William wrote in with a great photo of his new Stella Amp:

Thank you very much for sending the replacement resistor. The Stella
amp is fantastic. Not only is it the best clean sounding battery
powered amp, but the overdrive sounds are stellar. It's so good that I
made it into an amp head so I can use it with any number of speaker
combinations. I've included a picture of the Stella connected to my
Emery Sound mahogany cabinet with a 10 inch Weber Alnico Blue Pup.

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?

A leaky dishwasher while we were on vacation lead to some flooding in our basement. The flooding led to moisture and the moisture led to mold!

The worst of the mold damage was confined to my electronics workbench and my collection of antique cameras, of course.

About thirty minutes ago, I was sitting at my desk. It's a hot summer day, I'm upstairs, and sweaty. My iPod nano was sitting on the desk, connected to my Apple Cinema Display, happily syncing and charging.

I shifted my arm to get a better angle with my mouse, and suddenly OW!

That's odd. The sharp edge of the iPod nano must have hit some nerve in my arm. I picked up the nano and a sharp jolt went right through my hand. Yeeeowch!

That's an electrical jolt. Why is my iPod electrified!? Is my charging cable frayed or defective somehow?

But man, can he play the drums:

I wrote an article about my new Strat clone, and my quest to add tuning stability to it: Jenga blocking a tremelo.

First off, I'm starting something new. I've arranged with a friend of mine to pre-build some Stella Amp kits! So for an extra assembly fee, you can get the board pre-soldered. All the wires and potentiometers and such are not soldered. If you want one of these you will still have to solder on the pots and the input jack and the like. If you are unsure of your soldering skills or if you just want to save yourself some time, you can pick one of these up.

It's mulberry season (at least at my house) and before it's over I want to give you the results of a few experiments we tried recently with mulberries.

The first was fresh mulberry green tea. I took about a teaspoon of fresh mulberries, a teaspoon of green tea, muddled the mulberries in with the tea, and cold brewed it overnight in the fridge.