Pete Thorn Telling the Story of EVH Moving to EBMM

Pete Thorn posted a new video telling the story of why Eddie Van Halen moved from Kramer to Ernie Ball Music Man, and how the Air Norton and Tone Zone pickups came to be.

Restore the Old “Right-click” Context Menus in Windows 11

If you’re like me and don’t dig the new cartoony icons for cut, copy, and paste in Windows 11 when you right click on things; you can use this terminal command to bring back the old context menus.

  1. Hit Windows Key + X
  2. Select “Terminal”
  3. In the terminal window, copy and paste :
    reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve
  4. Hit Enter
  5. Reboot your machine.

After you reboot, the right-click context menu should be displayed in the old way, with “Copy”, “Cut”, “Paste”, and “Delete” being words, and not icons.

2022 Asus Zephyrus G15 Keyboard Issue Resolved? (Nope.)

My Zephyrus laptop has been having keyboard issues for quite some time. The “E” key has been intermittent at best and it doesn’t appear to be a hardware issue, but a software one.

The “E” key won’t type by itself at all, it will only register if it’s immediately follows another keystroke. So, for example, if you just type “e” nothing happens, but if you type “Pre” and hit “r” and “e” fast enough, you get “Pre”. (Sometimes it’ll do “Per” though, so it’ll even register the order wrong.) This appears to be related to ghost key detection, or sticky keys (even though I have it disabled in Windows 11) or rollover key detection. What’s weird and frustrating about this situation is that it doesn’t happen all the time. Sometimes, the “e” won’t work at all.

The other oddity is that if I do a clean install of Windows 11, the keyboard works perfectly fine… for a while. Sometimes it’s a day, sometimes it’s a couple hours before it starts acting up again. This led me to believe it must be a software, or more specifically, a driver issue. Either Windows 11 is installing an update that breaks the keyboard driver, or the MyAsus utility is installing something that’s broken.

To test this, I reinstalled Windows 11, and I disabled Windows 11’s ability to include manufacturer updates. Like always the keyboard worked fine for a couple of hours, and then the “E” key started acting up again. So it’s not Windows Update that’s the issue. It MAY be MyAsus installing something that Windows 11 doesn’t like.

At this point I gave up, and decided to go with the nuclear option, and installed PopOS (Linux) on the laptop. Guess what? The keyboard is working fine now without issue. So, it’s definitely a software problem, not a hardware problem, and I guess I’ll just have to keep Linux on the machine from now on. (The laptop isn’t under warranty and I’m not paying $90 to Asus to have them take it in for repair because they wrote a crappy driver.)

Strike that. The keyboard had to be replaced at a local repair shop, with mixed results. No more Asus laptops in my future.

My First Electric Guitar

In 1991 my parents bought me my first electric guitar and electric guitar amp for Christmas. The guitar was a brand new Squier II HSS Stratocaster in red, and the amp was a Peavey Rage 108 solid state practice amp. I loved that thing, and I learned on it for years but it eventually became my experimental project guitar. It was on that guitar that I taught myself how to replace pickups and knobs, and as you can see in the 3rd photo I even tried my hand (unsuccessfully) at painting. Eventually, I moved on from that guitar to others, an Aspen Les Paul copy, a Washburn (also seen in photo 3), and some other off-brand emerald green S-type that wasn’t work its weight in wood. Unfortunately in the end, I modified the Squier into oblivion. Its mangled body resided at a friend’s house for years, while its neck lived the rest of its life in my storage shed. The bridge and electronics live in a ziplock bag in my tool box. While my original Squier II won’t be played again, I may have found its brother online, and it may have to come live with me soon…

Linking a Local Folder with Microsoft’s One Drive

You may want to sync a folder on your computer with OneDrive that isn’t one of the Windows standard C: drive folders like “Documents”, “Pictures” etc. If that’s the case, here’s the command line for you to use to link any folder with OneDrive.

mklink /j “<path to configured OneDrive location>” “<path to directory you want synced>“

So, if I had a folder called “photos” on the D: drive that I wanted uploaded and synced with my OneDrive, and my OneDrive was configured to exist at c:\onedrive (the default is C:\users\<username>\onedrive) I’d do the following command in a Command Prompt window:

mklink /j “c:\onedrive” “d:\photos”

You’ll see the “photos” folder appear in your OneDrive, and the OneDrive app should start syncing the files from your local storage to the remote cloud-based storage.

All 3 Ultimate Comics Locations Burglarized

http://ultimatecomics.com/2018/06/crime-wave-hits-ultimate-comics/

Fender Fret Wire, and My Preference

From Fender:

The main fret wire maker, California-based Dunlop Manufacturing Inc., produces five main fret sizes. Listed by part number, name (where applicable), crown width and crown height, they are, from smallest to largest:

6230: The smallest fret wire found on older Fender necks (.078? x .043?).
6150: Vintage jumbo. Much wider but not as tall as 6230 (.102? x .042?).
6105: Modern narrow and tall; currently very popular (.090? x .055?).
6100: Jumbo. The largest fret wire available (.110? x .055?).
6130: Medium jumbo (.106? x .036?).

Which size you like is purely a matter of preference, although it can affect your playing style. If you like your fingers to actually touch the fingerboard when fretting the strings, frets that aren’t very tall like the 6130, 6150 or 6230 are for you. On the other hand, jumbo 6100 fret wire can provide easier playability with better sustain, tone and bending because you don’t have to press as hard to fret the strings, but your fingers probably won’t even touch the fingerboard, which could take some getting used to if you’re accustomed to smaller frets.

The main guitars I play are my Made-In-Japan EVH Wolfgang Specials. One of the primary reasons I love these guitars so is because they (and the MIC models) are the only EVH Wolfgang Specials to have “Vintage” frets on their fret boards. When production moved to Mexico in 2014, jumbo frets were used on the Specials, and they have been that way ever since. Now, only the USA made EVH Wolfgangs come with “vintage” 6230 sixed frets.