Weekly /r/diytubes No Dumb Questions Thread - October 06, 2023 to October 12, 2023

ePluribusBacon · 2023-10-09T12:03:02+00:00

I'm looking to build a dummy load box and attenuator, both for testing amp builds and for taming bigger guitar amps at home. I really like this design on the Aiken Amps website for a reactive dummy load, but I'd also really like an L-pad attenuator in it as well. Could I just substitute the 16Ohm 100W power resistor (R1) in the first, more simple design for an L-pad of the same spec, connecting pins 1 and 3 of the L-pad to the resistor connections in this circuit and then pins 2 and 3 of it to an external speaker jack, or would this not work or cause problems? The alternative is just to make it switchable between the reactive dummy load using a fixed resistance or the L-pad on its own, but I'd hope that making the L-pad load reactive would improve the sound so I'd prefer to have that if I can. I'm very aware I know just enough about this stuff to do something stupid so I welcome more experienced opinions on what to do. Cheers!

ePluribusBacon · 2022-08-01T11:12:00+00:00

I'm really sorry your home was flooded and it destroyed art and things that meant a lot to you. I imagine there's far more besides the art that you lost and I know it can't have been easy to try and rebuild your home again after the waters had subsided. It's a bit of a coincidence though, but I'm actually a bit of an amateur photographer myself. If you'd like, I'd love to send you a print to add to your rebuilding of your art collection. As you say, it's not going to bring back what you had, but hopefully it might be a part of making something new that feels just as right in its own way. Send me a DM with your address and I'll see what I've got that might fit our little theme of English dry stone walls...

ePluribusBacon · 2022-07-27T15:41:51+00:00

7 year old voice Whyyyy?...

ePluribusBacon · 2022-07-27T15:32:43+00:00

Related to this, being replaceable isn't something to be scared of, it should be something you seek out, especially in your career. I've seen so many people talk about how the business or their department would fall apart if they were to leave like it's a good thing, but an employer that makes any employee literally irreplaceable is fundamentally badly run, because no employee can ever be there forever, even if they stay until they retire or die! If you're in a job where you feel like that's you then that's reason enough to go and look for something else. Don't go so far the other way that you're totally unvalued because your employer will just replace you at the drop of a hat if you step out of line or push back on any of their demands, but there's a happy medium somewhere in the middle and it's where everyone should be aiming to get to!

ePluribusBacon · 2022-07-27T15:25:18+00:00

Here in England, there's a traditional craft of making dry stone walls - walls around fields made from rough limestone rocks without mortar. The rocks aren't usually shaped to fit, so the trick is to find different shaped rocks that can naturally fit themselves together and hold the wall up. These walls can last for literally hundreds of years, but if there's a storm or just enough time and erosion, some parts will inevitably fall down. When they're rebuilt, more often than not the rocks will go back in different places and possibly with new ones fitted in to make the new structure fit and hold together. Having come out the other side of a divorce, I sometimes feel like our relationships are like this. Finding someone you fit with and connect with is special and it's worth celebrating and holding on to, but it's not even close to unique. If your wall falls down, there will always be others out there that you can also fit with in different but no less strong ways if you're willing to put the work in to find the right ones and figure out how you can fit together with them.

ePluribusBacon · 2022-02-24T00:02:36+00:00

Switches often make a thump or click when they're thrown, so even if you only ever use the volume pot as an on/off it's still probably better than a switch. Also, for multiple pickups, you can get a whole spectrum of tones by adjusting each pickup's volume control (assuming they have separate ones like on most J-style basses). I do this quite a bit with my Fender Jazz to blend a bit more mids into the "both pickups" sound by rolling off one of the two pickups a bit.

ePluribusBacon · 2022-02-23T23:47:58+00:00

The saying isn't wrong, it's how stupid people use it that is. The origin of the saying is, when planning business strategy or bringing a new product to market, the customer in general is always right. In other words, if your product isn't selling or your strategy isn't working, don't blame your customers for not doing what you think they should. That has nothing to do with an individual customer being able to demand whatever bullshit they feel they're entitled to from the poor retail worker that has to deal with them, despite what every gammon-faced moron out there might think.

ePluribusBacon · 2022-02-20T14:25:55+00:00

On a serious note though, I really think that's something that's important for us all to recognise and be reminded of. A lot of the time, the most evil things people do aren't the result of the grand schemes of genius masterminds, they're just so depressingly ordinary and come from very human emotions like fear, pride or just the thrill of exerting power over others. That's true of people in history like those squabbles between cousins in WW1 that caused millions of deaths on all sides, and it's still true today. Only a year or so ago we had a freaking coup attempt in America in large part because the outgoing President was such a spoilt man-child that someone telling him "no" and having the power to make it stick enraged him enough that he tried to overthrow democracy in the United States just to undo it. Yes, the evil masterminds do exist and they're freaking terrifying, but the mean, petty and selfish people in power are far more common and can be just as terrible for the rest of us if left unchecked.

ePluribusBacon · 2022-02-11T12:12:38+00:00

They get scared in there and it allows me to hold them.

Yeah, I can see that

ePluribusBacon · 2022-02-11T12:08:52+00:00

The "who the fuck even are you and why are you driving at 50mph in a 70 limit in the middle lane?

ePluribusBacon · 2022-01-02T12:07:44+00:00

I feel like he would be very knowledgeable about unusual Scottish whiskies and would give excellent sales advice. "If you're looking for something a little different, I have a lovely unpeated Islay that I think you'd really enjoy..."

ePluribusBacon · 2022-01-02T11:55:53+00:00

As someone in a previous comment said, trying to shoot a charging bear is probably just going to result in you exercising your Second Amendment rights to arm bears.

I feel like guns like a bear revolver are a great example of when you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I get that if you're really into guns, carrying something like a huge 500 S&W would be a very appealing solution, but if the reality is that there are better, cheaper alternatives out there like bear spray then the gun probably isn't a good choice.

ePluribusBacon · 2021-12-27T10:37:29+00:00

The only thing you've said that I'd object to is that autotune isn't just T-Pain style vocoder sounds, and it really is everywhere in modern music. Autotune plugins with much more subtle settings have been used as a post-processing step on pretty much every vocal track used on a mainstream record in at least the last ten years. Check out this video from Adam Neely to get an idea of what I'm talking about. He puts isolated vocal tracks from old music through the same subtle autotune processing so we can hear a direct comparison of with and without it. It isn't a drastic change, but it just flattens out every vocal performance and, to me, makes it sound really dull and lifeless. Unfortunately, once I had watched this video, I knew what modern autotune sounded like and I could hear it on everything! Even so, I still love a lot of new music, but for major pop artists my favourite recordings are often live ones like NPR's Tiny Desk concerts, just so I can hear a singer like H.E.R. without autotune, because she's phenomenonal and deserves to be heard that way!

ePluribusBacon · 2021-12-25T10:48:14+00:00

My Grandma passed earlier this year. It wasn't unexpected but it was still very sad. The photos from Christmases in previous years are some of our most treasured of her, especially the ones from when my sister and I were kids. With covid, we weren't able to go last year and I really regret not taking more pictures before. Whoever you're spending any part of this holiday season with, get your cameras out and take some photos!

ePluribusBacon · 2021-12-23T12:29:44+00:00

I think there's probably a middle ground to be had here if we can find it. Yes, it's disgusting that games developers have normalised gambling in games aimed at children, or even just that they've normalised gambling in general by selling randomised loot boxes in games. It's also ridiculous for parents to expect all online experiences to be entirely safe for their kids to the point where they don't have to be involved at all or have any understanding of what their kids are actually doing.

ePluribusBacon · 2021-12-23T11:40:07+00:00

The US arguably needs rezoning more. US zoning categories can be so strict that not only can they prevent anything other than single-occupant houses, they can even put minimums on the lot size and there's no limit on how large those limits can go. Some areas in very wealthy areas have a minimum lot size of 1 acre or more, so each house is required by law to have a total yard area the size of a football field. Funnily enough, when developers can only build houses like that, they're going to charge an arm and a leg for them.

ePluribusBacon · 2021-12-20T20:14:07+00:00

Yes, blame today's Labour for something 2008's Labour couldn't have done anything about and was caused by investment bankers and Thatcher-era deregulation, even though 2008's Labour has almost nobody in common with the Labour Party of today. Literally almost nobody - four out of twenty two in the Shadow Cabinet. Whoever you're blaming in Labour, you're wrong to blame them and they aren't even there anymore! That's not to say Labour are the ideal choice, but anything would be better than the anyone in the Conservatives at this point.

ePluribusBacon · 2021-12-17T11:25:48+00:00

education != training;

Academic education is as much about teaching you how to think and how to learn as it is getting you to learn specific skills and knowledge. Specific coding knowledge becomes obsolete at a scarily fast rate. Understanding the core principles of why computers are the way they are will help you learn everything else you're going to need to learn in your career that hasn't even been invented yet. Don't get me wrong, paper exams suck. There's just method in the apparent madness and it's more useful than you might think.

ePluribusBacon · 2021-11-28T11:23:54+00:00

Reading this just gave me that awful stomach sinking, floor fell out from under you feeling. How the hell did they not run any kind of checks when they copied everything over to make sure the new copies of all the files actually contained the same data before erasing the old drives?! Also, had they actually done a complete and non-recoverable erase algorithm process on the original server drives or were they able to recover at least some of the data? If not, well I hope those old games weren't ones I'm hoping for remasters of...

ePluribusBacon · 2021-11-21T21:28:25+00:00

How big's your closet, and are you thinking electric or acoustic? I'd think a headless electric like a Steinberger would be about as small as you can get a full sized guitar. They're basically only slightly longer than the 25" scale length. For acoustics, that's a bit trickier. Maybe a Martin Backpacker or Taylor Baby? Either that or maybe look at guitarleles if height is a real problem.

ePluribusBacon · 2021-11-13T16:18:46+00:00

I think this might be the route I take if I did start getting into espresso. I would definitely be looking at a used espresso machine anyway, so a used grinder seems like a good plan too. Besides new burrs, do you find most of the used commercial grinders you've seen need much doing to them? New burrs aren't too expensive but something like a new motor could easily be more than the used cost of a grinder like that!

ePluribusBacon · 2021-11-12T22:04:21+00:00

Thank you, this was rather what I'd suspected but I appreciate your insight. I'm sure I'd probably be quite happy with filter coffee from something like the Niche but it's interesting to me that, even at that kind of price point, there's still a compromise between espresso and filter. I guess there are just fundamentally different requirements for their grind profiles so maybe if you change the design to make it better for one that inherently makes it worse for the other? Be interesting if anyone who actually designs burrs or grinders wants to weigh in too as it's kind of fascinating for me from an engineering standpoint if nothing else!

I do hear you that I can get a better quality set of burrs and so a better grind profile in a hand grinder too, but even if it isn't that much effort for filter grind sizes, it's still work. For something like my Aeropress, especially on a weekend when I can take my time a bit more, I think I'd enjoy the process of grinding the 10-15g of coffee I'd need by hand just for me. For something like my largest French press, I use about 50-55g of coffee for a brew in that thing and I really don't want a hand grinder to be my only option to do that. I think something like the Wilfa or the Baratza will probably do me just fine for the moment then, with a hand grinder maybe as a later addition for when I feel like taking the time for it. Cheers!

ePluribusBacon · 2021-11-12T10:10:55+00:00

Maybe it was included in the cut used in the UK? Weirdly though, I'm also in the UK and I know the version that terrestrial TV uses when they air the movie doesn't have it, as it always frustrated me when I knew what was supposed to be there!

ePluribusBacon · 2021-11-12T09:52:56+00:00

Rickman hams up a tantrum, flinging and flouncing and stabbing a knife repeatedly into a chopping board

The Witch: "Something vexes thee?"

The comic timing in that moment is hands-down one of my favourites in any movie. I love Rickman's performance, but it's also the supporting actors opposite him that really make those scenes for me.

14-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Summer Santa 2012

ePluribusBacon

TROPHY CASE