Here's this week's datasheet-a-day reading...

I started a new thing this last week. I've been impressed by Adrian Colyer's the morning paper for a long time. It's a project where Colyer read and commented on a computer science paper every week day during term time, and wrote a summary of the paper. Some of the summaries are quite long. It was really useful, for those of us who were working in a similar field, because it meant that we could get a quick overview of papers without going to the trouble of reading them.

I have no intention of displaying the level of diligence that Colyer did, but it did make me think about a less ambitious "read a thing every day" project. I've been thinking of it as "datasheet a day", but I've been reading a mixture of datasheets and application notes.

I completed a fun little electronics project yesterday: a small solder fume extractor based on a PC fan. I've been calling it the Solder Snorter, in homage to Jon Thomasson's Solder Sniffer 9000 — this thing is more or less a redo of that idea.

Just as I was starting to make some progress on personal projects, we had to move house. Our landlord got divorced and needed to move into our flat herself. (That's about the only reason that you can be forced to move out of rented property before the end of a contract here.) We were pretty annoyed about it to start with, because we liked the place a lot and the rental property market in Villach is not great right now.

However, we lucked out. Oh, how we lucked out. After seeing a few not so nice places, we realised we were going to need to spend a little more than we'd been planning, so we expanded what we were looking at. And we found a little house for rent in Drobollach, a couple of minutes walk from Faaker See.

I've been making some progress with Contextual Electronics, and have been learning a lot, although some of the learning has been a little painful and frustrating.