EndeavourOS on my desktop and laptop. Works like a charm. By far the happiest I've been with a desktop distro.
On my server VMs I'm running Ubuntu Pro because it's absolutely impeccably stable, Pro is free and I like the idea of having the option of not upgrading them for 10 years.
All running on Proxmox. I have a few appliance type VMs like opnsense and 3CX and they're nice and stable too.
Everywhere? Where will we put all the existing things? You can't turn the whole world in to just toilets, that's taking the piss!
I was once not spotted whilst wearing a bright fluorescent orange cycling rain jacket and standing 6'5" tall in an office of suits.
Wednesday Addams from the Netflix show
I received so much spam and abuse of my network from .xyz domains that they are fully blocked in every conceivable way from being accessed or accessing my network.
I'm with you. The infantilism of films is so depressing
I would check your but first and make sure you get some nut sauce on there.
If you still feel like it's the tuners then I'm a big fan if the Wilkinson EZ-Lok tuners.
Perhaps consider an amp modeler. There's a lot to choose from out there and most sound more than good enough. If your amp has an FX loop you can plug a modeler in to the FX return.
I would steer clear of the MG series of amps.
What's your budget? That would drive all recommendations.
Not at modest volumes it won't. A 1W valve amp is going to be more than loud enough for use at home levels, let alone cranking a 20W amp
A few people need to get off their horses and come up with and agree to IPv4². It's exactly the same as IPv4 except there's 2 more octets of address space - 48bits for addresses*. Job done. You'd see wide spread adoption in under 2 years and then we can forget about it all and move on with our lives safe from the clutches of IPv6.
I don't give a crap that doesn't neatly fit into 32 or 64 bit architectures. It's more than doable at plenty fast speed and it keeps everything manageable.
Just because a DE looks sparse doesn't means it also uses less resources. In imagine KDE would actually run well as it doesn't need all the bells it offers and is actually a well written performant DE.
Pretty sure my Seagate usb disks I use for backup are SMR and sustained writes are awfully slow. Luckily I've discovered restic for backing up which lowered a 1.5tb weekly incremental backup from 9hrs to 1 min.
Don't have to take the penalty if you never start another F1 race taps nose
I mean I can't pick one really. Parabol/Parabola by Tool ranks pretty high
(I told you I can't really pick one)
Ok, I've cracked. I have a nice pedal board and I can get some nice sounds from it. But I'm selling almost all of it and moving to Helix. Keeping a rams head muff and blues driver. But the expandability, versatility, simplicity of setup and no need to worry about patch cables, power supplies etc..
Am I going to regret it?
My camera (Nikon Z6) has a lot of features I never use and probably never will. Bit it's still an amazing camera that I can use to take photos with that I couldn't with other Nikon cameras I could afford. So it doesn't matter if it has a weird feature I don't use when I regularly make use of a feature it does so well. Paired with an old 70-200 2.8 I have taken a lot of photos I would have previously not have dreamed possible with my older camera setups.
I would 100% recommend taking lessons. I waited 25 years to start lessons and wish I'd done it much sooner. It's amazing how much you can improve in 6 months. And even professional touring musicians in really big bands still take lessons. It's only theoretically possible to self teach yourself, but practically very hard, especially if you have no musical background. If nothing else it gives you a motivation to practice whatever you've been set the previous 1 or 2 weeks.
I noticed that I wasn't getting many mails (I need better monitoring), and discovered that my iredmail server was poorly.
I have spent far too much time and energy on getting it back and working these past few days, but I've finally got it back up and stable.
Some background: I've had iredmail running for probably going on 6 years now and have had very few issues at all. It runs on an Ubuntu VM on Proxmox and originally was running in the same VM on ESXi (I migrated it over). I haven't changed anything to do with the VM for years other than the Ubuntu LTS updates every 2-3 years, it's always been there and stable. I occasionally will update the Ubuntu OS and iredmail itself, no problems.
Back to the problem... I noticed that Postfix was running OK, but was showing a bunch of errors about clamav not being able to connect. Odd. I then noticed that amavis was not running and had seemed to just die. I couldn't find any reason in any log file. Very strange. Bunch of hunting, checking config file history in the git repo. Nothing significant for years.
Find that restarting the server got everything back up and running. Great, lets go to bed.... Wake up next morning to find that amavis was dead again - it only lasted about 40 mins and then just closed for no reason. Right, ok, time to turn off clamAV as that seemed be be coming up a bit wheilst looking, follow the guide, all is well. Hmm, this seems to be working, but I don't really want clamav off. A whole bunch of duck duck going and I still couldn't figure out a root cause.
And then it clicked, the thing that was causing amavis to close was that it was running out of memory and it was being killed. Bump the memory up to 4GB and re-enable everything as it originally was and.... it seems to have worked. Been going strong for over a day now.
I don't know what it was that's changed recently which has meant the memory requirements have gone up a bit, but at least it's now fixed and it took all of 2 minutes to adjust.
The joys of selfhosting!
There's 3 things that really stand out for me that I would say made a massive difference to my life:
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Cordless screw driver. Bought the day after building a flat pack bed with a crappy screw.driver that just shredded my hand. Thought it was frivolous at the time, but I've used it so much since. It's light, small enough to fit in my pocket and good for 90% of DIY tasks.
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Tassimo coffee machine. Bought it 9 years ago, use it every day. Nice quick easy coffee. What's not to like.
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My first DSLR camera. It was a Nikon D50 back in 2005/6 and it sparked my interest in photography to this day. It gave me a hobby I can take lots of places and do it alone or with others. I never loved the D50 camera itself, but I did get some really nice shots with it
Thank you for the replies yesterday about my drill. I think I'm going to get a cheap corded SDS drill and some big bits. This is what I need to feed through the wall and there is no way to detach the cable from the camera and feed it the other way. I know it needs to be weather shielded, but this is a mad amount of connectors!
The icon is a little different to what I've seen on others and I don't know how to tell otherwise. I have a job that involves drilling through a breeze block wall about 20cm and I don't want the expense of buying an SDS if I can help it.
This drill was given to me a long time ago, hence not knowing what I have here.
Thanks!
The icon is a little different to what I've seen on others and I don't know how to tell otherwise.
Thanks!
Seems like a shame to throw away and must have a use.
It's not the most exciting pedal in that it's just a clever switch, but I do like the possibilities it gives.
It has two switchable loops. In one loop I have my Diezel VH4-2 working as a preamp and in the other I have my Peavey Classic's pre amp. This allows me to switch between which preamp I want to use whilst also keeping my delay and modulation effects in the FX loop - post preamp.
Guitar goes in to the input. Red loop sends to the VH4 and returns from the VH4 preamp output. Green loop sends to the front of the amp and returns from the FX loop send. That's the two preamp loops. The left switch toggles between each loop and the right switch bypasses both loops, which in my case means I have no preamp as the signal goes straight to the FX return via the delays - so I'll keep the right switch always on.
Then the output of the pedal goes to the modulation and delay pedals and then to the amp's FX return.
I got my first guitar in about 95 and have been totally self taught. I stagnated massively for around 15 years in the middle when I infrequently played then got frustrated all I could do was some Nirvana power chords.
Started playing again around 5 years ago and had my guitar professionally setup - what a world of difference that made! I've made decent progress since but it's still all just the odd riff or solo here and there and there's a lot I can do a lot better. Using YouTube videos is only getting me so far and some 1 on 1 I hope will do the trick.
My wife started taking piano lessons and it inspired me to do the same for guitar. I'm sure it will be helpful even if they're going to rip my technique up and start again.
Have you had lessons or are you self taught? What helped the most for your playing?
I thought I'd never see the day.
For King Tovalds and Country of FOSS OS's
Wear Arch, but I run EndeavourOS. If EndeavourOS launched a line of shoes I'd probably wear them.
I have just spent almost 5 days trying to rid the interference noise (and at one point the radio) from my speakers that started when I setup my new Behringer audio interface.
Signal chain: Peavey Classic 20 MH -> XLR -> Audio Interface -> NAD hifi amp -> speakers.
I must have tried at least 20 different things, so many youtube videos, including complete rewire of pc cables, usb, power cables. Different power outlets, with and without the UPS, extension cables from different floors of the house, turning off the tumble dryer, removing smart plugs, different cables, different usb ports, turning everything but the amp and interface off. Bought a noise canceling usb (ifi Defender+)- made things maybe a bit better when unpowered, made things worse when powered. So much crawling around under my desk! It was only an issue when the XLR was connected from my guitar amp, whether the amp was on or not - XLR unplugged PC audio was fine. Thought I'd try a different power cable to the amp - unplug the existing one and all hell break loose - SO MUCH NOISE AND INTERFERENCE!! Give up on the power cable idea. Then I unplugged the XLR and decided to try the headphone output of my guitar amp in to the interface. Whilst reaching around the back of the amp I see a small switch labelled "ground lift". Press it. Problem solved! Almost no noise. If I had happened to have that pressed when I bought the amp over a year ago I'd have had no problems. FFS!
And now the ifi Defender+ does work and has made everything perfectly quiet when nothings playing. No more annoying noises when I move the mouse with a fuzz pedal on. Really nice, so a pretty good result overall, but so much effort!
So remember kids, if you have a noise issue, check if your equipment has a ground lift button. I didn't see a single YT video that mentioned ground lift and I didn't even know they existed or that my amp had the button even after I was sure it was a ground loop issue.
A Player strat in black with maple neck. So far I'm pretty impressed. The neck is nice, the back is satin and the fretboard is glossy, but not sticky like I thought it might be. The electrics all seem high quality. Fit and finish all excellent and almost as good as my PRS SE. Came setup with the bridge very floating and the 9 gauge strings old and corroded, but whatever they were coming straight off either way.
I've already modded it to end up with the guitar I really wanted.
New single ply black pickguard, decked the trem, tightened the truss rod, and a new set of GHS Gilmour strings.
Now I'm very happy. I just love looking at it as much as playing it.
Thought I'd share what I think is one of the most beautiful guitars I've seen: my PRS SE Custom 24 in bright Bonnie Pink. The light was catching it quite nice this evening.
This thing plays as good as it looks. The neck is really nice, the frets and edge of fretboard are like butter, the trem is really nice with a push in bar. The high fret access is just superb. I love the pickups that have some great bite, but clean up with volume and tone adjustment. The split coil setting, although not perfect adds a lot of versatility so I dont often want to swap guitars just for some single coils - well, most of the time.
Only criticisms would be I think it should have some with locking tuners, but as a £90 add on I can see why they did it to keep the cost down - having since added them I really like the PRS locking system.
The pickup selector switch I find to be quite out of the way and the trem bar gets in the way if wanting to switch mid song. A LP is hard to beat in this regard.
Overall a definite 9.8/10, very highly recommended.
This was a very nerve racking experience as I'd never gone through a major version Proxmox update before and I had spent a lot of time getting everything just so with lots of config around disk and VLANs. The instructions were also a big long page, which never fills me with confidence as it normally means there's a lot of holes to fall in to.
My initial issue was that it says to perform the upgrade with no VM's running, but it requires an internet connection and my router is Opnsense in a VM. Thankfully apt dist-upgrade --download-only, shutdown the Opnsense VM and then apt dist-upgrade did the trick.
A few config files changed and I always hate this part of Debian upgrades, but nothing major or of importance was impacted.
A nervous reboot and everything was back up running the new Proxmox with the new kernel. Surprisingly smooth overall and the most time consuming part by far was backing up my VM's just in case. The upgrade itself including reboot was probably 15 mins, the backups and making sure I was prepared and mentally ready was about an hour.
Compared to upgrading ESXi on old hardware like I was doing last year, it was a breeze.
Highly recommended, would upgrade again.
It's been a long time in the making, but this is the happiest I've been with my board for a while.
Signal chain: TU2 -> Blues Driver -> Vox Valvetone -> Diezl VH4-2 -> Wampler Pinnacle Deluxe v1 -> Wampler Pantheon -> EHX Rams Head Big Muff -> Mooer E-Lady -> Front of amp
FX Send -> TC Electronic Flashback 2 -> EHX Oceans 11 -> FX Return.
Running it all in to a Peavey Classic 20 Mini Head and a Harley Benton 1x12 cab with Vintage 30 speakers. The little red pedal is plugged in to the amp to toggle the channels (clean / OD) and the boost (on / off).
Considering it's by far and away the biggest pedal on the board, the VH4-2 probably gets the least amount of use. But what it does is so unique that I'm not getting rid of it.
The Oceans 11 is my most used pedal as it's never off. Otherwise I use the Pinnacle the most. It has such a good tone that reacts to the volume knob on the guitar so well. I find I can do almost any OD / distortion sound I want from it.
The Pantheon, BD2, Valvetone and Rams Head all do their particular thing that the amp and Pinnacle can't. So even though there's a lot of drive pedals here I don't feel like there's much overlap at all. It means I can play Gilmour one minute, then Tool the next, Van Halen another and Clapton another.
Stuff no longer on the board: TC Electronic mojomojo (too similar to other things), Boss DS-2 (not my kind of sound these days), Behringer noise gate (turned out my noise issues were caused by a Boss RC1), Behringer CS400 compressor (I want to like it and maybe I'll put it back on but I haven't been able to get what I want out of it).
