Capacitor Test: Polyester Film vs. Paper-in-Oil (PIO) in Guitar Tone Circuit

Background

There are people swearing by paper-in-oil (PIO) capacitors for electric guitar tone circuits. The say all else being equal (same capacitance, similar tolerance -- voltage is not relevant in guitar circuits), a PIO capacitor will sound different, meaning better. Words like "warmer", "mellower", "livelier" are being employed to describe the difference. The theoretical basis for this would be the dissipation factor, which obviously varies with capacitor "architecture".

guitar • tone • electronics • capacitor • PIO

A Brighter Guitar

SUMMARY: Advice regarding brightening-up your Les Paul-type guitar, which applies to most dark wood made, humbucker-equipped guitars.

guitar • pickups • humbucker

Dean DMT Pickup Color Codes

They are the same as Seymour Duncan humbucker conductor color codes, as seen in Dean's scarce pickup wiring instructions, and Seyomour Duncan's pickup color codes comparison chart. I'm talking 4-wire conductor humbucker pickups. In summary:

guitar • humbucker • dean • DMT • seymour duncan

Fuck you, Microsoft

For better or worse, it has come to this. I used your operating systems because I had to - everyone was developing for your sick platforms. "You don't like it? Switch to Linux." I would, MS, I really would, if the other players would just develop the software I use for Linux. Till then I'm stuck with you. I even learned to love your idiosyncratic  way of doing things.

Sony MDR V150 headphones - a bargain

My two year old shitty Creative headset finally gave in, after going through a "mono period" (yes, due to no more sound on the right, I rewired it and it came out all nice, but mono). It was a mic-headphones combo one would use for instant messaging and some gaming, but would be ashamed to admit to actually listening to music through it. May it RIP.

music • gear

Hashing

Hashing provides one-way encryption. This means there is absolutely no way of recovering the original string that was hashed, from the hash string. Hashing has a significant ammount of mathematical theory behind it, most of which you needn't know. However, I encourage you to have a read of the relevant Wikipedia articles.

Storing passwords

How to store passwords (of your website's users), you wonder? There has never been a simpler question in website security, with such a straight forward answer:

Strong passwords

Your mighty user authentication mechanism, which you've spent countless hours developing and testing, and is now, theoretically, full-proof, will be rendered useless if you or your users choose to use weak passwords. Hence the need to enforce strong passwords.

Implementing security

There are two main ways to implement security in a system. They should always be used together, for reasons that will become obvious.

Storing credentials: the vault directory

Where do I store my database credentials?

There comes a point, in security matters, when developers run into the age-old question: "Who was first? The chicken or the egg? Or the hen? Perhaps the fowl?"