Reviews of Things I Have

Most people who are familiar with Univox tie the companies name to the infamous Mosrite copy, the Univox Hi-Flier, which several famous guitar players – including Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, are known to have played.

While the Hi-Flier maybe the now-defunct Univox’s claim to fame, they also produced really fantastic copies of other famous guitars. On a recent Craigslist adventure, I procured what has become one of my favorite electric guitars – a 1976 Univox Ripper.

The Ripper is almost an exact copy of the 70’s era Fender Stratocaster. The key difference between the two is that, whereas a Fender Strat has 3 single coil pickups and a 5-way selecter switch – the Ripper has 3 humbucking pickups and a 3-way selecter switch. Aesthetically, the guitars are identical – right down to the chunky 70’s era headstock (which Fender now prevents companies from using on their Strat copies).

I’ve been lucky enough to play hundreds of different guitars in my lifetime, and will put my heavily (and naturally) “relic’d” Univox Ripper right up there with Custom Shop Relic Strats in terms of playability and aesthetic appeal. My Ripper has been played hard and tossed around by countless guitarists over the the past 30-some-odd years, and it shows! Belt-buckle rash, checking, nicks, dings, hand-oil stained maple neck and fretboard – all the signs of a well loved rock-n-roll instrument are clear and present.

The Ripper definitely has it’s own sound – and the pickups are very interesting. Between the three positions (bridge, middle and neck pickups working individually), there is an almost absurd range of tonal color. The bridge is very, very hot – and full of bite. The middle position reminds me of the neck pickup in a Telecaster. The neck pickup is so warm and “rolled-off” sounding, it reminds me of a more lo-fi take on that famous Woman Tone.

All in all, I recommend that if anyone sees one of these finely-crafted Japanese Strat copies out there – pick it up and play it! Mine is a wonderful blast from the past – I certainly wouldn’t pass up a chance to own a second one.

I’ve never used their services before so I can’t vouch for much, but AllBusinessCards.com is having a giveaway for 100 sets of 1000 16pt glossy business cards. That’s pretty cool!

They say they’ll declare 10 winners for the next 10 months, the first set being announced at the end of this month.

Yay!

Link: http://www.allbusinesscards.com/business-card-giveaway.php

I do a bit of freelance web design when I get home from my 9 to 5. Oftentimes, my clients already have a site, domain, and hosting, and it’s my job to take the whole thing and give it a facelift, keeping it on the same server with the same company.

Thus, my aggravating swipe with ReadyHosting (aka Ready Hosting, ReadyHosting.com), possibly the worst web hosting company in existence, came to be.

A short list of terrible things from my experience with them:

• un-intuitive, confusing, non-user-friendly administrative panel that had me accidently bringing down my client’s website for a couple terrifying hours
• incompetent, rude, outsourced tech support
• their servers are running PHP5, supposedly, but it’s not optimized nor does it have all the features installed, so good luck trying to use many of the features of modern CMS’s (if you ask them about it, they will give you the runaround and try/fail to fix it)
• they will cache things (in my case, an .htaccess file) and keep them outside of your jurisdiction, which is, to put it lightly, problematic

(I could write more, but my blood is angry just writing those… and this was months ago I dealt with them!)

After a week or two of trying (and failing) to circumvent their shortcomings and a couple calls with their ridiculous customer support that had me pulling my hair out, I convinced my client to open an account with DreamHost and had their beautiful new website up and running in a couple hours.

From what I’ve read, they used to be a fantastic company based in the States, but then the owners sold it to an Indian firm and things went downhill fast. Yay, capitalism! Boo, unfortunately true stereotypes!

Final verdict: Run, do not walk, from ReadyHosting.com. I’ve worked with lots of hosting companies, and they were definitely the worst of them all.

I got my My Book (is that how you would say that?) awhile back, mostly just for Time Machine backups on my Mac. I’ve had hard drives die on me before, and nothing sucks worse than losing your all your work, music, and data.

The drive has a rotation speed of 7200 RPM. The version I got, the Triple Interface, features USB, Firewire, and eSATA connectivity. I use Firewire for its speed and to keep my USB hub less tangled.

While multiple capacities are available, I opted for the 1TB version, and partitioned it so 250GB would be used for Time Machine backups and the rest would be free, open storage.

It is ” hot-swappable” and, more or less, plug-and-play. Though you will have to format it for whatever particular system you’re using.

The software the hard drive comes with will probably be useless to you. In fact, the useless Western Digital software icon still clutters up my menu bar, seemingly completely unable to be uninstalled.

Even still, the Western Digital My Book Home Edition External Hard Drive (1TB, Triple Interface) works wonderfully, certainly helps to ease my mind, and didn’t put the dent in my wallet that other comparable drives could have.

The other day at work I needed to do some intensive, non-Notepad HTML work but found myself at a computer without Adobe DreamWeaver. So what did I do? I grabbed a copy of KompoZer, the open source WYSIWYG HTML editor based on the now defunct Nvu.

There are other free alternatives to DW, like the old Netscape Composer or even the version of FrontPage Express that came bundled with IE4 (I actually used it as my editor of choice years after IE updated). KompoZer is noteworthy in that, despite its lack of price tag, it is feature rich and gives DreamWeaver, a very expensive program, a run for its money.

Here are some quick pros and cons I wrote down as I was using it:

Pros:

• Tabbed WYSIWYG, Source, TAG, and Preview work areas
• HTML color coding
• CaScadeS CSS editor applies in real time
• All the standard object and formatting buttons and shortcuts
• DreamWeaver-like selectable tag hierarchy
• Spell check (not on by default)

Cons:

• Saving your work changes the view from source to normal
• Pasting rows bug
• Lots of automatic styling in tables and images
• Minor arrow text navigation bug
• No automatic HTML tag closing like DW
• Minor table cell align bugs (un-checking a box doesn’t revert to default)
• Selecting content between tables bug
• Automatic markup cleaner, while nice, removes empty lines used to better interpret code

Granted, those rough lists aren’t quite a thorough dissection of this rich and well-worked program, but, as you can see, the software is not without its bugs. They’re mostly minor, like source code not displaying properly as you navigate around, but they will get on your nerves.

Okay, verdictville. Is this program worth its salt? Definitely. How does it compare to its big brother from Adobe? It’s close, but not quite as good.

KompoZer is a great WYSIWYG HTML editor for quick, simple work. If you haven’t the dough for something better, it’s well worth a look.

http://kompozer.net/