Ultimately the Cheese proved to be Worthless

It’s all in the title, really. I now have a G1.

I’ll write more about it once I’ve got a bit more used to it.

“We’re always talking about wanting to make a webcomic - why don’t we actually make one?”

“Yeah, alright…”

So I’m now making a webcomic with my sister. I’m not going to link to it from here, since this is meant to be my more professional blog, but I want to briefly talk about it. I just spent a few hours hacking together a website for the comic using PHP, along with an upload page and a mini-blog for each individual comic. I’ve learnt how to do a few new things in PHP that I’ve never needed to do before, so I’d say that it was a productive evening.

So I decided to stalk myself for a few minutes and see what I could find.

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Recently I got called a stalker by someone I know at work. They changed their mind a minute later, but even so I feel the need to point out how easy it can be to go from only having a small bit of personal information to having quite a bit.

Some people might consider this a bit of a creepy post - it’s not intended to be at all. It’s merely meant to show that you should be careful with your personal information. Also, that putting someone’s name into Google and following the obvious trail of results is not stalking

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I’m deleting three months of spam comments at the moment.

I’m pretty sure I just deleted one entitled “Indian Herpes Dating”.

Who would want such a thing?! Is there even a target audience for such spam?

It’s been far too long since I last wrote anything here. Let me give you a quick summary of what I’ve been up for the last few months…

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My NerdKit arrived last week. I haven’t had as much time to play with it as I’d have liked, but it’s still awesome. I’ve built the first two examples, a temperature sensor and a binary adder. I’ve modded the adder to light up a couple of LEDs depending on the sum, which taught me how to set pins as output and drive them high or low. It’s all done with bitshifting and logical operators. The variables that control things like input or output are stored in 16 bit integers (if I recall correctly). Each bit stores a boolean value referring to a single pin or setting. With some nice logical operations, it’s possible to retrieve a single bit, or change a single bit to a 1 or a 0. I might write a guide about this someday.

So, what should I tackle next? Should I upgrade the binary adder into the binary RPN calculator that I talked about before (this would require buying some more switches) or should I try to drive the piezoelectric buzzer at frequencies corresponding to musical notes and make music? How can I choose?!

In the last week I have watched all of ToHeart and ToHeart ~remember my memories~. This is my mini review of the two series.

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This morning I finally got around to ordering the Nerdkit that I’d been drooling over for the last few weeks. After I’ve built all of the example projects, I plan to order some more switches (and probably some more LEDs) from Maplin and build a binary RPN calculator. Because, you know, that’d be way cool.

More on the Nerdkit when it arrives!

I’m working on a Hitori solver. I’ve nearly finished encoding the rules. I’ll then see about writing some kind of algorithm to solve the puzzle.

Tonight’s task was to write a graph structure to represent the game grid. One of the rules is that the un-blackened-out squares must form a connected graph. It was fairly easy. I’m using depth-first search from the first non-black node to determine whether the graph is connected or not. Recursion is nice