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There’s something I do that really bugs me: not doing. I’m really excellent at coming up with cunning plans and genius schemes (not as genius as Sarah’s Cheese Sander though) and then completely failing to actually do it. I’m quite good at doing what I say I’ll do with work, stuff tends to get done (although I have six days to complete the big giant database…) but with projects and things I’m pretty crap.

Here’s an immediate list of things I haven’t done that I said I would (in a hope that writing them down will make me do them):

• Buy bits for and finish the MythTV box
• Blog about the Arduino that I said I’d do some days ago
• Figure out how to make the 8×8 LED bricks work and design a PCB for them
• Retrofit a Luxeon LED into an old lamp to make it cool (and to make it work…)

So here’s the plan: Manage my time a bit better so I have a bit of spare time to actually do this stuff. I tend put all my time into one thing and then fry myself working on it. I need to spread my time around a bit over the different things I need to do and I’d like to do. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m not looking at an old processor heatsink sitting on my (unnaturally tidy) desk and thinking that it would look pretty cool with a Luxeon stuck on it too. Luxeon LEDs look totally cool to start with. Another one for the list…

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…