Mickblog

So while I’ve been looking for work I’ve also been dabbling in all sorts of things. Let’s see:

- I modded my x-box, which you already know about

- I have bought a PS2 and plan to mod it as well :) I sure hope this is a moddable version - I haven’t found a web site yet that identifies its version from its model number.

- Been having a play with gEDA and a, um, *cough* evaluation version of Altium DXP (the new name for the Protel electronics design suite, that costs a house). geda is pretty complete in the sense that it’s got the functionality for designing very complex boards, but its interface is awful at the moment. But I’ve only so far tried the version that is in dapper’s universe, which is a year old now. I’m thinking of either helping out with it, or starting a similar project (not on my own of course)

- I’ve bought 2 big fat text books, one on engineering mathematics and one on linear circuit analysis. These two books, along with The Art of Electronics , I plan to go through slowly and thoroughly. We’ll see if I persevere.

- For a while there I thought I could get a contract doing some embedded development. I narrowly missed a job doing some kernel coding which I would have loved, so I kept looking for a similar kind of job. Looks like that was as lucky as I’ll get. Anyway in the meantime I spent a bit reading up on kernel programming.

- Been playing with povray again. I finally found the scene files for the povray scene that got me into raytracing so long ago. It’s improved a lot since then. It’s got media, radiosity,photons (what they’re for I don’t know) and isosurfaces, which can essentially render almost any aribtrarily complex mathematical function, with a bit of guidance. Turns out the rendering algorithm isn’t impossible to understand. Regardless, it’s cool. If you can figure out how to play with the math you can make all sorts of interesting shapes

- Been collecting a list of places where I can get cheap surface mount components, so when I am ready I can
start making prototypes with them. I reckon using SMD will making the process less painful, since it will at least mean I don’t have to drill at least 2 holes for every component on the board.

- Searching for an FPGA development board. FPGAs are essentially huge reprogrammable logic circuits - you can turn one into a CPU, and more. I’m hanging out to design my own processor :) I learned the basics of processor design in a subject about it at uni many years ago. Never had the chance to apply it.