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If you’ll excuse the quite appalling title to this post (though you really shouldn’t, it’s an offence to any person’s sensibilities), beer makes the code go round. Open source software is driven by it, to the point where free software conferences are timed to line up with beer festivals.

This intro is really just a poor excuse to set the scene for the rest of this post, a review of Black Isle Brewery’s Red Kite Ale. It’s not so much a review as telling you that I’ve just drunk a bottle of this and it’s nice. You might have got a more in depth review if I’d done the wine tasting gargle and spit type sampling but that would have been wasteful.

Instead I’ll tell you that Red Kite is a very pleasant real ale made with organic hops, giving the catchy strap line “Save The Planet – Drink Organic”. Save the planet, drink beer! Who knew it would be that easy! Plus I’ve just written some PHP code that works, thus vindicating my appalling introduction to this post.

I bought my Red Kite from Real Foods but I bought my first Black Isle beers from their stall at the Edinburgh Farmer’s Market (which we haven’t been to for ages) up at Castle Terrace.

I think that counts as a review. Night!

Not much has happened today, I participated in a teleconference which fortuitously was a teleconference and not a physical meeting as a punch up may have occurred. Then we had lunch out while Sarah seethed a bit. Then we came back and worked a bit. Something else must have happened but I can’t remember anything in particular.

At some point this morning postie delivered my jiffy bag of Arduinos (They’re italian so the plural is probably Arduini) from Modern Device Company. An Arduino is a little PCB with an Atmel microcontroller and support circuitry (regulator, resonator, that kind of thing). The micro is programmed with a bootloader to simplify the development process and the really cool thing is that all the code, the PCB layout and all the programming tools are GPL or Creative Commons licenced which means you can have a whole development setup for almost no money!

The modules I have look like this, except they’re just a bunch of bits at the moment and the PCB is a natty white instead of green:

The Modern Device Company Arduino modules are only $15 as a kit and shipping to the UK is very reasonable so I’ve bought a couple for a play around with. These things have been used for all sorts of cool projects like interfacing with a Nintendo Wii controller, robotics and, my favourite, blinkenlights. I like LEDs. Hopefully I’ll get some time to actually build these boards up soon and flash some LEDs. Just as soon as I finish panic PHPing…