Tag Archives: gear

Preserving Cell Phone Power During An Electrical Outage

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For better or worse Hurricane Sandy will be past us on the east coast in 48 hours. But winter is coming, bringing yet more opportunities for electrical service to be interrupted.

Cell phone towers have backup batteries that can last for some hours or longer, so keeping your cell phone available for emergency calls is a good idea. Here are some tips to maximize the juice in smartphones:

– Turn off your phone’s wifi side (since your cable modem isn’t on, so there’s no sense it letting the phone keep searching for a signal) and Bluetooth services.

– Turn off most of its location services. On an iPhone go to Settings-Privacy-Location Services. You can either turn it off altogether, or leave Location Services on but go in and turn it off for most individual apps – if you have emergency notification apps like Ping4Alerts and CodeRED leave those on to get warnings from your city/state emergency management).

– Adjust the screen illumination to be as dim as possible, and to turn off the screen with the shortest available idle time.

– If you don’t plan to use your laptop for offline work, charge your phone from its battery.

– If you have a car, get a 12V charger for your phone (and gas up the car before the storm!).

– Plan ahead: this 12V storage battery (designed for powering Celestron telescopes) has two 12V jacks plus built-in small and large lights. Also pick up a DC/AC inverter and you can charge your phone plus power some other gear (e.g., recharge a laptop).

Friday Faves 10-26-12

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Note: this may be the last Friday Faves until December. I’ve signed on to do NaNoWriMo this year, which means my writing energies will be occupied with laying down a 50.000-word novel between November 1-30! Through the magic of pre-scheduled posting there WILL continue to be a weekly article each Wednesday.

New Music: my friends Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys recently composed and played live a soundtrack to the classic silent film Metropolis. Fortunately it was recorded, and you may now download it for pay-what-you-will on Bandcamp – I’m thinking it will make a great NaNoWriMo soundtrack too!

 

Kickstarter Trends

Besides the ubiquitous band-making-an-album, I’ve noticed a few trends lately in Kickstarter projects:

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What Do YOU Want To Know???

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I’ve added a new page to this site – in the top bar next to Contact you will now find a link:

What Do YOU Want To Know? Use Betty’s Brain

Do you need

  •  to know something I haven’t addressed?
  •  some topic researched but don’t have good Google-fu skilz?
  •  a piece of music written, transcribed, or the sheet music located?
  • a wingwoman to accompany you to test/buy some gear (musical, tech, even a car)?
  • an acoustic or electric violist/violinist for your event, or to sub at your band’s gig?
  • something else with which I could help? Tell me about it…

I’m available for any of the above – hire my brain! Ask me for a quote:

Some Things to Know When Changing Acoustic Guitar Strings

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I recently bought a used acoustic bass guitar. The strings on it were fine, but I wanted a different kind (flat-wound, coated, recommended as better for an acoustic). They duly arrived, and last weekend I decided to change to them.

I had never previously changed guitar strings, but had seen it done before (Pete in The Gobshites used to go through several a night at a 3-set gig). I looked at a few instruction pages on the web and it seemed pretty straightforward. I began by loosening the E string, removing it from the tuning machine, and…

could not get the corresponding bridge peg to come out!

I wrestled with it, looked up more info, found someone who had had the problem with my bass model, tried what they were told – loosen the next string in order to put a hand into the guitar and push the peg from underneath… still not going anywhere. Finally got it out with Joann pushing it from below while I worked on levering it carefully with a wrench. Did that again for the A string next to it. While I might have had better leverage if I’d had a string winder with a peg puller, these bass pegs were a lot thicker than 6-string guitar pegs, and I’d read that it may not have fit.

I moved on to putting on the new E string, but now the peg kept popping up as I tuned it up :-(

I went back to the web (I had shut down everything while a thunderstorm came through) and found a very helpful video, in which at 1:30 the presenter describes the correct way to mount the string with the bridge peg – basically put the string’s ball end into the hole, put the peg in loosely, then pull up on the string so that the ball is not under the end of the peg, but higher up on the side of the peg. The peg then keeps the ball from being able to exit the hole both are in, but the string ball is not pulling up on the peg itself.

And then my mind reversed this information: to remove the peg, I should not be trying to pull up the string… I should try to push the string down so that the peg is not running up against the ball as I try to pull it up!

Once I had this epiphany I was able to remove the remaining two strings’ pegs by myself with little difficulty!

Perhaps there are instructions somewhere that detail this trick, but none of the ones I found gave any time to removing the old strings – though I suspect that this is not as much of an issue for regular guitars, whose strings and pegs are both much thinner than those of my acoustic bass guitar.