...the non-geeky middle-aged checkout chick at Aldi starts chatting to you about her now using this Linux Thing, and that being quite cool.

I wore my Tux shirt today (which has a penguin and the slogan "Linux - for IQs higher than 95" embroidered) and she said something like 'hmm, I guess I've got an IQ higher than 95 then!'; her new EEE pc thingie which comes with Linux was quite nice and so on.

Conny likes to fall asleep with some light on. I dislike having to wait until she's gone late at night, just to switch off her bedside light. I dislike having an energy-wasting halogene 25W burning all night long even more, not to mention the temperature problems with the transformer base buried in stuffed animals.

The solution: teach her something! So we repurposed an old broken desk lamp carcass, I taught her how to solder, programmed a 12f629 PIC and we combined the above with sufficiently many white LEDs and some recycled laptop Li-Ion cells into an auto-off bed light: Press the button when off, and you get 18 min of light. Press the button when the light is on, and the light goes off. Simple, neat, efficient. As a bonus the lamp body is black, Just Like It Should Be.

The circuit is trivially simple, the diagram follows and the PIC code (also boringly simple) is here (plus the auxiliary delay library).

The diagram is not complete in two particulars: I used a 4.5mm plug with a builtin bypass switch to isolate the battery when charging (don't want to blow the LEDs and/or PIC when my intelligent charger feeds the LiIon), and I repurposed the original lamp switch as an extra "general disconnect". BSTS.

Great care should be taken to avoid shorting or annoying the three 2000+mAh cells in any way - unless you like to play with fire extinguishers.

Conny did all the soldering apart from one or two small fixes and the LED interconnections. Well done.

...with a FREE spelling mistake, but nevertheless excellent.

(source:some flicker user via Cryptogram)

Das Inserat hier ist grad eben vorbeigekommen, sehr schräg...

Dazu passend die folgende Headline von gestern: Ein Abgeordneter in Mississippi (selber blad) hat einen Gesetzesvorschlag eingebracht, nachdem es Restaurants verboten werden soll, Blade weiter zu füttern. Welch Brilliante Idee.

In Obelix' Worten: ils sont fous, ces americains. Completement fous!

Conny has pretty much settled in, but my brain is close to pastel overload already.

I've had to move just about all my stuff from her room so that she can make it into her den. She brought three fat and one slim suitcases full of things, and her room is unrecognizable.

The only remainder of my things are my Tektronix scope, the HP function generator and a bench vise on the desk.

Cognitive dissonance: the shelf above the TEK and the HP now contains mainly pink boxes, makeup, dolls and other girly gear (instead of soldering station, multimeters, charger, bench PSU and other tools).

School seems to be fine and fun; she has gotten lost (slightly) between home and there twice so far.

Townsville might be a good place to learn golf quickly - or else. Gives a whole new meaning to the term "water hazard".

Whenever I am optimistic and not expecting trouble, this state of oblivion usually gets cut short, badly, when it rains problems. On the other hand, if I expect bad things and worry, a lot less trouble finds its way to me. This sucks.
click here for the rest of the story...

Juhuuuuh! Heute hat die Post endlich mein Weihnachtsgeschenk aus Ö vorbei gebracht: Alle 19 Kottan-Folgen, auf 8 DVDs.

Ah, Nostalgie pur. Böse Wiener Gfrasta. Inspektor gibt's kan. 70er Jahre Schädelweh-Tapeten. Danzer-Gstanzln. Ambros. Wunderbar.

Danke, liebe Frau Mutter!

Next Wednesday my daughter Cornelia is arriving in Oz, to spend a fun and action-packed year 2008 with me. Well, let's hope the action is of the Good Type...either way, there goes my independence.

In other non-news the weather still sucks completely, it's been so wet and humid over the last weeks that some of my leather gear (bike suit and mountain boots; what did YOU think?) started to get mouldy on the surface. This sucks.

Work sucks, too, with disorganized chaos worse than usual, even factoring in that it's the first week of the semester. But numbers are up, I have about 13 for the networking subject and about 7 for the Silly Subject. What I don't have is a correct timetable, exact enrolment figures, and fun. What I also won't have in two weeks' time is a clueful unix-savvy counterpart in the central it services dept, because that fellow is throwing in the towel.

Not that I can fault him at all; the management and marketing hordes have grown like mushrooms in the wet, while we peons are being kept like mushrooms.

Apropos mushrooms, it's been wet enough for quite some mushrooms to grow in my backyard. Some look very similar to small Parasol but I won't try them.

This stuff is pretty cool I think. I found that one the funniest construct.

Should you end up with this cheap DVD recorder you'll note that by default it is region-crippled. The thing has divx support, records to dvd and dvd-rewritables and has vga-out, which is why I bought it for AU$130: my Zensonic Z330 player is badly on the way out.

Region-lockout is at least close to breaching the law in this country and thus region-free gear is actually way more common - and legal.

Should you - like me - be very pissed off by the manual not saying anything about how to make the fellow region-free, don't despair. I voided my warranty by opening the box, found out that it uses a Mediatek MT8105DE chipset - and that on a no-name unidentifyable mainboard. No go so far.

However, looking around further I found out that the sequence Power on, Setup button, 8 1 0 5 gives you its internal system info screen (alas, with the region unchangeable). On a Hungarian board I found the crucial info that Setup, 5 0 1 8 gives you a menu with the region changeable (use 0 for any). Hit setup afterwards, power off and on again and everything works. (apprently the firmware is similar to another noname called chili/yanada dvr-8500x, for which i found the 5018 thing...)

This success helps at least a bit to offset the disappointment of lots of shite weather in the last 8 weeks (and counting). The farmers are happy, the dams fullish, the beaches are gone and the wind howls and/or it rains. Soon I'll have to develop gills and webbed fingers - unless the mould gets me before.