There’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of setting the place up, but we just couldn’t wait any longer, so yesterday we started on the first project. This project is to build some kind of radio controlled sound system. The exact details of what it should become seem to be changing slightly as we progress, but that’s part of the fun.

The other part that I’ve always found to be fun (just ask my mother) is to take electronic equipment apart and seeing what it looks like on the inside. Yesterday was most satisfying, as we busted open a whole heap of speakers and then also disassembled my old DVD-player/stereo. The twist this time is that we’ll actually be putting it together again, and hopefully into something that actually works.

Other fun activities included burning up a volume control from one of the active speakers while testing if we could connect it again and playing blip blop music (of course including the Bubble Bobble theme tune) on a pre-existing home built sound system and a toy synth.

The real theme for the evening for me, however, was derailment. Like how Olle’s and my project to get the arduino to play music got derailed when we obsessed around getting the correct notes for the Bubble Bobble theme tune and started googling for the correct frequency for a b (or h) below the standard c, and then tried to figure out how to convert that into a number we could use to send to the arduino. (It turned out that the conversion was really simple if you just knew how.)

Or when I was just going to quickly show off what Processing looked like and loaded a silly little project that I built out of boredom last week when I was ill. It’s a version of pong that takes the built in webcamera on my MacBook as input and bounces the ball against anything dark in the picture. Luckily the wall behind us was light enough to be a playing field and we ended up in a long deathmatch between my (currently a bit too big) hair and mickeprag’s sweater.

So for me the evening included a whole lot of silliness and not a lot of usefulness. Just the way it’s supposed to be.

Now, I’m in no way saying that my version is perfect, but I think it’s a little improved from the one Olle posted, so therefore I’m making my version of the poster available here.

I tried to work on a Firefox extension, and even though I have actually written an extension before, I started out from scratch because I couldn’t actually remember anything from that time. That period one year ago was fairly hectic and my memories from it are generally quite vague.

General hints on extension writing would be to make sure you get your install.rdf and chrome.manifest files right, since not doing so can both make your extension load without doing anything at all, and load and break all of the built-in chrome in the browser. Neither of these are very pleasant. And related to that last point, make sure you follow the advice on creating a separate profile for development. I didn’t, but it would really have helped.

In the end, I created an extension that really did nothing, because I couldn’t get the nsIWebProgressListener interface to do what I wanted. I haven’t given up, though. I might just have been grabbing what I was trying to listen to at the wrong time.

On the other hand, Olle and Ola sort of got done what they wanted, with a lot of experimenting along the way, a nice big pink border and a huge magnifying glass. So all in all, it was a good night.

I must have been really tired at the end, though, because when I tried it again this evening all I had to do was to fix one syntax error in my script and then everything worked.