Can't say I really want to discuss openly what it is I'm working on, but lately I've had a fire lit under me again and I've been building non stop in my downtime.

I forgot how much I enjoy designing and printing circuit boards. It's pretty fun to brag and say "ya I print circuit boards in my living room. you should come see my etching setup".

Here's a few photos from design, etching in ferric chloride, drilling, sanding down edges, and completed. 18 small boards, took about a week, but that's in reality probably about 12 hours.

PETA apparently gets a lot of emails about Genpets as they're fast to respond, but I don't think they even bothered to read about it. funny.The entire project deals with animal rights, but they don't get it. doesn't surprise me.... 

"This is a hoax, you’ll be glad to know. In very poor taste.    – Martin, PETA".

Apparently stirring up debate and making people think is poor taste. Throwing red paint at people wearing fur is not though.... right. PETA, the glowing example.

never been a fan of PETA.

I grew up with a commodore 128. the fancy pants of the commodore line. I never had a 64, but my friend Nadine grabbed me an old 64 back in January for my birthday.

I've since gotten back into commodore and have been reading into how to program for them... which is CLEARLY the most optimal use of my time.

Anyways, I grabbed an old SX-64 portable commodore 64 off ebay. I need to post pictures of the restoration process as... it's crazy. there's layers of mud inside the machine and it still runs perfectly. amazing little 1mhz machine.

I've been experimenting a lot with hardware/software integration at work during downtime and one of my first experiments past simply pushing data was this!

My tweetbox! it sits in the corner of my cubicle so I can see the lastest twitter update of anyone in my feed.

PHP parses all the data from my account, and then feeds that to a Flash snippet I wrote, Flash then talks to a local server running on my laptop which handles talking over the usb port to a small microcontroller hooked up to the LCD. *phew! catch all that?

well it works...

a small red LED comes on when a tweet is new.