Smörgåsbord

Today hath rained a bountiful plenificence of boo-tay upon my coffers, opened wide by the possibility of wicked bling.

First on the agenda was an order from Amazon, including some really fantastic music. In specific:

• Schubert Complete Trios, including one of the best movements ever. I really like Schubert—he's one of the moodiest classical composers I've run across. Note: there's a ripping error at around -4:55. I'll rerip this later.
• The soundtrack to Naqoyqatsi, probably my favorite film of all time. The soundtrack is an outstanding work and is one of the big reasons that the film is so good. Philip Glass rules.
• Transformed Man by William Shatner. This was cheap and makes excellent fodder for zinger links and the such. MR TAMBOURINE MAN!!!

I'm still expecting The Prince's Toys by Nikita Koshkin. I could probably fill a few pages ranting about Koshkin (and Glass, actually), but will save that for another post. In short, Koshkin has written some of the most imminently playable pieces for the classical guitar, ever. He's up there with Tarrega and Segovia, on my list.

Lastly, I got toys. Toys!!

Or, toy. Whatever. A few weeks ago someone (Mouser?) tipped me off to the Atmel AVR Butterfly evaluation board. This thing is a microcontroller, LCD, and shit-ton of sensors strapped onto a board ostensibly as an active electronic nametag and as a product showcase for the Mega169 microcontroller.

This thing is freaking sweet. It's got a ~12x3 character (non-backlit, bummer) LCD screen, 4Mbit of flash, a joystick, and light, temperature, and voltage sensors onboard.

What's the best part, you ask?

It was only twenty fucking dollars. Excellent.

It reportedly talks RS232, although I haven't found out where to solder the serial leads quite yet. Nor have I figured out the connectivity ... but that can wait. I've done similar work with systems that are presumably much more complicated and backwards.

But that's all I have to say about that, for the moment. Expect more when I actually read the manual for this bad boy.

Also, here are some pictures of Aleph being dumb and playing in the trash can.