I’ve recently been using VMWare ESXi 5.5 in anger – with real VM’s rather than just testing shell commands. Plus it seems the last couple of versions of VirtualBox can no longer run ESXi as a guest. Anyway, its soooo Windows-centric vendor-locked its unbelievable. I mean you can’t even load a bunch of ISO’s on a USB stick and put them in the back of the machine, you have to transfer them using the VSphere client over the network.

I seem to have a lot of electronics projects on the go which I’ve not got around to finishing. Just thought I’d make a post to help me remember my plans. Internet radio – need to finish the box. Also need to change the code to account for the new 20×4 LCD, maybe with custom play/pause characters. Maybe scrolling tweets or displaying the temperature from the weather station project or an internet API.

I’ve finally got around to replacing my mini breadboard and bunch of dupont cables with a proper ISP breakout board. Its got a ZIF slot to make it easy to insert/remove the chips, and a couple of DIP switches the switch the location of the reset and GND pins between 8-pin ATtiny85’s and 28-pin ATmega328p’s. Just connect a 6-pin USBASP and “make ispload”. Building it was a bit of a disaster – first I’d soldered all the wires before realising the veroboard is a horizontal type not vertical (or vice versa) and then I forgot my USBASP 10-to-6-pin adaptor had female headers on it, so I had to desolder the female headers I had put on my board and replace with male pins.

I filmed a video in portrait mode on my camera which for some odd reason actually saves the file as a landscape movie but sideways! So I tried all of the Linux video editors I could think of – Pitivi, OpenShot, Kino, Kdenlive, Cinerella…. None of them could rotate a video without cropping it and downgrading the quality. I also wanted to remove the audio and scale it down. Good old ffmpeg to the rescue!

I got a couple of great translucent lamps from the car boot sale for £2 that would diffuse RGB LED’s – or a strip of them – really nicely, so I’m going to make a couple of mood lamps. The first one is going to be basic and just use the 44 key IR remote and LED controller that came with my 5050 LED strip kit. These are just analogue strips not posh WS2182B digital addressable ones.