I can't really take too much credit for pulling this one together as I just followed a magnificent tutorial, but here is my arduino hooked up to a lone floppy drive (only one I have, currently) pumping out some Zelda music. I will be adding more drives soon and doing some additional fanciness. Yes...

I've been wanting an Arduino microcontroller for some time and last week I finally broke down and bought one. I've been dicking around with some simple projects, but on of the things that I've been eagerly looking forward to doing is a computer controlled Christmas lights setup. There are some selfish reasons, I'll admit, like winning the company Christmas decorations contest. But, I digress.

To that end, I horked some code from a Taiko no Tatsujin clone I'd been writing a few years ago and tossed the output at the Arduino via serial data. Here's the result:

Code is after the break!

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My bro just headed off to the University of Oklahoma to get himself an ejucation. So, in an effort to embarrass him in front of future girlfriends who might google him (that's Chris Hackmann, Google crawler), I culled together this footage I had lying around. Enjoy!

With only two more blog posts to go and only having missed one day, I'm digging into cheap content to fill this space. Perhaps it'd be more challenging to actually create new content for an entire month, but I'm too lazy for that.

Instead, you get random scraps of things I started and never completed from my sketch books. So, yeah. Enjoy that. Or have a beer. Or have a beer and then enjoy that.

This was the first thing I drew with the complimentary box of Crayons I got from Crayola. I was not in the least bit bitter.

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Oops, I did it again. I have redesigned and relaunched this website. Granted, I managed to go nearly two years without touching it. That's amazing.

So, what's new? Outside of an enormous code reworking to take into account the wonderful new OOP changes in PHP 5.3 and the obvious new look, here's what's new:

• Responsive design: not everything has this treatment (art page), but all the main pages should display themselves nicely no matter what device you view them on.
• Threaded comments: if you reply to a message, your reply will display underneath, like this.
• Removal of SSO for comments: no more twitter, no more facebook. Gravatar is also used for avatars.
• Better lightbox: every image in a blog post will display in a lightbox when clicked (larger if there happens to be a larger image). This same lightbox is also used for the art page
• Art page is all pintresty. Because, hey, why not.
• Content reorganization: gone is the video tab, here is the "code" tab with all sorts of random code projects of mine.
• Popular art module. That's new.
• Cloud tag has been removed.
• Archives is a list again and smarter in that it will select what year to show depending on the context of the page you're on.
• Code snippets use the Solarized theme

So, that's what's new on the front end. As stated, most of the fun stuff is all in the code changes. And, for the first time ever, you can see the code that's running this site on its GitHub repository.