for me.

This weekend I got it into my head that I want to paint my old guitar (as well as replace the broken switch and the crappy pickups). I also want to learn how to modify guitars instead of being a guitar retard (or guitard) for the rest of my life. Here's what I've gotten done so far:

Gibson Epiphone G-310. The first left-handed guitar I owned and the guitar I used for I Don't Know What I'm Doing. Before this I was playing an upside down left-handed Wayne's World Fender telecaster.

The tools I'll be using (forgot to include the putty knife I used to strip the paint). Heat gun (or pistolet thermique in French), mask, goggles.

Tore the guts out and detached the neck. It's at this point I'm realizing I may never get the guitar back together again without having to cry to a professional who will tease me. I also can't get those metal bridge things out no matter how much I swear, so I guess they're staying in while I do this thing.

I move everything to the garage. Taking the paint off the back is surprisingly easy though it's hard to hold the guitar in place while I heat gun and strip it.

Flash forward a couple of sweaty hours and I think it's more or less stripped. The edges were a pain in the ass. It can still use some clean up, some black remains on the edges, but I'll wait until someone's around who can hold it for me.

So next is sanding. Also deciding if I'm going to do the neck and headstock. I can't find much in the way of instructions for that on the internet and I'm hesitant to try it in case I damage the fretboard. Also I have to figure out what pickups I'm putting in this thing as well as find a replacement pickup switch.

Oh and what color am I going to paint it?

Other parts in this series: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

The Infernoptix Digital Pyrotechnic Matrix is pretty much screaming to be used in a live show or possibly as kick-ass road signs.

Forget big screen and flat panel TVs. The Infernoptix Digital Pyrotechnic Matrix is the latest in high-impact visual and audio entertainment. The 96-inch screen employs computer-controlled bursts of fire, in a 12 x 7 array, to create scrolling text, simple animations, freehand sketching (via mouse), and an audio level meter.

Some videos:

I went into a music store the other day thinking I'd buy a Shure Beta 58A mic for live vocals. They didn't have any and I got talked into picking up an Audix OM2. I tried it out with the band last night for the first time and I was seriously impressed, what a huge difference over my SM48 and 57. I can't find many reviews of the OM2 online but so far I'm really happy with it.

Roomba hacked into slightly cruddy musical instrument - the next step I hope is to hack the Roomba into an unstoppable killing machine.

R-F-T Telefunken M16 and Apex 460 Bench Test - two microphones: one $1400 and the other $230, both with basically the exact same insides.

LyricWiki - a wiki of song lyrics. Wondering how long until they get hassled by the feds, but it's a nice resource for now.

Worst gear purchase? - a fun thread full of audio gear regrets. My worst was probably the EMU ESI-2000 sampler where I tried (and failed) to convince myself I was wrong about soft-samplers being the future.

Google Music - word on the street is that Google Music is on the way. I'm wondering what interesting things they could bring to the table.

80s videos - a huge list of links to 80s videos on Youtube. Not just mainstream stuff either, lots of neat alternative stuff. [via]

I Don't Know What I'm Doing is now available for ordering in over 2400 records stores worldwide thanks to CD Baby's new In-Store Distribution. If you need any info on what stores near you will order my album, drop me a line with your location and I'll look it up.

As a follow-up to my recent live sound and Google Notebook posts, I give you my Google Notebook about live sound. I've been researching how to process live vocals as well as microphones and if you care about that then I guess you could read my notebook and follow me around and we could be boring together.

So far I think the consensus is that I need to try my Digitech VX400 again and maybe actually spend some time working on the sound now that I sort of have an idea what I'm looking for.

Google Notebook is still weird. Any page with more than a paragraph of good information I bookmark, so it's got a really narrow focus. Still no tagging bothers me. It's hard to move lots of items between notebooks. The notebooks display your oldest entries first, which isn't what I expect. The URLs aren't friendly. But Google's so smart, it must be a problem with me.