Origa.me

As my planned Myth/Boxee/whatever all-encompassing media centre PC is some way off, I wanted to set my existing systems up to at least work intuitively from a single remote and provide seamless switching between devices.  The devices I currently have are:

Following several months working with Drupal including some contract programming work and several existing client migrations, I've decided to migrate my own blog from Wordpress.

I've been having a bit of a tinker with Comet , a complementary technology to Ajax. The concept isn't new: it's essentially socket programming but instead of sockets it's done over HTTP with a web browser and a standard web server. The idea has been around for a number of years in various guises but has gathered steam recently in "Web-2.0" (don't shoot me! At least we all know what I'm talking about!) circles so I thought I'd...

Hooray - my USB adaptor arrived this morning and within 1 hour of rigging up an Arduino compatible development board all sorts of cool things are happening! I decided to be a real cheapskate and build my Arduino myself rather than buy one. So it's all breadboarded and slightly rough looking, but on the plus side it works perfectly and I have another 9 AtMEGA8s sat around waiting for exciting things to happen to them. Here's the...

This came in kind of useful on a client's site recently - allows you to display data in a standard HTML table and then use jQuery to read the data in the table and display a graph using Open Flash Charts in its place. It's all a bit rough but meets my requirements so I probably won't give it any more attention. I'm making it available here in case anyone else finds it useful - feel free to take it and extend it. Here's the jQuery plugin...

A few years ago I bought a pair of Aiwa headphones with a built-in MP3 player. They were only 128MB but they were very cheap (factory refurbished) and they looked so cool that I figured I might as well get them and if they didn't work out in their original form, I could just transplant a bigger MP3 player into them.

This is a pretty cool idea and works well (I might add). Well, it works well except with my GTalk address but that's not their fault. XMPP auth for OpenID

Hot on the heels of my ICSP programmer, here's my simple development board for the 16F628. It's based on Nigel's PIC tutorial but I've used right-angle headers to allow it to be plugged into a breadboard . I've also added an ICSP socket, reset switch and switchable MCLR functionality (via JP1) which allows MCLR to be either tied high with the reset switch enabled, or used as an input.

Oh dear, it seems my parallel port LVP programmer was somewhat fragile - I'll skip the details but suffice to say it doesn't work any more. The silver lining to this sad story is that it led me to build a really simple and cheap ICSP (In Circuit Serial Programmer) which connects to the serial port and only uses 3 resistors.

At last, I finally enter the exciting world of Microcontrollers. If it's any use to anyone out there, Byron Jeff's Trivial LVP programmer actually worked very well for me. Here's mine: