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Steve commented on my last post about how much better the CD player would be if the front buttons worked (thanks a bunch Steve, you suggested me a pile of work there!), and that joy2key and a cheap joystick would do this.

Sounds simple, so I grabbed a cheap joystick (a Genius MaxFire G-08XU), upgraded to Kubuntu (I was on an old version of Fedora, and decided it was time for a change), and off I went.  Very early on, I found that this was not a common and well explained solution, so I thought I would explain how I got it to work… (more…)

On moving in with Susanne, I faced a minor problem.  The purple cube that was holding my VIA Mini ITX PC blended in very well with what could be described as a bachelor’s apartment, but there was some resistance to its prominent placement in the new house.  Given that I had burned all of my CDs to MP3 and decided that I quite liked never having to change the CD, this was a bit of a challenge.  The computer obviously had to be located in close proximity with the stereo equipment, but blend in with it. (more…)

A while ago I saw a project on www.makezine.com where a guy had converted a Netgear WGT634U wireless router to a music player, and had some brief instructions here: http://devices.natetrue.com/musicap/

I talked about this with Susanne, and to my surprise, her reaction was “cool”, rather than the usual “that’s nice”.  Curious, I asked her why she thought it was cool, and she told me that then we could beam some tunes into the bathroom, as we had both discussed before, but I had forgotten about.  So, the project was officially on.

The instructions on Nathan’s web site assume a fairly advanced level of knowledge, so I was going to need to do a bit more research than that, and thought that I might as well document it. (more…)

There are a lot of PCB CAD programs out on the web, often linked to PCB manufacturing companies, but if you are just making a small one off board, these seem like using a sledge hammer as a stapler.  Quite possibly a lot of fun, but probably not for all of the right reasons. (more…)