Every so often you see something both ingenious and simple at the same time.  This little device designed by Gerrit, aka "DammitCoetzee" is one of those things.

Published on his blog is a how to on this nifty little tool, though you can probably see from the construction just how simple it is. 

I think I will be having a quick root around the cupboards to see if I have some round wood.  Well done and thank you to Gerrit.

I recently purchased a The Adafruit USBtinyISP AVR Programmer Kit from Adafruit.  If you are unsure as to what this is, have a look at my article here. Although I want to use this programmer to try out some of the AVR based projects detailed on the internet, I figured that I needed to have a project to test the programmer with.  I also thought that having a universal remote control might be useful in my job.

Who am I kidding?  I am 35 years old going on 10.  When I read about the TV-B-Gone open source project I was giggling inside.

Thunderhammer3000 (AKA Ben Scott) has posted a great idea over on Flickr.  Frustrated at the low quality of standard proto-board Thunderhammer designed some for personal use and then had a large batch made up for projects.

Ben is clearly an AVR enthusiast, and has geared the prototyping board with space in mind for one of these IC’s, but looking at it I was thinking that an audio proto-typer’s board would also be a useful tool. 

I was sent a copy of this deal from Maplin today, Looks to be a great price on the EeePC.

Its the Windows XP version that they are selling.  You may not be aware but Asus is moving the Eee range to the larger 10’ models.  Personally I prefer the 9’ screen.  I think that the 9’ model is about the correct compromise of keyboard size versus portability.  With sub notebooks getting larger, I think now is a good time to get hold of one of these before the format is ruined.

I have to admit that I sometimes suffer from an overactive wishful thinking gland.  And recently it’s being playing up again.  My current wish is to be able to program my own microprocessors.  Across the web, there are so many brilliant projects using PIC or AVR processors.  Of course to program them you must wrestle with programming code, compile it and then program the processor.

For the programming part you need a small piece of hardware that will interface the chip from your computer.  So where to start.

Over at DIY audio Projects, they have added a couple of new do it yourself audio cable articles.  Commercial audio cables range in price from a few pounds to a basic model, up into thousands of pounds for the most exotic.  Clearly a frugal audio builder is unlikely to give away so much hard earned cash for such luxuries?

During the last few months, Asus has started selling the "eeePC 1000H GO" with internal 3G/HSDPA card for easy everywhere connectivity. While this is surely a welcome addition to the Eee PC range, customers such as Dennis  were left wondering if they had purchased too early. Dennis wanted 3G mobile internet on his notebook and was prepared to take what some may describe as a drastic step to get what he wanted.  Dennis considered a buying one of those ugly external USB 3G modems but considered it a risk to the USB port or even the whole motherboard if the EeePC was dropped or knocked. His solution was to modify the notebook internally…