I bought a Wii recently with a bunch of vouchers I scored from work. While this entire thing is undoubtedly awesome, there’s one problem for me. I have a projector in my loungeroom, and the Wii needs a “sensor” bar for the Wiimote to work. What’s annoying is that this bar needs a cable that has to run across the centre of my loungeroom in order to work.

Luckily, all that’s in that “sensor” bar is a bunch of infrared LEDs. Nothing more. So, why not build your own? There are plenty of people out there that have done so, and I decided to do it as well, with a few differences from what else is out there. I’ll leave the gritty details to a future post on garagehacker. This post is merely to highlight my retardedness.

I spent an hour or so wiring up the circuit, and spent a decent portion of that calibrating a potentiometer to the right level of resistance. Unfortunately, I then wired up both points to the same leg, completely removing the resistor from the circuit.

Niiiice.

Needless to say, removing 440ohms resistance from your circuit results in Colonel Dave’s Crispy Fried LEDs. I’m not sure how many I’ve burnt but I’d say it’s at least 4-5. Financially, they’re only $1 a peice. It’s still bloody annoying, however, and I feel like a real moron.

So hence the title, don’t try and hack if you’re retarded (like me).

Saturday night was Clare’s uncle’s 40th. It was commemerated by a major bash at his place, complete with ridiculous amounts of alcohol, service staff, very little food and a karaoke setup. Needless to say, this is an explosive combination. No-one knows how to throw a party quite like Alex.

I managed (as far as I know) to avoid completely disgracing myself in a drunken mess, which is always a plus. However at some point we decided that karaoke was a fine invention. I forget what songs I ended up belting out, but I’m sure they were forgettable.

Sunday was spent in recovery mode. Did general house crap, pruned the garden, washed the vehicles etc. I also got a bunch of my tax crap done (finally). There’s still a bit more information I need to collate before I can put it to bed, but I’m getting there.

I tried out a new dish on Sunday night. It’s something my mother used to make a lot (she may still) and that Luke’s been telling me I should do because it’s awesomely cheap. Mussels with a tomato and white wine sauce. It didn’t actually end up being all that cheap for us. Not overly expensive, but not incredibly cheap either. The mussels cost us about $10 to serve 2 people. I think they must be out of season or something. Anyway, the recipe is nothing revolutionary but I couldn’t find anything online so it’s a David Banham Original.

Ooh, and I finished Tony Hawk’s Project 8 on Friday. Definitely an enjoyable game overall. The bail physics still annoy me but it’s not enough to completely kill it. That said, now that I’ve finished it I probably won’t be revisiting it to play back through the challenges. I’m really looking forward to playing some GRAW though. Should be good.

I finally got around to modding my PSP to Dark Alex’s new 3.03OE Rev A firmware last night. I’d been putting it off since it looks like an absolute nightmare to do.

Thankfully, however, this is just due to the fragmented nature of all the information that’s out there. The guides suck, but the actual tools are excellent and the process was really simple. I downgraded from 2.0 to 1.5, then back up to the custom. Peice of piss.

The best bit is that I can now play game images from the memory stick instead of UMDs. Also, I can play emulated PS1 games. Added to that, I can play ROMs and run homebrew programs and all sorts of other great stuff.

It’s definitely a change from the state my PSP has been in for the last 6 months or so, sitting uncharged under a pile of crap on a shelf in my bedroom.

Also, 9pm tonight is 0-hour. I find out whether I’ve been offered a university placing in the first round of offers. I’m kind of freaked out, but staying cool about the whole thing.

It’s kind of a bitch. Slept in late today and then went out and blitzed the crap out of a bunch of weeds in the back yard. I eventually had to stop since the bin got full but there’s a lot more work there. The entire thing is really badly overgrown with grass and this really agressive vine. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s a bitch. It’s killed one tree out there and it’s now my aim to make sure it doesn’t kill any more.

In less boring news: Tony Hawk’s Project 8 looks really cool. It was what kept me up last night which led to my sleeping in this morning. As all the reviews say it’s much more stripped back than many of the recent titles have been. A lot of the extraneous crap of American Wasteland (which I still finished and really enjoyed) has been ditched. You can still jump off your board and go on foot but it’s not at all a focus of the game. All the funky parkour moves are gone.

The strange thing is that the physics engine seems to have taken a step backwards too. It performs fine when skating but sometimes just totally flips out when you bail. Weird screen spinning errors style flipping out. Also, when you mash keys to get up faster it now seems to sometimes forget that the bail ever happened and you’re just skating again in some arbitrarily chosen direction. I’m not sure if it’s going to annoy me long term, hope not.

Heading out to dinner tonight with Luke and Bon which will be fun. We’re hitting up a pizza resteraunt calls La Disfida which Bonny says is great. Clare has a feeling that we went there once while I was living in Five Dock, which is right near Haberfield. Unsurprisingly, I can’t remember at all. Maybe when I see the place it’ll job a memory.

Best of all, it’s BYO. BYO FTW.