Big Fat Ostrich

I’m officially finished messing around with operating systems for awhile, and I’m officially done with Arch Linux. I re-installed my office machine with Arch Linux a while back, and it was a great experience. Except for one thing. It sucked.

Seriously, if it wasn’t for the one tiny detail of Arch Linux sucking, it would have been awesome.

To be fair, I didn’t try hard enough. But, I just want an OS that works. Arch Linux is a great OS for performance nerds, like Gentoo fans who enjoy compiling every module for days. In my own experience, this is a fun way to really get to know Linux. However, those days are behind me and I just want an OS that works.

Arch Linux is so light and fast, but it’s also a desolate place where nothing lives but the core OS. You have to install every package manually and when I found that even the fucking calculator had to be installed (as part of gnome-extra) well, that was the last straw.

So I made an executive decision and did something I haven’t done in years.

I installed Fedora. Fedora 16.

Why? Two reasons. For one, most of our software runs on Redhat and Fedora is in the same family. Second, I use dual monitors and Ubuntu has become a complete idiot when it comes to managing that.

Well so far so good because Fedora 16 (Verne) works right out of the box. Yep. Everything works: external monitors (both of them) work which includes flipping them vertically or horizontally without having to mess around with your xorg.conf. No wireless issues, and the clean install is fast and snappy. Overall, Fedora 16 is a huge improvement over whatever Fedora I used in the past (like 2008). Even YUM feels better and package management seems tighter.

So for now I’m just going to use it as a regular desktop and see if any issues come up. I really have nothing else to say about it right now because I’m still blown away by the fact that the whole installation was complete and working in under 20 minutes.

Here’s the default desktop. Looking kinda Steampunk:

We had fajitas last night so we were left with a bunch of cheese, salsa and sour cream. Here’s how I incorporated them in my standard omelet recipe to create one of the tastiest culinary wonders to ever come out of my 2 square foot kitchen!

Omelets are fun and easy to make if you got the right tools, namely a good anti-adhesive frying pan and a stock pot lid.

Ingredients you will need:

- 1 onion

- A bunch of mushrooms

- Some salsa

- Some sliced up hot peppers

- 6 eggs

- Milk

- Butter

- Tabasco

- Baseball mustard

- Salt

- Pepper

- Grated brick cheese

Preparation:

Chop the onions, the peppers and the mushrooms to the size you prefer. I like big chunks but hey, everybody’s different. Put the frying pan on medium fire, put enough butter in it so that there’ll be some left when you add the eggs later. Put your veggies in there and stir fry them for 10 minutes.

While that’s going on, put 6 eggs in a bowl, a cloud of milk, a bit of tabasco, a bit of cheap bright yellow mustard (that we lovingly call “baseball mustard”), but be very careful not to overdo it. Just a light squeeze of the bottle, 2 at the most. Add salt and pepper (more pepper, less salt). Whisk vigorously until the stuff is kinda consistent.

When your stir frying is done, add salsa to the frying pan(3-4 tablespoons of it). Wait another 4-5 minutes.

Then add the eggs mixture, stir to make the thing even, add the grated cheese on top and reduce the fire to 2. Let it go like that for 2-3 minutes, then cover with a pot lid and wait another 5 minutes. It should look like this (yeah, the cooking process somehow gets rid of half of it, it’s MAGIC!):

Serve with a mountain of sour cream and enjoy!

Maybe they’re not officially dead, but it’s starting to feel that way.

The guitar tab plugins that I’m talking about are the add ons that you would use in applications like Rhythmbox or Amarok (that piece of crap), Songbird, Banshee, or even Exaile (which is cool, but based on Amarok, so therefore it’s a piece of crap).

Or maybe it’s all Ubuntu 11.10′s fault.

I don’t know anymore. I once wrote about guitar tabs in Rhythmbox and how they no longer work in Ubuntu 11.10. Banshee doesn’t seem to have the extension, and Songbird is no longer maintained and is basically dead in the water. I tried Exaile which CLAIMED to have a guitar tablature plugin (in the search results), but when you go on their website, there’s absolutely no mention of it. Nada.

I think what this all points to is that developers are starting to care less and less about applications that you need to install. The focus is now leaning heavily on cloud based software, and music apps are no different with iCloud and Google Music. But what are your options if you want to play your music locally and display guitar tabs?

Maybe Canary has the answer. (Yes, another animal named software!) Canary.fm is so freaking new I don’t think anyone knows about them. And hell, they only have 4 Twitter followers. But, they’re doing something interesting which is cloud based guitar tabs. And the tabs look super slick. Now, if you can display guitar tabs WHILE I listen to my music (locally or in the cloud) I may be sold.

Here’s a vid:

Since Ostrich Guitar Labs has an international reputation in the field of quality drunk soldering, we’re constantly being commissioned for all types of repair jobs. This week we tackle a BC Rich Warlock aka THE metal bass.

The problem was the wiring, and by wiring, I’m talking about this mess:

I don’t even know where to begin. Basically the volume pot was completely BURIED in dried glue. The wires themselves wrapped up in a crazy spiral. Who does that? Really.

Anyway, it’s a very simple circuit so I’ll keep this post completely uninformative. 1 single volume, one tone and two pickups. The hardest part was scraping out the glue. I had to use knives, pliers and a fucking spoon, but I did it. Nice and clean.

The working circuit looks like this:

The finished product. Approved by the cat:

YEAH!! YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Shit like dis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arKpdxjHamI

SHOULD NEVER EVER EVER happen. “Cliff  Blackwood is a huntah…” or “Kurt Bliffwood is a huntaaaaah”… or whoever the fuck is a huntah. NO! NO VEVO! WE’D RATHER YOU DON’T EXIST! AND IT’D BE HARDER TO GET TO THE SONGS! AND THEY’D BE IN “SUPER SHITTY RESOLUTION” INSTEAD OF “EXTRA SHITTY”. But we don’t care. And Birth Kitwood is not a huntah. Blark Thurstwood is a dude who should go to bed now. That’s right, John Engelwood, go to bed now, with your cross-eyed crosseyes. And you shitty black belt. The joke is over. It wasn’t funny in the first place. Now it’s over. Go to bed. GO! Put on a clean diaper and go. Florch Blortfegelwood. Nobody loves you no more. Blake Frenchwood.

No wait. It was Chuck Norris. STILL! I’m super angry. The U2bes aren’t what they used to be.

Fuck you, Chuck Norriswood.

-Dan

Holy fuck, whenever it’s too cold to go outside, I have to invent new dishes from all the shit left in the fridge, because, fuck going outside right?

So for this one, all you need is:

- 3 slices of bacon
– A hamburger patty
– 2 toasted pieces of white bread
– Baseball mustard
– Mayo
– Super spicy salsa
– One (1) Kraft Single

So, you put the bacon in a frying pan. When it’s sizzling, you put the patty in so it cooks in the bacon grease.

While all that’s going on, put the bread in the toaster. When the patty is almost ready, leave it in the frying pan, turn the fire off and put the Kraft Single on top of it. When the toasts come out put mayo on a slice and mustard on the other. Put bacon on each of them. Then put the patty with the cheese in between and pour some salsa on it. Cut the thing in half and enjoy!

Here’s what it looks like:

That’s right boys and girls. We’ve got video features coming so we thought “hey, let’s create a youtube channel!” And we did.

This first video is just a test. BUT WHAT AN ADORABLE TEST!!! JUST LOOK AT THOSE BIG BLUE EYES!!!!

[Dan out.]

Dan just got his brand new American Standard Fender Stratocaster, in Olympic White, no less! Of course, this called for a celebration, so we met up at Big Fat Ostrich Guitar Labs to road test it.

And take it apart.

And change the pickups.

With a glass of Campari in one hand.

And a red hot soldering iron in the other.

Yeah, life’s dangerous.

Here’s the strat.

It’s such a beautiful guitar, that we just had to take it apart. Dan had already devised a plan and ordered a set of D. Allen 69 Voodoo pickups. All we had to was remove the stock pickups and start soldering. Actually you gotta solder to first and THEN remove the pickups. But you knew what I meant, didn’t you?

Now, normally you’d remove the strings and unscrew the pickguard before starting. We were lazy and actually just loosened the strings until they were slack. Then we unscrewed the pickguard and flipped it over for the operation. It’s do-able, and we did it.

Check out that clean wiring job. It’s even got that inside of a brand new guitar smell:

It’s a pretty simple circuit. In fact, we discussed this while taking a break over a glass of sweet sweet Campari after unscrewing that pickguard and loosening the strings. The circuit and volume and tone pots haven’t changed much since they were invented and it’s fascinating just how pleasing and enduring the shape of a Stratocaster is. Just like the Telecaster, they got that sexy shape right very early on.

Ok ok. Less talk, more soldering. Here’s what our signature soldering joints look like:

1 pickup in, 2 more to go! And no, we are not leaving an extra pickup in there:

And just like that, it’s done. Look at those joints:

And that’s it! We’ll be back with some sound clips because you can’t hear shit from just looking at the pics.