DIY Octavia pedals, boosters and treble boosters

Posted 2007-06-22 in Effects by Johann.

There’s a huge amount of DIY circuits available but most of them are scattered across the various DIY websites. In this post, I’ll provide you with links to simple circuits I have either built myself or heard good things about.

Octavia pedals

Green Ringer

The majestic Green Ringer (schematics). A classic. Downsides: Low on sustain. You can try my Atmos mod that adds LED distortion and a lot of output.

The Octo-Booster

Extremely simple and apparently a very clean octaver.

Bobtavia

JRC386-based octaver. Bobtavia video demo.

Pushme Pullyou

One of Tim Escobedo’s octavers (schematics). Pushme Pullyou clip, Pushme Pullyou transistor experiments.

Boosters

Boosters make your signal louder. Most of the time, they will add some distortion on their own. Boosters using J201 JFETs provide “juicy,” soft compression.

Boosters are some of the simplest circuits. If I can build and package one in two hours, you can do so, too.

Stratoblaster

Super easy and nice, round sounds.

Booster recommendations

Great review of popular boosters and the most creative packaging I’ve seen in a while.

AMZ Mini-Booster

Jack Orman’s highly popular booster/overdrive.

Fetzer Valve

A booster with some theory behind it. Easy, too.

Discrete FET Guitar Preamp

This one is just perfect to have around as a utility boost.

Treble boosters

Omega

Runoffgroove’s attempt at making a better, modern Rangemaster.

Brian May treble boost

No knobs – just boost!

Happy building!

panscient.com = still bad bot

Posted 2007-06-07 in Spam by Johann.

Just when the alleged CEO of panscient.com says their crawlers currently obey the standard robots protocol, I find the following in my logs:

$ grep "\"panscient.com\"" <logfile>
38.99.203.110 johannburkard.de [02/Jun/2007:06:56:54 +0200] "GET /?johannburkard.com HTTP/1.1" 403 3778 "-" "panscient.com" "-"
$

What were they looking for here? That I registered a .com of my name? I have, thanks. How did they find the domain? Last time I checked there were no links to johannburkard.com.

Of course it still does not ask for robots.txt. Yawn…

15 comments

Linking CSS for handheld devices revisited

Posted 2007-06-02 in Mobile Web by Johann.

I described an effective way of linking CSS for desktop browsers and portable devices (mobile phones and PDAs) before.

However, some browsers have to be treated differently.

IEMobile/Pocket Internet Explorer

Microsoft’s mobile browser downloads and applies style sheets for the screen media type which produces interesting results when screen and handheld style sheets are mixed.

IEMobile showing my home page.

NetFront, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable

NetFront is one of the most feature-packed mobile browsers that is embedded in many devices, for example in the Sony Ericsson K610i. Both the PlayStation Portable as well as the PlayStation 3 are also shipped with NetFront.

Unfortunately, it does not load any handheld but only screen style sheets.

NetFront v3.3 showing the HTML and CSS for Mobiles test page.

The solution

The following code will embed a style sheet for the handheld media type (for NetFront/PlayStation) and hide the screen style sheet from IEMobile and NetFront:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
    href="handheld.css" media="handheld"/>

<script type="text/javascript">
if (/(NetFront|PlayStation)/i.test(navigator.userAgent))
    document.write(unescape('%3C') +
    'link rel="stylesheet" href="handheld.css"\/' + unescape('%3E'));
if (/(hiptop|IEMobile|Smartphone|Windows CE|NetFront|PlayStation|Opera Mini)/i
    .test(navigator.userAgent))
    document.write(unescape('%3C%21--'));
</script>

<style type="text/css">
@import url("handheld.css") handheld
</style>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
    href="screen.css" media="screen,tv,projection,print"/>

<!-- -->

The gory details

The first line simply embeds a handheld style sheet. Nothing special here.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
    href="handheld.css" media="handheld"/>

A handheld style sheet is written to the page in this test for NetFront or PlayStation:

if (/(NetFront|PlayStation)/i.test(navigator.userAgent))
    document.write(unescape('%3C') +
    'link rel="stylesheet" href="handheld.css"\/' + unescape('%3E'));

The JavaScript then writes a starting comment (<!--) in case the user is using IEMobile or NetFront.

if (/(hiptop|IEMobile|Smartphone|Windows CE|NetFront|PlayStation|Opera Mini)/i
    .test(navigator.userAgent))
    document.write(unescape('%3C%21--'));

From this point on, IEMobile and NetFront will skip the following:

<style type="text/css">
@import url("handheld.css") handheld
</style>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
    href="screen.css" media="screen,tv,projection,print"/>

This links the handheld style sheet and the style sheet for desktop browsers. The handheld style sheet is embedded after the JavaScript so that IEMobile/Pocket Internet Explorer will not request the same stylesheet again.

<!-- -->

This empty comment ends the linking. IEMobile will perceive this as the end of the comment.

The result

My home page is now looking great in IEMobile and NetFront. For other mobile browsers, find out how to test handheld style sheets in other browsers.

IEMobile/Pocket Internet Explorer handheld stylesheets

Posted 2007-05-30 in Mobile Web by Johann.

IEMobile (formerly known as Pocket Internet Explorer) has the nasty habit of downloading style sheets for the screen media type.

A very simple solution I came up with is to write a starting comment element to the page in case the user is using IEMobile. I fully explain this trick in Linking CSS for handheld devices revisited.

Pages

Page 17 · Page 18 · Page 19 · Page 20 · Page 21 · Page 22 · Page 23 · Next Page »