Moved
Yay, I moved again. I still live in Munich though 
. This weekend I managed to finish my living-/hacking-/music room and thought I might share some pictures (yeah, they're a little dark I know , light still sucks).
Notice the new chair 
!!
Still lots of work to do. The walls need some love (pictures - I dunno) and I need at least another two weekends painting the kitchen and the toilet, buy some good lamps (anyone got experience with LED stuff?) etc. etc..
It's Been Quiet Here
Not because I'm not doing anything worth telling the intertubes, but because I put a lot on hold at the moment (including this blog). Mostly because I'm moving (again). In three weeks from today I'll be in my new flat, with a hopefully ready to use Internet uplink1) and plenty of free time to work on interesting/funny/musical/nerdy stuff again 
(I have big plans - as always ).
Until then I'll waste my free time relaxing and playing Eve Online (the first game in month which I still enjoy after playing it for more than a day).
ArduinoBoy (WRT54G Edition)
Today I finished my very first Arduino project .
It's an ArduinoBoy. Basically it's a device that lets me sync my GameBoy to a sequencer (I'm using Renoise using MIDI. On the GameBoy itself runs Nanoloop1). This was my first ever electronics project and it went really well. I only soldered one wrong connection which I luckily found after some debugging (de-soldering a IC sucks though 
).
After I finished the breadboard version of the ArduinoBoy I began to think about a fitting enclosure. It turned out that finding something appropriate was the most difficult part of all. I finally decided to have a look into the WRT54G router I use solely for distributing wireless OSC messages via either my Nintendo DS and DSMI or TouchOSC on my iPhone. And to my surprise it had exactly that much space left which I would need for putting an extra Arduino inside 
.
Getting all that stuff in there was a delicate thing to do though. I have to remember to open the thing with care should I ever have to. Unfortunately I'm not that good at drilling holes, that's why the holes for the LEDs look a bit ugly. However, I'm happy with the final result, especially because it took only one weekend to finish which makes me less worried regarding my plans to build an Arduinome (I have all parts except the PCB ).
Okay, now I have to make some nice GameBoy 8bit music .
Stop Blogging
Today I came accross an interesting article about keeping outdated incorret technical information around in form of blog posts.
I too see this problem and have to deal with it often enough myself when I'm googling for information. You can never be sure if what you read is still valid or just silly outdated stuff. It gets worse if the blog posts/pages don't contain any date where you could see when they've been created (because I learned the hard way to look for exactly that before I even start reading).
However, I don't see this as a reason to stop blogging about technical stuff alltogether, like the article suggests. The nature of technical blog posts (at least in my case) are often just quick hacks, or short code snippets which, most of the time, aren't worth updating regularly. In contrary to the author of the aforementioned post, I don't see the web as something which should only serve fresh and valid information and I honestly don't care if something I wrote two years ago doesn't apply anymore or people don't verify information they find on the web.
Also, if I'm seriously after valid technical information I tend to look for better resources like wikis and official docs of some sort. That however, doesn't apply to everyone who comes accross my blog so I decided to display a nice little info message above every post which is older than 100 days to inform the reader that the information he's about to consume might not be valid anymore .
I guess that should suffice.
My Nanoloop
arrived today . So I'm finally about to put the Game Boy Pocket splitbrain sent me last year (many thanks again!!) to some good use1).
I'm also waiting for the parts I've ordered to build an Arduino Boy2) to be able to integrate it into my Renoise setup .
I'm still trying to get my hands on one of the old gray Game Boys. If you have one around, don't need it anymore and want someone to put it to use again please don't hesitate to mail me!!
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