Hello everyone. Today I decided to get down to business and add a pickup to my ukulele. It cost me a total of about $2, maybe a bit less. It may not sound as great as some of the $150 pickups, but hell, my uke cost $80. and this sounds pretty dang awesome!

Here’s what i did:

Here is my ukulele. It’s a Lanikai LU-21C and it’s a great little gal. She sounds great, and is a huge step up from the toy ukes people can get for $30.

Here you can see that i’ve undone the strings, and placed the piezo pickup on the body. This is the piezo unit that I used. It costs 75 cents. Sounds great too. Here’s a close up of it.

I bought a mono 1/4’’ jack from radio shack that came in a two pack. It think that cost me about $2. Here’s a close up of that.

Next I used some copper wire and connected the leads from the piezo to the audio jack, and then removed the casing from the piezo. Becareful taking the plastic off the piezo. These things can break pretty easyily.

Next I used my dremel to make a hole for the jack. I took the washer off of the jack and traced the inside circle onto the body. Eventually it was the right size and the jack fit like a glove.

After putting the strings back on and taping the piezo to the body of the uke, I was all done! One afternoon and $2 and now I can play it through my sweet old Kustom amp. Not a bad saturday afternoon!

NOTES: I used to much wiring from the piezo to the jack and now there is a bunch of extra wire in the body of the uke. It rattles sometimes. Use less wire to avoid this.

If you don’t like the sound of the instrument when you amplify it, try moving the piezo to a differnet spot inside the body. It will pick up different vibrations better in different locations, so give it a try, and move it if necessary.

I was just browsing the internets when I stumbled on this link: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/57846. Supposedly, there once was an instructables restaurant, where you could go enjoy a meal. Once you are done eating, you could get the recipe, list of ingredients, plans for the plate that you ate off of, electrical blueprints, whatever you wanted.

How cool is that? I mean, you can learn so much from a place like this, and I doubt by sharing their schematics they are going to loose any customers.

It sounds like it opened and closed, but if I was in amsterdam more often I would have been all over that place.

Me and my lady friend were wondering what to get Jake’s son for his 2nd birthday. It’s super rad!

Today i’m feeling pretty good. I’m more tired than i was yesterday, but that’s to be expected. I think I’m reaching the cusp of this here experiment and I’m excited for my body to get used to this new sleep schedule.

Last night i went to a craft night where I put together this and then headed home to take my evening nap around 11:30pm. Too bad my brain was still going because it took me a while to fall asleep and then i think my 4AM-7AM sleep was a little less deep. I did watch 3 episodes of true blood though, and that was awesome.

Good morning world. This update is my first blog post about my new plan. I am going to tackle the Everyman Sleep schedule, so that I will have more time in every day to make awesome things happen.

What is the everyman sleep schedule? Glad you asked. Most people in the world sleep about 7-8 hours each night (at least that’s the recommended amount) all in one go. Some people sleep a little less each night and have an afternoon nap. The everyman sleep schedule takes this idea a step further and has you sleep 3 hours for your main sleep, and take a short 20-25 minute nap about every 5 hours.

This means that I’ll be sleeping from 4AM-7AM before I get up and go to work. then, I’ll take three naps at some point in the day around noon, 5PM and 11PM. What I’ll get is about 3-4 more hours each day to work on awesome things, and my body won’t (hopefully) feel any worse. Actually, most people that can adapt to this schedule feel quite alert throughout the day.

Last night was my first attempt at this new schedule, and my body isn’t quite used to the two short naps. I didn’t get to sleep at all during my 6PM nap, and just barely dosed off during my 11PM nap. It wasn’t too surprising that I didn’t quite make it to 4AM, but hey, it was my first try. Tonight is going to be better.

After a stressful morning of refreshing the sparkfun.com checkout page, I was unsuccessful in getting in on the free day action.

This was a pretty good idea for the sparkfun.com guys, cause now i still really want that stuff in my cart, even if i have to buy it.

*sigh.

This is a little late, but I thought that I’d post this info on my personal blog as well.

I write for my company’s blog every thursday, occasionally with a co-worker filling in when they have something awesome to write about. This last thursday was thanksgiving, so what better topic than turkeys and stuff? I decided to write a flash game and post it for the world to see, play, and rip me apart for not commenting my code enough.

Here is the FLA file.

I’m about to head home, where a movie is being shot. I’m gonna be an extra.

when I get more info, like what hte movie is called, how awesome it was, and all that stuff, then i’ll update this post.

woo hoo! I got an invite to google wave and now I am better than all of you!

today is such a good day. not only am I now on google wave, but tonight is also the Pink Noise show at the Dante’s Go-Go Fashion show! OH BOY!

Well, maybe not a genius, but look what I made! It’s so cuuuuuuuute!