Entrecard Drop list
I've been trying to come up with an easy way to fulfill my Entrecard dropping responsibilities, and until now I couldn't figure out a way that reconciled fairness with my absolute laziness. So I decided to create an Entrecard drop list.
It's not as neato as Matthias', in that it doesn't check for widgets. I figure I'll just manually ban people from it if I go to their site and they don't have a widget. What I do is have a script that checks my drop list periodically, and then adds an entry when someone drops.
Then when I go to the drop list page, it organizes the list by the number of times each user has dropped on me in the last 30 days. That way I'm dropping on the folks who religiously drop on me first, instead of using the toolbar which neglects some really fanatical droppers if they should wait until after I've done my run to drop on my site.
Previous to this, I was using the toolbar to drop (because it's faster than dropping from the EC website, which is heinously slow these days). I was putting people who drop a lot into my favourites, but maintaining that system was time consuming, so I neglected it. I get the feeling that I might have been dropping on some people daily who weren't reciprocating, I was just dragging people around like dead weight in Delsey luggage. 
So yeah, that's my grand plan #2 to organize my drops. Previous mentioned rules will of course land people in the drop slammer. 
Homebrew Security Systems?
So I've been tossing around this idea for a while now. Our house is pretty big, and basically no one is downstairs at night once the last person is done watching TV, and the doors downstairs aren't exactly the greatest in security (someone with simple tools could easily pry them open).
So I've been thinking about trying to get a security system from a yard sale or whatever and installing it, but the problem is that I can't find any. Then there's the fact that most alarm systems probably won't do entirely what I want to anyway, and in true hungry hacker fashion I've been jotting down notes to try and build my own.
I don't have an oscilloscope any more, and I haven't done any research into the way that motion sensors and whatnot communicate with the control module - I think they're just either normally open or normally closed, and that's all there is to it. So I'm toying with the idea of writing a controller using an MSP430, and coming up with some kind of a concentrator system to allow me to fix many different detectors to a simple bus.
I think the cool thing about building my own would be that I don't always want the alarm to sound if something happens. For instance, it might be nice just to have the system beep if the door opens during the day, or what have you. Rolling my own system would let me figure out all the things I want to do. I could even build an intercom and doorbell system into it as well, and have the whole thing have different operating modes for when people are here and/or asleep.
The possibilities associated with this project are pretty exciting, and I think I can build the whole thing much cheaper than going and buying a system. I smell an article coming in the future, hehe.
Winter Photography
We had our first "snow" today. It's not going to stick on the ground, but it came down, a sure indicator that winter's well on it's way. The weather this year has been really strange here, with the way things were acting in October I really thought we were going to have an early winter, but for all the show, mother nature's been really easy on us so far.
I went back and edited my christmas list, because I realised I neglected to put a camera tripod on there. Photography is something of a hobby of mine - sort of, but not really. I mean I enjoy it, I'm just not particularly good at it and I don't really do it enough to call it a hobby I suppose. Probably more of an "interest" I guess?
We've been through three digital cameras so far, each one better than the last, and the last one was actually brand new. You can see from browsing my flickr that I'm not fantastic at it but I've definitely been getting better.
One of the things I would like to do this winter is get out and take some really dramatic shots of the woods when there's snow all over. I've seen some people take fantastic shots and doing weird things with the composition and truthfully I have no idea how to do any of it - but I'm hoping to learn. I just need to find the motivation to get out and actually take some photos when it's about 10F out.
