So I’ve been a lazy butt, and I haven’t been keeping up with my favorite pet blog as well as I should be. Over the last week or so, I’ve been screwing around with interfacing a wii nunchuck with my laptop. Have some videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koXZ20MdEt4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ro-Lz3BUOo

They’re pretty self explanatory. I’ve also done some work with moving the mouse with the nunchuck, but I haven’t actually gotten off my lazy butt and recorded it for a humiliating posterity yet.

The next step is to… do nothing with it. It’s very much less useful as a HID device than I thought it would be, to the point that I would curse working with such a thing if I had to use it as a mouse for every day activities. It might be useful as a gaming device (as Nintendo intended), but I can see the intention of the nunchuck as an accessory showing itself in such a function. So, it would be better to just use the entire Wiimote as an input device, or to use the nunchuck as a control device for the arduino itself.

In short: it was fun, but ultimately useless (as of right now). Having the functionality mapped out might prove to be useful later, but not yet.

Okay, so friday, right. First, I edited an arduino program so that it should read a frequency from a spinning thing-a-ma-jig (look, I’m really tired for some reason), and adjust the power delivered to the motor that spins the thing-a-ma-jig with PWM. It depends on if we can get something to switch fast enough; transistor, maybe. And since we’re using a breadboard arduino to make sure our dev board doesn’t die, that’s where the breadboard comes from.

We’re out of TP, and my roomie left for home for the weekend. Yeah, gonna have to go scrounge some up somewhere.

I spent some 2 hours (really? only?) soldering up my minty-amp, which proved to be a tedious failure: trying to bridge tiny distances with short wires is amazingly frustrating: I hereby renounce my cavalier attitude towards laying stuff on perfboard. To put it lightly, I’m not very happy with myself.

Milestone: one tube of solder almost gone! Have something like 10cm left.

Finally, there will be no friday update next week: I’ll be in the thick of the MCM, so my life will be somewhat chaotic. Go me.

Yeah, I’m tired. Have a story, I’m not gonna buffer anymore.

Friend: i haven't been this bored in a long time... hellllp

Me: write a story

you know thats not very helpful

well try something artsy fartsy with it you know something different

Tangy sea air, wafting lemon pie, musty cardboard

what is that even supposed to mean

hell if i know just take a world and run with it to somewhere youve never been before

well i gotta do homework

Light breeze, chill air with a slight bite, spongy chair, feather weight pencil, sticky eraser cruft,

homework can wait sometimes we just need to escape out of reality and have some time to ourselves

but we have to deal with our problems in reality just look at how screwed up the world is trying to seek escape into some contrived world wont help anyone

and that is where you are wrong

Filtered surf, muted grandfather clock in the living room, breeze through tall grass, distant birds clawing for a meal, percussion of bare toe on wood floor

screw this i cant finish my essay im going to go watch some tv

but you can watch tv anytime now a blank page calls to you to fill it with something anything

but i dont even know where to begin and the only thing i can think of is a direct rip off of my favorite show

the important thing is to create versus consumption its cheesy but writing is the one thing they teach us that we can easily create with

Yellowed mid-afternoon sun, two dark frames splashed against baby blue walls, ajar door leading to hushed interior, ebullient billowing drapes, congested room brimmed with empty boxes, limitless sky,

so how do you

Okay, so I have absolutely nothing to show for this Friday. I hung out with friends, and didn’t do anything productive other than burning bootloaders into 2 ATmega168 chips. And, I wrote a new story!

Friend: is reminded again that "to be lonely and to be by yourself is not the same thing."

Me: Ghosts, that's what they were. Machines dressed and taught to imitate a culture. Sure, they dressed like they were attending a high-class social function, and they spewed words in semi-comprehensible phrases, but they never actually said anything intelligent, no matter how one coaxed them. That wouldn't have been so surprising, but the fact that the palace never seemed to end suggested something deeper at work. One moment dozing over a paper: the next, waking up in a red dress with hair put up, slouched in a easy chair next to the hor'devours, facing the endless rooms full of partiers. It took only an hour to figure out that none of them were of any help; another six to steal a watch from a portly gentleman exchanging drivel with the rail-thin lady, another twelve to give up hope that this was a dream. Another ten hours to fall onto a couch, exhausted, and what seemed like 5 seconds to find a shadow of a man leaning over me, a blink to find him dissolved. After that, every day was filled with wandering and fits of half-sleep, evading the shadows that came with REM. It took a few weeks until I resorted to attacking the walls with a stout butterknife, finding ordinary plaster and wood beneath the gilded facade before the shadows were all around, whispering about something before they again dissolved. A warning? Perhaps. Would doing something drastic again change *something*? Perhaps. But there was still hope that something would change, and while that still held, doing something at all dangerous could have negative effects. I was wearing away at the edge I was on, though, several weeks having been spent in a silent, furtive walk through the murmuring crowds looking for something, anything. Now, it was again time to find a couch or chair and get some rest. Wait, that man over there isn't talking to _anyone_... looks solid enough. Maybe I'll walk over and punch him.

Edit: story needed status update that it came from.