On Stuff

During my freshman year, I picked up a refurbished Logitech MX Revolution for really, really cheap. This has long been my favorite mouse, but on several occasions, I’ve had problems with the blinky red light charging error.

Other people have proposed solutions to this, such as banging the mouse on the desk, and placing resistors inside the mouse.  I had the resistor fix in place, which worked for a while.  The problem came back, I got sick of it, and threw the mouse into storage.

This week while doing some cleaning, I pulled it back out and got to thinking.  Cooper Bills’ solution of resistors had made the mouse work for a while.  Was it possible that the voltage supplied by the power adapter was just too high?  After all, the mouse itself specifies 4.1v as the input, and the given power supply floats at around twice that.

I removed the resistors from my charging dock, had a dig through a junk drawerm and came up with a 4.5v 300mA wallwart transformer (transformer, not a regulator).  It had about the right size barrel plug, so I plugged it in, and boom shaka-laka, my mouse is charging.

I strongly suspect that any power supply around 5v will take care of this problem.

If you happen to find this via google and it solves your problem, leave a comment.

After 3 minutes and 20 seconds on the phone with Amazon, I’ve got a replacement kindle in the mail and a return shipping label to get my broken one back to them.  At no cost.  The replacement will be here on Friday.

An astounding achievement of customer service.

What with family socialization rituals and a continual feeling of crappiness contracted from a sibling, this break has turned out to be far less productive than predicted.

Being in no mental state to juggle variables, I read a whole bunch, and actually played some video games.  I wound up finishing an entire series of books (Hooray for Ciaphas Cain) and polishing off a Discworld novel and a half.

I also played through most of Super Mario Galaxy 2 (not bad), and dug out my old copies of Freespace/Freespace 2 and completed the FS1, Silent Threat:Reborn, and FS2 campaigns over the course of a week.  The Freespace SCP interests me greatly, although I doubt I’ll ever have time to contribute to them.

When I eventually decided to get out of the house, I threw my kindle into a custom-made case, and then into my bag. When it came back out, only 1/3 of the screen was refreshing.   The evidence would suggest that even the toughest of USPS cardboard and some felt isn’t enough to stand up to the pressures forced upon it by a learning institution in the form of an Electronics textbook.  Hopefully amazon will sympathize.

Being out of a kindle for the near future, of course, I’m now planning on actually starting Gozerterm.  (Hey, it’ll be written in Go and Goterm doesn’t have the same ring to it.)  I’ve started thinking about how the program will flow, although I’m still just getting into the Go mindset.

For the next semester, I’ve got a jam-packed schedule of Programming Languages, Linear Systems, Hardware/Software Integration, a technical writing class, and Intro to Cryptography.  Should be an interesting semester.

You gain 5 HP and 4 INT.

I appear to have kicked ass in a few classes, and not failed any, so I consider this a great success.

With the end of the semester comes nearly an entire free month in which to do things. I also picked up a Kindle 3g earlier this week. It’s a beautiful device, and I’ve already burned through one 380-page paperback, with a few more queued up.

I did some googling and was surprised at how easy the thing is to root/hack, though. There are a few terminal emulators out there, specifically KindleTERM, written in Java, and kiterm, written in plain-old-c.  Over the past few weeks, though, I’ve been itching to write something in Go, which conveniently enough has an ARM compiler.  The other programs are also missing certain features I’d love, particularly tabbed terminals/smaller fonts.

I smell a beautiful break coming.

If anyone happens to stumble across this and has any name suggestions, I’d love to see some in the comments.

Theoretically, this website should serve as motivation to actually get working on some of the projects I’ve got planned, and also serve as a place to document them.

Look forward to lots of procrastination, and eventually probably a few neat projects.