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{{Blog
|date= Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 11:20am
|subject= That's Istanbul not Constantinople
|details= [[Image:PIC 0039.jpg|thumb|Istanbul, Turkey]]
Just got back from a short trip to Istanbul in Turkey, my first visit there.  I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the city, it was pretty clean and unpolluted and the locals were friendly (with the exception of the occasional insane taxi driver of course).

We had a little time to take a walk around the old town and admire the sights, sounds and smells(!) of the crowded market places selling pile upon pile of spices, fish and (of course) Turkish Delight.  The architecture there is stunning, and I wouldn't hesitate to travel there again.
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{{Blog
|date= Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 7:15pm
|subject= Nearly spring in Sweden
|details= {{#ev:youtube|erETrkGZwH8}}
So, it's now March here in Sweden and the spring is finally starting to happen after a very long and harsh winter (worst in 22 years so I'm told).  However, it can be quite stunning at this time of year so I decided to take the new video camera and take some footage of a frozen lake near our house.

I finally decided to invest in a new HD camera which records 1920x1080p straight to an SD card.  The results are amazing, however the rendering and upload times are much longer than my old miniDV camera.  Hopefully it will help me to make my youtube videos that little clearer and brighter once I finish the next electronics project.  I'm still working on miniSID, however it continues at a fairly slow pace.  It seems there are many other demands on my time at the moment.
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{{Blog
|date= Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 10:30pm
|subject= Africa
|details= [[Image:Mozambique.jpg|thumb|Maputo, Mozambique]]
Just returned from a quick (business) trip to Africa.  I spent a day in Mozambique and then 3 days in Tanzania.  Nice to see the sun again, but it was a lot of flying and very little time actually on the ground.

My UltimateSIMON project was recently featured on [http://hackaday.com/2010/01/30/the-ultimatesimon/ Hackaday], and at the moment the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i914ja6S6U YouTube video] has received 2000 hits.  Hopefully I inspired a few people to dust off their old games and get them running again!

My miniSID project is moving along slowly.  I have some reference hardware up and running and have been working on the PIC firmware to allow communication with a Windows 7 box.  The windows side of the programming is taking a little more time though, since I am by no means a windows programmer. Still I'm making good progress, I now have a Visual C++ program which allows you to talk back and forth to the SID chip via USB and I'm able to get the chip to generate some sounds.  Next step is to rewrite the test program using threaded calls (in case the USB device disappears) and to enhance the code to automatically detect the connection and disconnection of the device.

Once this is done I will make a custom DLL ready for integration with VICE.  After that I will probably change the USB firmware to a composite device and add in USB MIDI support, which will make the device as multipurpose as possible.  Watch this space...
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{{Blog
|date= Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 8:00pm
|subject= Website improvements
|details=
I've just finished moving my website over to a newer, faster hosting service which I hope will improve my site by serving pages faster to more visitors.  Thanks to the tireless support from the people at [http://www.siteground.com SiteGround] it's all now up and running.  I hope you like it!

In other news I've been busy with PIC microcontroller projects and recently got a feature on [http://www.hackaday.com Hackaday.com] which was great; it's nice to know people are interested in my crazy hair-brained schemes :)  Most recently I've been working on making a low-cost SID synthesiser board which will allow you to connect SID chips (made famous by the Commodore C64 and chip-tunes/demos) over USB.  It's in its early stages at the moment, but I will be posting more details shortly!
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