So,

For those of you who have heard the latest (as of writing) episode of lugradio, they made the claims that iPods don’t play OGGs.  I have some evidence to the contrary:

PS/2 to homebrew adapter.  Courtesy of an old DIN to PS/2 adapter, the remains of an IDE cable, my dodgy soldering, and excessive amounts of electrical tape.

Give it some juice, and hook up the probes

Result!  Bonus points for telling me what character that is.  Oh, and yes, I did invert the signal.  I got a headache after being upsidedown for 5 minutes.

Well, several melted microchips, a burnt finger, a bunch of messing about with a multimeter and a lot of googling later, I have a question…

Why did nobody tell me that you need a resistor on the base on a transistor to prevent rather large amounts of current flowing.

Oh well, I guess I’ve learned something for next time - PICs don’t like having 200mA or so pulled through their pins.

So, I’ve just started work on my latest project, a digital thermometer. The circuit diagram (Drawn at 4AM, so don’t blame me) is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/23154926@N04/2272526886/. (Blame aidsmonkey for the dragons.)

I’ll be getting the rest of the bits on tuesday, so far I’ve just done the display (On the right, here )

Oh, and tell me, what colour LED should I use for the status indicator? I have red, green, yellow, blue and can produce orange.

I’ve just finished my last task on Google’s GHOP, and I thought I’d mention a few things.  Firstly, massive thanks to google for doing this, as they are really giving back to the open source community that (I belive) has helped them a lot.  I’m sure there are many companies out there using open source software and doing very little, if anything, in return.

Secondly, even more massive thanks to the task mentors.  They’ve been patient, friendly and extremely helpful, throughout my memory leaks and stupid questions.  I hope they get some sort of reward from google, in addition to the students.  The ones who I’ve particularly been impressed with have been Andre Klapper, Xavier Claessens, Nickolay Shmyrev, Michael Chudobiak and Fred Peters.

Thirdly, thanks to the other students doing this who have also been very friendly and nice - I’m very impressed how mature everybody seems considering they are generally aged 13-18, probably considered the “worst” age group on the internet by many people (Especially on IRC).  It’s been very interesting to meet a wide variety of people from a staggering amount of countries, including Israel, the US, and all over Europe, to name a few.

One amusing symptom of the mix of cultures, however:

Comment 43, Yesterday (24 hours ago)
btw, what the “shagadelic” effect is?

(If you don’t get this joke, watch an Austin Powers movie or two.)

On a side note, my cello bow’s end is splitting slightly, and although it probably doesn’t affect the structural integrity or playability, I’ve been considering a new bow for a while and this has pushed me over the edge.  The one thing I’m curious about is carbon fibre bows - I’ve never touched one, and barely anyone I’ve talked to ever has.  I’m a student, taking grade 8 soonish, and am looking for a bow for between 100 and 500 GBP - anybody know if a carbon fibre bow is worth looking at in these circumstances?  Any brands to look at or avoid?

Cheers

Cillian

for i in `ldd GHOP/jhs/gthumb/libgthumb/.libs/libgthumb.so | cut -d’ ‘ -f3`; do if ldd $i | grep glib | grep “\/usr\/lib” >/dev/null; then echo $i; fi; done

This little beauty, I hacked together to take all the deps of a particular library which was producing linker errors, see which of them were the culprit(s), and tell me.

Though I’m sure windows has a piece of $20 software which does something like this. 

You know how when you plug your iPod into a computer, it goes into disk mode, whether you like it or not. Well, sometimes, maybe you want to charge your iPod while still listening to music. I know some wall-plug-chargers can do this, but I don’t have one and don’t want one.

I remember reading a while back about how they do this, it was something to do with grounding the data pins. Well, I decided to do it my own way

You will need:

First, lop the USB extension cable in half. I did mine near the male connector, so I don’t have to stare at my shoddy hack too much when it’s plugged in behind the computer

Second, strip the ends of both stubs so you can get at all the internal wires. You should have 4 wires + shielding. The four wires are something along the lines of:

Strip off enough of 1 and 4 that you can screw them into the two bits of the terminal block. Do this for both stubs of the cable. Leave 2 and 3 disconnected (I originally thought you had to ground these two for the hack to work, but it seems to work with them left floating on the ipod (female) side).

Trim off any trailing shielding, 2 and 3, tighten up your terminal block connections.

Hope for the best, plug the extension cable into an old computer and ipod (Well, I used my main workstation and my expensive ipod video, but hey, why not), and hope for the best. Worked first time for me (I actually tried it out before using terminal block, just holding the wires, and that worked fine too).

Finish using any means necessary. You could make a nice little neat box, or even replace some insulation or something to make the hack invisible. Me, I just stuck a wire tie around the two cables and covered the whole lot in bright red electrical tape (Why won’t people let me charge my iPod on their computers…?).

Good luck, happy hacking.

Edit: I just had a thought, it would’ve been quite cool to actually use a double throw switch so you can choose whether you want to charge or transfer data, rather than having to use a different extension cable. Oh well.

Well, I just completed my first issue on GHOP, to fix 12 bugs from bugzilla. There are some things that have annoyed me, like there not being many bugs to choose from, some bugs taking a *lot* longer than others, but overall I’ve really enjoyed myself. I should be getting a report on my results some time soonish.

Even though it’s a lot of work, and you really have to spend quite a lot of time a day to finish the issues within the timelimit, I think this is a great alternative to SOC for younger people. It is unfortunate that most tasks require quite a lot of programming skill and prior knowledge of open source software and the projects in particular - therefore I don’t think it serves the purpose of getting young people interested in open source software so much as getting those already into open source software and programming into contributing to projects.

I’d like to say thanks to Andre Klapper for giving me some pointers along the way, and massive hugs to grep and vim for being awesome

Edit: Andre just marked my results as completed - thanks

So, (Yes, I know I started with so, it was deliberate), I just read about Google’s GHOP and signed up.  By working on open source projects we all love, I can earn cold hard cash, supposedly - cool.  There are a number of tasks - for one you get a T-shirt, for each three you get $100 up to a max of $500.

Designed for over 13s but before university, it’s a brilliant way to get some of the many teen computer enthusiasts into open source coding by giving them an incentive and some bite size chunks.  For me, it’s a great way to spend my free time whilst making decent money and having fun.  It’s a pity the projects and issues available are limited - the only ones written in C/C++ are glade and apache, and apache has very few code issues.  I’m mostly looking at GNOME, as I know and use it, and it should be a good way to learn GTK programming too.  Oh, and now I can spell mnemonic perfectly :D.

I’ve just claimed my first task (Or “issue” as they call it), and am hacking away at glade while waiting for confirmation. 

Well, I got my cello pickups, more or less put them together (selotape…) and borrowed (stole) a smallish guitar amp.  It sounds pretty decent as a rock-distorted guitar, or like a bass guitar, depending on where I put the pickup and how I configure the amp.  Pity I can’t get a decent acoustic cello sound out of it.  Hopefully I’ll be able to whip out my soldering iron at some point and fix up the joints.  Also a decent cable and preamp would probably help.  If anybody knows anything about amping acoustic instruments or analog electronics and building a preamplifier, give me a shout.