This info might be useful if you update your iPhone while it is connected to your Mac.
TL;DR: It’s 2023 an you’ll probably have to force quit/relaunch Finder on your Mac. My anecdotal experience is that, if the phone has updated and restarted, you should be OK relaunching Finder with the phone still attached.
I just updated my iPhone 14 Pro to IOS 17.0.3 from 16.7.1. I mostly did this so that I could use Progressive Web Apps, or “Save to Dock” as Apple calls this. It’s nice that Apple is enabling this 4 years or whatever after the world.
I decided to back up my phone to my Mac (2018 Intel Mini) before doing the OS change. I don’t have much on my phone, and I know I could back up to iClown or whatever, but I’m just funny that way.
Because it had been about a week since the last time I connected my phone to my Mac, I had to download an update in order to connect to the phone. I noticed that the phone started trying to sync before the update actually downloaded and installed, but I’m pretty used to Apple’s sloppy interface stuff, so I just glossed over it.
Seeing as the phone was already connected to the Mac, and the Mac is on a wired connection, I figured it would be faster to do the update from Finder while the phone was connected to the Mac.
So now we will jump ahead to the meat of the story: The update ran, the phone restarted a couple times, bugged me to set up FaceID, and Apple Pay, and asked if it could collect my user data in order to “improve” whatever. The phone is now saying that it is updated to 17.0.3 and seems to be running just fine.
Finder on the Mac however, was still saying that the phone is running IOS 16.7.1, that “Your Mac is preparing to update the software on this iPhone,”” the status at the bottom is showing a stuck barber pole and says “Updating iPhone firmware.” And all Finder windows were beachballing and unresponsive.
I had no better choice than to force quit/relaunch Finder and see what happened. The iPhone was still connected, but given how many times you have to tell the thing to trust the Mac before you can do anything normally, I assumed that after restarting Finder, the two devices would be pretty much unaware of each other.
..aaaand Finder came back up. When I click on the iPhone, Finder now shows it with the proper IOS version showing, and immediately started the sync process.
So there you are: Finder still sucks, but sometimes you can still fix it.
Probably should have taken more pics before I modded this…
In the mid-late 80’s, my friend Rob bought a Fender Strat. It was, I think, his first “good” guitar. There were two things about this guitar which were unusual:
It was the first “Made in Japan” Fender that anyone I knew had ever bought
It was one of the best-playing, best-sounding guitars I’d ever heard.
Despite all the characteristics described below, this guitar rings really nicely. Notes hang around about as long as you expect, the whole thing responds to how and where you hit it. It’s a real player’s guitar.
I now own this guitar. It’s been through a lot of changes, and will probably go through a few more. I’m going to write about the work I do on it in a series of of posts, focusing on things that might be useful to other guitar fiddlers. I’m going to try to keep each post focused on just one problem or solution, and the information or issues involved.
This post covers the basic technical details of the guitar up until it arrived at my house.
The basics
Based on the serial number (A + 6 digits), this guitar was built between 1985-1986, most probably at the Fuji-Gen factory in Japan. It is the worst factory color for a guitar (white), and has a maple fretboard. The neck is a soft “D” profile.
I haven’t measured the fretboard radius, but it feels a bit wider and flatter than my other Strats.It has big frets which are ground down and very nicely even. Fretless wonder kinda thing.
The guitar is ridiculously stable. String gauge changes have never bothered it. The tuners are not great (low ratio), but once in tune, it stays there with almost disturbing reliability.
The guitar did unfortunately come with one of Fender’s legendary tragicomedies, the System 1 trem system. Much time has been wasted on the System 1—more by the poor suckers who bought it than by whoever “designed” it—so I will spare you yet another rant about it. 1
Life before netdud
Pickups and electronics
Early in its life, Rob replaced the stock pickups with EMGs. This was certainly the style of the time, but as I recall, Rob mostly made the switch because the stock pickups were noisy and didn’t sound that great. The EMGs really suited this guitar, the sounds Rob was after and the way he played, and stayed in place for decades. The original pickups disappeared somewhere along the way, and are completely unmissed.
A couple of years or so ago, Rob got curious, bought a pre-wired pickguard from GFS with a set of their “Gold Foil” single coil pickups, and put it in this Strat. Please click here –> 2 <– if that statement made your eye twitch. He liked them.
Rob also started a mod to convert one of the tone controls into a blend knob for the middle pickup, so it could be added to any regular switch position. This was not completed, but didn’t interfere with the regular use of the guitar.3
Bridge / action
There are two sure-fire ways to use the System 1 trem system reliably:
Replace it with literally anything else. You will be better off.
Remove the stupid string lock, block the bridge in place so that it can not move, and use it as a hardtail.
Rob had done the latter for decades, though he recently had the bridge set up so that he could use the trem (floating) , still without the stupid string lock. This apparently worked OK for him. We will see if it works for me.
Rob is a really fine player, with a freakishly light touch. He can make strings sound heavier than they are. He likes to have a trem, but uses it for subtle trem effects—a Bigsby guy, not a Floyd guy.
The nut on this guitar is cut really low, the action is really low, and the trem is easily wiggleable. The end result is a guitar with ridiculously soft feel.
Where I come in
A long long time ago, I told Rob that he was never allowed to sell this guitar, but if he did, he had to sell it to me. So that’s what happened.
I got the guitar with the gold foils in it, and the pickguard with the EMGs in it as well.
Before this came up, I would have said that I absolutely do not need another Strat. I guess I did. But now, I don’t need any more guitars and I TOTALLY MEAN THAT.
1 What a piece of shit though, eh? I mean, really.
2 YES! ROB KNEW, AND I KNOW, AND YOU KNOW, AND EVERYONE ELSE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET KNOWS THAT THESE ARE NOT “REAL” GOLD FOIL PICKUPS. LIKE XXXX PUT IN THE ZZZZZ BACK IN YYYY or Lollar makes or whatever, We ALL know, OK? It totally doesn’t matter for this conversation.
3 Unless you are one of those weirdos that actually use the regular tone controls on a a Strat. LOL @ you, weirdo! Also, please tell me how you do that in the comments, because I am 50% sure I am wrong.
On my iPad or iPhone, I will often switch to the Notes app and find that my existing notes all appear to be blank. I can see the list of notes on the left pane of the Notes app, but the right pane, where the text is supposed to appear, is blank.
This is a great excuse to freak out, so I will put my solution right here, in case you came here all freaked out.
The short solution that works for me
If there is a “Done” button at the top of your open note, tap that. Then force close the Notes App, then re-open it.
So far, this has always worked. When I re-open Notes, all my notes are there, the text is visible, and everything behaves as it should.
It looks like this is yet another problem in how stuff is displayed on the screen in IOS, and doesn’t affect the actual content of the notes themselves. In other words, it seems that this problem just prevents you from seeing the text, but the text is all there, and is saved whether you can see it or not.
I’ve looked for solutions/ways to prevent this from happening, and there just doesn’t seem to be any other advice that works better than closing and opening the app. Yup, I just said that about an app that does basic editing of text files in 2022.
There may be more than one cause for this, (apart from “Apple does not feel like fixing it yet”), which means that this solution might not work for you, and other solutions might.
I think this has only happened to me after the device has gone to sleep, but I am not absolutely sure of that. I’m not going to test it, because it doesn’t matter–“Never let your device sleep” is about as dumb a solution as buying your mom a new phone so her texts are a particular color.
Here are the two most plausible theories I found about this, which may or may not work for you.
It might be related to dark/light screen modes.
Turning off the “Automatic” setting under “Display and Brightness” –> “Appearance” might stop this from happening.
I had this problem even with “automatic” turned off, but it looks like this may have worked for some people. Doesn’t hurt to try it.
It might be because you are saving notes somewhere other than on the device or iCloud.
I keep a lot of my stuff–including notes–on a server I own, in a domain I own. Unfortunately, like a lot of stuff, Notes just might not be compatible with the Internet.
If you are the same kind of wild renegade who does things outside of iCloud, you could try copy/pasting all your stuff into notes you store in iCloud and see if that fixes this problem.
And then pour one out for the Internet we’ll never have.
Notes is probably the most useful app in the entire Apple universe. It’s the Apple application I use most, in no small part because its basic functionality allows me to work around problems that other applications create. I dream of a future in which Apple manages to solve the hard problem of transferring plain text files between devices using existing technology without screwing something up.
This is an opinion piece from The Register, and I agree with it completely.
And of course, I have thoughts.
Doing more, worse.
After 30+ years of development–and more important, marketing–we now have a rich, competitive market of 2 commercial desktop operating systems that are widely used. Yep, a whole two. Great job, everyone!
As the version number of each of these operating system increments up, more features are added to them.
For the last 20 years or so, the new operating system features that get the most attention (and more important, marketing) are things that were previously done by applications that were separate from the operating system, or things that could be separate from the operating system.
This includes stuff like ways to buy and play music, or ways to buy and play podcasts or ways to buy other stuff or see stock prices or buy and play games, or my favourite: ways to buy applications that allow you to control how your operating system operates
[I snipped out my inevitable rant about misusing monopoly positions without meaningful repercussions, “a fine is just a price,” the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) difference between selling “ease of use” and hiding important decisions from the user, and the similarities between “Buy your mom an iPhone” and just letting her eat cake–all my greatest hits. BUT I DO TAKE REQUESTS!]
Meanwhile, both the experience and the functionality of the basic operating system get continually worse for the average user.
What’s so bad about Windows/Mac OS?
Oh, I have lists of what is terrible about desktop operating systems, as does pretty much everyone. I am not dumping that out here.
If I start listing things that suck about one particular operating system, the conversation will quickly turn to an argument over which operating system is better or worse. That’s not what we’re doing here, and it’s also pointless.
[FWIW, I use FOUR different operating systems (I am SO interesting, aren’t I?) on a very regular basis, and given the choice, I use one of them more than the others. I haven’t thought of that one as “best” for a long time, though. It’s just less-worse. If you can muster a reason why the other one is less-worse for you, you are correct.]
What I am saying here is that, while these features keep getting added (and coming soon: the ads keep getting featured) to desktop operating systems, the core functionality–what an operating system should do for you at a minimum—and more important, the experience of using that functionality—is getting worse or at best, not improving.
No matter which operating system you currently consider the least-worst, your file manager still sucks, you can’t do some basic things you want to do, and other things seem much more difficult than they should. Every time you get a new computer, or a new version of an operating system is foisted on you, it requires you to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out what has changed, and how to do things you used to know how to do.
Here’s what happened: Instead of being a platform on which you can build an environment and set of functionality that lets you do whatever you want to do, desktop operating systems became platforms designed by and for what other people would like you to do.
OK, but how does this relate to Four on the Floor?
To illustrate what I mean by this, invoke the nice easy search (“start” if you bought a computer for Microsoft, or CMD+spacebar if you bought one for Apple or [Prolonged Argument over what is the best distro/desktop/window manager that somehow involves systemd] if you are using Linux)) on your desktop computer and type in “Change IP address” or “Add a drive” or “create a new directory.”
Does the desktop operating system you are using take you to where you can accomplish this task in that operating system?
or
Does it use its awesome weeeb integration to contact a search engine on the 1nternerbs and return articles that may or may not give you instructions on how/where to do the thing you want to do on your operating system?
It’s the latter, isn’t it?
Yup. I checked.
That search on your machine could absolutely be set up to do the former. It could learn or be updated to help people more easily find the things they need to do on their computer the most often, or even to know about upcoming changes they might need to make, and make those changes easier to make.
The only reason the search on your operating system can’t do that is because the people who make that operating system decided to do something else instead. Instead of making your operating system easier to operate, they added those other features, which you paid for.
And that’s why your awesome desktop operating system can much more efficiently find you the filmography of Jimmy McNichol than it can help you actually operate your system.
There are a lot of cool old amplifiers out there which can be rebuilt into excellent guitar amps. One of my amps, named the “HurtZOMG!” was rebuilt out of an old portable phonograph, and worked out really well. This post is about how it came to be, and what makes it so useful
Let’s start at the beginning, which is
The End Result
The HurtZOMG! is a small, simple, single-sided tube guitar amp, very similar in basic design to a Fender Champ. It has a regular speaker out and a soaked (line level) output that you can plug into the input of another (following) amp or DI box. This allows the HurtZOMG! to act as either a small amp head or as a preamp.
Controls
Volume (Vol) -This is basically the input gain. It’s a click-on knob that also switches on the input, though the amp is always on when plugged in
Tone – Also a click-on knob, so you can disable this part of the circuit completely
Master volume – This knob only affects the output level of the soaked output
Ins and Outs
Input – instrument in here
Speaker Out – speaker out here. Min 4 Ohms
DI Out – to following amp or DI
The Story
Chapter 1: An Old Beginning
How it originally looked
I saw an ad on Craigslist for two old tube amps for $35. Neither of the amps had started life as guitar amps, though both were basically the same design as guitar amps.
The amp that became the HurtZOMG! was originally part of an old RCA transcription record player. When the turntable part of the player gave up the ghost, the amp section was removed and fitted into part of the original record-player case. A couple of 1/4″ jacks later, someone had a small and fun little amp head. That was the shape the amp was in when I bought it.
When I got the amp home, I took a look at the tube complement and realized that it was interestingly similar to a Fender Champ.
12AX7 preamp tube
6CM6 power tube
6X4 rectifier tube
The Champ is tube complement is usually 12AX7, 6L6, and 5Y3, but the tube variations in my amp are often used in modifications of Champs and other guitar amps. This little amp would make a good basis for an interesting build.
The Plan
I’ve been a fan of Big Sugar for a while, and fundamental to Gordie Johnson’s huge guitar tone has been the mighty Garnet Herzog. In a nutshell, the Herzog a modified Champ circuit with a soaked output. You plug your guitar in to the Herzog, crank the snot out of it, then run the soaked output into another guitar amp. You can adjust how hard the Herzog output hits your next amp, and enjoy the awesome power of cascaded low- to medium-gain stages.
You can read more about the Herzog here. It’s a pretty cool thing, and you have probably heard one without knowing it.
I figured that I could recycle this cool old amp into a very useful single-ended Champ-like amp head that could also be a device of crunchiness. So that’s what we did.
The Process
After a bit of thinking, I took the amp to Michael Saklar at Echoluxe and told him what I wanted. As always, Michael had some sane advice on how to make this idea better, and then he did the rebuild.
The amp had been glued and jammed into worn-out, smashed piece of the original RCA record player’s cabinet, and Michael had to break that open in order to do the rebuild. As always, his rebuild went very well. Michael kept as many original parts in the circuit as possible, replacing only things wouldn’t work any more, or would have been dangerous to keep.
He also changed the layout around a bit, which improved things, and changed the orientation of the chassis relative to the “cabinet.”
I was absolutely determined to reuse that same crappy “cabinet” the amp came in, so I spent an hour or two cleating and glueing and reinforcing and hacking it all back together.
It’s not pretty, but it’s honest work
At some point, I’ll probably cover the whole thing in Tolex, so no-one will know it’s in the original bit of RCA box but me, but dammit I’LL KNOW!
It’s upside-down and backwards now, which is right-side up and frontwards
So How Does It Sound?
It sounds GREAT.
As a little amp
Because I am normally a nice, polite fellow, I usually run this though a single, open-backed 12″ speaker. I have used it a lot with both a Celestion Vintage 30 and a WGS G12c/s and with either it sounds big and full and throaty with cleans, but keeps that open uh, squonkiness that we love in small amps.
Because the HurtZOMG! is small and enthusiastic, it works up a bit of a sweat whenever it is running. This means you always get that nice push and responsive-yet-forgiving feel without being as loud as you might need to be with a bigger amp. That sounds like an obvious thing to say, but not all small amps actually work like this, and a lot of them only sound good in a narrow volume range.
it’s very easy to find a sweet spot tonally with just the volume knob on the HurtZOMG!, without getting so loud that the tone blows past you, or can’t be heard at all.
That having been said, it can get surprisingly loud1 and there is a lot of clean headroom. I have used this amp for rehearsals with bands in which I pretty much only play clean guitar, with people who are quite loud (STEVE!) and I could be heard just fine without having to push the amp to a point where it didn’t sound like I wanted it to.
But let’s be honest–clean sounds are not what most people use small amps for–especially if they already own bigger amps.
No, the reason to have a small amp is so that you can turn it up and make it unhappy.
And this amp gets wonderfully unhappy. As I said, it is pretty similar to an old Champ circuit, and once you open the taps a bit, you start to get that cool single-sided breakup. It’s quite controllable–again, you can get a variety of overdrive sounds based on how much you turn it up.
BTW, you are soaking in it!
Which brings us to the HurtZOMG!’s extra trick: Plug your guitar into the HurtZOMG! and then plug the soaked out of the HurtZOMG! into the input of another guitar amp.
This gives you some nice options:
Turn the HurtZOMG! waaaay up to get the crunchtastic fun and then run that into your amp the same way you would an overdrive pedal
Set the HurtZOMG! up so that you have that sweet spot where it breaks up when you hit hard, and cleans up when you lay out a bit, and run that into your amp to make that sweet spot even bigger
Use the HurtZOMG! as an extra gain stage, and run the master volume up high, to drive your following amp into crunch land
So far, I have just stuck to running the HurtZOMG! straight into a following amp in order to get various levels of crunchy overdrive. With a boost pedal in front of HurtZOMG!, and running into a good following amp, there are many options, and they are all easy to set up.
But wait, there’s more!
You can also run both the speaker out and the direct out at the same time, so there are tons of possibilities for using the HurtZOMG! in series and/or parallel with a second (and third) amp and effects. Add in stereo effects, and the chances of you making it out of the basement before dawn approach zero.
But seriously, folks
Despite all these options, I have used the HurtZOMG! most simply as a really good-sounding small amp head. It’s great for rehearsals, and it’s easy to use live.
And now, the bummers
This is really the first iteration of the HurtZOMG! and I’ve learned some stuff about how I prefer to use this thing. There are some downsides, which are minor enough that I am happy to live with them.
It’s a bit noisy
When you turn it up to full stupid, you will hear some noise. Michael actually re-did the circuit in order to pull the power stuff to one side and the audio stuff to the other, which helps a lot. But we are dealing with a 50+ year-old circuit in a small box, and I have the mentality of a 13 year-old, so yeah, there is noise.
That having been said, I have certainly used purpose-built guitar amps that were noisier than the HurtZOMG! when turned up to full stupid. Relative to how loud you are, the noise is not a problem.2
It’s tricky to carry around
This is a common problem when rebuilding amps that were not originally designed to be portable. It might take some thinking to come up with a solution, but this should not put you off doing a project like this.
After I get the tolex on it, I’m going to add a handle and some protection for the back of the amp—maybe some kind of screen. I might look at putting in an IEC jack so that the power cord is removable when hauling the amp around.
Conclusion
For less than the cost of a meh-quality new amp, I have a great-sounding and versatile piece of gear that makes everyone who plays with it happy. And I kept some stuff out of a landfill. If you have the opportunity to do something like this, you should do it!
1 By law, you HAVE to say this about every small amp. Always. Honestly, I am no longer surprised by how surprised I am by how loud a small amp is.
2 Both the power and rectifier tubes in the HurtZOMG! are the (probably original) Westinghouse bottles it came with. This might also contribute to the noise.
