Nowadays, we’re used to having mobile everything. Cell phones, laptop computers, PDAs. Cash withdrawals from any point in the world, wireless internet service and satellite navigation. But didn’t you ever wish you could have a mobile potted plant? Well, me neither.

But then I discovered minipl on fourmilog and decided that I, too, needed to be in on this. Today, my mini plant arrived in all its sub-centimeter glory. See for yourselves:

(click for large picture)

At last, a living companion to take wherever I want! And it only needs real attention once a month…

I spent this evening building a simple experimental board for a microcontroller at Metalab during Philipp‘s Microcontroller Workshop. Great fun! At the beginning, I was slightly dismayed to discover that there were well over 100 points to solder before everything was complete, but this turned out to be less of a hurdle than initially expected. Of course, that doesn’t mean I didn’t screw up a whole bunch of them, but we had plenty of expert help available, and after some passes under the critical eye of Mrzack and a lot of resoldered joints, it actually worked.

Sadly, the soldering part of the workshop took all of us clueless people so long that we never got around to the programming part, and so I’m now left with a PIC that blinks its status LED and writes “PIC Hello World Sample” to the RS232 when it boots. Fair enough, given that I don’t even know what most of the pins do yet.

Back at home, I discovered that my impoverished hardware repository does not even include a single serial extension cable, and I’ll only be able to buy the much more useful USB-to-serial adapter on Monday. Luckily, the controller also plugs directly into a serial port, which is inconvenient since it’s on the back of my PC, but still better than just staring at the board and imagining how much fun it would be to have it working. Finding a power supply also proved to be a major piece of work. It seems that all the spare power supplies that litter my home produce outputs up to 5V while the board requires something between 7V and 12V as input. The only matching piece of equipment was the 12V supply of my external hard drive, and a couple of rubber bands and scary chicken wire attachments later, I had it set up.

Tomorrow, I’ll try and figure out the basics in the 390 page datasheet, then find out how I can upload my own programs in Linux. World domination, here we come!

This ten year old Wired article by Neal Stephenson is fun. In his usual eclectic style he conveys the enormousness of the enterprise of laying a cable around the world, mixed in with tons of history tidbits on everything from cable engineering to his theory of Egyptian road evolution.

(Warning: Also typical for Stephenson, it’s really long – around 40000 words. I’ve been reading it intermittently for the last two weeks and still have not gotten all the way the end. I have no idea how that ever got printed.)

I officially mark today a good day™. Woke up early, relished the fact that the semester is over. Went to work by bike, spent ten hours actually doing something interesting (as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t feel the need to check a single blog all day). Went home (interrupted by some minor fix-your-bike-with-a-paperclip episodes), had a simple meal, went to sleep. Woke up, discovered that Germany is out of the football World Cup. Adorable. I think I’ll go back to bed now before anything can spoil the fun.