On Monday night I got to hang out with Ian and Dave of Down and Above. I made a couple of amps for them as Christmas presents and, well, between their schedules and my schedule, it took a while to come up with a mutually agreed upon time to hang out.

Here's Ian trying it out for the first time:

It was a lot of fun to hang out and get feedback on the Stella. Ian and Dave both really liked how it sounded at maximum volume levels. If you crank all the knobs, the Stella starts self-oscillating and sounding weird. But if you play a power chord through it, you get a super thick, fat fuzz. When you hold the sustain and let the chord naturally die out, the sound starts swelling and breaking up in a unique way that is hard to describe.

As a harmonica player, I don't crank it that high, since these kinds of volume levels lead to feedback problems. But for the guitar, it sounds awesome.

The nice thing is, the Stella doesn't start oscillating right away if you cut the note off, so you can get away with a little syncopation.

A little caveat: this is how it sounds if you power the Stella Amp with anything from 4.5-6 volts. At higher power supply levels, like 9 volts or so, it cuts out more instead of giving a nice sustained fuzz when playing it cranked. In the video above, the amp is running at 6 volts (4 AA batteries).

Batter and fry up 4-5 chicken livers. Set aside to cool a bit. Crumble livers onto a bed of greens. Liberally apply some freshly made Penzey's Italian salad dressing. Toss.

Serves one.

A friend of mine gave me an old Super Graphic recently. It had been in his basement for quite some time and had gotten a bit musty. After my experiences with the basement flooding and the mold, this was something I wasn't terribly happy about, but I figured I could do something about the problem and not vaguely ignore it.

I googled some variation of 'clean musty super graphic' and came upon a few pages that recommended wiping it down with [vinegar / dilute vinegar / dilute bleach / Formula 409] and letting it dry for a few days.

I didn't have any Formula 409. I do have this amazing cleaning solution that I made from vinegar and orange peels (fill jar with orange peels, fill jar with vinegar, put in fridge for a few weeks). The vinegar / orange peel solution is really thick though, so I diluted it down with a little extra vinegar and some water.

I grabbed a bunch of q-tips and cotton balls, and started to work. Of course, I had my ever-present helper elves with me.

(Fortunately these older cameras are fairly sturdy. My 20 month old son (that's his hand at the extreme left in the picture above) thinks that "gentle" means "I'm not throwing it at the moment.")

I left the camera opened up for a few days and now everything on the camera smells faintly of plastic from the 1970s. I call that a success.

Coming soon.

Here is how I noticed that going wheat free helped me out. I like cooking, but only on a creative basis. I have to be in the mood for it. If my mind is creatively elsewhere, I want to show up where food is, eat food, and get back to creating. So for a time, a large number of my meals were "Open can of southwest flavored canned tomatoes, eat with chips, done."

At Chipotle, I started getting the burrito bowl instead of the burrito, just to see what it was like, and I discovered that I liked the bowl better than the burrito. I often found myself feeling subjectively better after eating Chipotle, and I started wondering why.

I started paying attention to what I was eating, and I noticed that if I had spent the past few days eating meals without wheat (entirely by happenstance: beef stew for dinner, chips and salsa for breakfast, left over stew for lunch, cheesy salmon rice for dinner, leftover salmon rice for breakfast, and then Chipotle), and then followed that up with a good steak burrito bowl, I felt pretty good. If I went from a wheat based diet directly to Chipotle, I didn't get as much of a *pow* good feeling of well being.

I think what it is, is that there are a number of different whole, high nutritional foods in a steak burrito bowl, or at least there is the way I make it (with plenty of mild tomato and medium corn salsa, and all of the vegetables.) If there are any vitamin deficiencies I have foisted upon myself (chips and tomato salsa, tasty, but not too nutritional) then the diversity of the ingredients in the Chipotle is going to help that out.

Sorry, this probably sounds like an ad for Chipotle! I wish there were more, similar restaurant chains or other kinds of food I could make that was similarly tasty. Unfortunately, to make something like this at home would require following a number of different recipes and dirtying most of the dishes in the kitchen, at least as far as the taste is concerned. For me, a big part of the taste is that there are a bunch of individually cooked ingredients that all come together in the final plate. Cooking the vegetables with the meat (like in a stir fry) isn't the same.

As far as dark wheat bread goes, for a time in college I ate nearly nothing but whole grain, whole wheat sunflower seed / raisin bread. I was extremely broke, I bought all of the ingredients in bulk, and I used my roomate's automatic bread machine's timer function to make a loaf every morning before I left for class. I'd wrap that loaf up in a towel and throw it in my bag, and all day I would rip parts off the loaf whenever I would get hungry. It was wonderful and extremely convenient.

10 or 12 years later I discovered my old recipe, so I picked up a second hand bread maker, and started making delicious loaves of bread again. Unfortunately, I discovered that every time I ate a bunch of bread, I felt absolutely horrible a few hours later. Sadly, I suspect that gluten intolerance is a cumulative disease.

And finally, I also had great luck with traditional sourdough breads. Especially using spelt. Spelt is a harder grain to work with, baking wise, but I didn't get the usual gluten blahs when I used it. Unfortunately, Peggy doesn't like the taste of a strong sourdough! And maintaining a starter is too much work for just me.

But I don't have a life threatening allergy to wheat. Usually what happens is I go wheat free for a while, but then I forget and eat a whole bunch of it. I do like egg noodles.

Most of this post came from a comment I wrote on a blog post at A Quiet Simple Life.

Look at your walls. If you are like I was, your walls are fairly bare, because when you think of putting something up on them, you feel like, well, what if you make a mistake?

Listen. Don't worry about making a mistake. If you see something you like, buy it, and put it on your wall. You will be a much happier person.

I want to tell you about my friend Noah. He is an amazing photographer, and that is not something I say lightly. Check out his portfolio. When you see something you like, be bold and buy it. You will not see art that is this good, for this good of a price, anywhere else.

I'm going to tell you a secret. When you see one of his photos, and you say "Wow!" to yourself, you're still going to say "Wow!" to yourself 5 months from now when it is hanging up in your house. Every now and then I pass one of his photos in my hallway and I just stop and stare at it. And I've had it up on the wall for three years!

And if you don't see anything of his that you like, go find something you like and buy that instead. Or if capitalism isn't really your bag, you can go get a big piece of poster board and paint a picture of a dolphin or a giraffe or Elvis or whatever floats your boat and hang it on your wall.

Surround yourself with beautiful things. Life is too short for blank, off-white walls.

So I decided to try my hand at soldering surface mount components. I mean, lots of people are doing it these days, how hard can it be?

I read a bunch of how to solder SMT tutorials, and they all said the same thing. They said, start out with the larger passives, like 805s, and once you get the hang of those, 603s are relatively straightforward.

Being a bit of an idiot, I thought to myself, I'll just start with the 603s, how hard can it be? So I ordered some, and they came in the mail. You want to know how small a 603 1k resistor is?

About the size of a single digit of the date on a nickel. Thereabouts.

We're having a Labor Day Weekend sale: 10 percent off on Stella Amps!

As summer winds down, it's not too late to pick up a Stella Amp for fall camping season. Sale price is for a limited time, or while supplies last. Get yours today!

Phil Graham (@Roadstead) wrote in on twitter with a question and a comment. My reply was just a bit long for twitter, so I thought I'd answer it here.

Going to build my brother in law a Stella. Have you played with diode pairs or bridge between trim -> level or trim -> ground?

No I haven't! One of the things I did when I designed the front end was to put a little op amp distortion in there. Playing with diode distortion is on my list of things to do. I know a lot of theory behind it but I haven't played around with actual circuits before.

If you get something working that you like the sound of, let me know! Make a video of it if you can, and I'll post it here.

Also, you could add a cap in series with R1 to bleed off some of the higher harmonics like the miller capacitance does

I also have not played around with adding a tone circuit but if I did want a tone circuit, that's pretty much where I would put it. Except I would put it after the trim and level pots and before R1, or before the two trim and level pots entirely. I did experiment with a funky tone circuit that was integrated in to the entire backend, and it should have worked but it did absolutely nothing. So I got discouraged, but I should really dig that out and see if I can get it working. The idea was that it would cut the higher harmonics even if the back end amplifier was distorting, which sounded awesome on paper but in real life did not work at all.