I am a total idiot. Well, ok, so you knew that all along. I’m sitting here at three thirty in the afternoon on a library computer at college. A class was cancelled and I forgot about it until I went in and sat down and realized no one was there X_x This afterlunch class cancellation combined with the test-taking previous class that let out an hour early makes my lunchtime loitering period about four houts. But, hey, look on the bright side. I got a lot of websurfing done =oD

I obsess over things, don’t I? webserver webserver webserver. linux linux linux. aimpoo aimpoo aimpoo. Korean movies Korean movies Korean movies… ok wait that’s a love not an obsession. ANYWAY, my point is that I get these stupid little ideas in my head and have a hard time letting go of them. However, this isn’t always a bad thing in my opinion. I sure have fun and usually learn a lot from these little ‘projects’ and it’s hot I get 95% of my work done. Anyway, what’s next? Well, I started playing around with my hardware last night. I have an old almost completely useless 200mhz laptop with bad ram that barely works. I found a slackware cd and popped it in to boot into linux (without installing it). I then used a little program I downloaded to control the signals goung out of the parallel port. I spent a little time and hooked up eight LEDs to my computer via the parallel port, and with a simple shell script I discovered how to make them light up in every combination possible. (255 possible combos, controlled by an 8-switch binary number) Anyway, I started thinking of cool things I could do with this. A light flashing when I have new email would be cool. A light flashing on my webserver when someone is downloading files would be cool. Maybe I could assign a differnet LED to every different filetype I upload? Or.. did you ever see Knight Rider? da da da da! scanning back and forth red LEDs just for looks. Or, make the speed of the scanning a direct representation of the system CPU load. Or maybe I could make the lights virtical and have it plug into winamp, so it’s a little equalizer that goes up and down on the volume. Oh the possibilities!

but… Scott never stops where he should… So, some more googling around and what do I find? none other than the uber-cool LCD panels that can you can use to display characters by connecting it directly to a parallel interface =oD I might have to break out my soldering eqipment and get an old computer and start making something cool. I’d love to start getting back into writing gcc-compilable software, and last night’s writing was sure fun… I think this could be a cool little thing to play with. I could show xmms songtitles, tail -f (monitor) apache logfiles, watch the system temperature and/or cpu load. If I get a big enough one (40×2?) I could even use it as a console XD The reason I’m looking into this little thing is because I’m working on designing a new case for the crappiest computer in my room: my fileserver. It needs to hold a lot more hard drives and work well (cooling wise). And, hey, why not make it look cool? Since it’s headless (no monitor) it’d be a really cool thing to have a little LCD panel like this to show me the different information. Maybe I’ll get fancy and add different buttons/switches you can push or toggle to display different sets of information? I could do so much. But rest assured, the dumbest idea I come up with is the one I’m most likely going to end up using. ^_-

comments of ideas are welcome…

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