DIP Update II

It’s mid-way through the DIP term. Things are sorta falling into place. Did I mention that I was doing the hardware section for the project? So anyway, the pieces are finally coming together and the testings have produced very favourable results. That’s good. Considering it’s such a major scale thing that’s going on involving 20 ppl.. it’s so big with so many parts, that as long as one part gets stuck, the whole project will be jeopardized. So until it’s finished, you’d never know when Murphy will pop by.. Just found out too that my prof will be leaving NTU for Australia right after this proj term. Going to lecture at another university there.. quite sad. But that would probably be a good move for him.. one can probably guess that I’m not too pro-NTU.. heh.

Didn’t get to run much this week, unlike last week, so that meant that I had more time to myself.. lionel told me about this website crunchyroll.com. You’re able to watch A LOT A LOT of movies/dramas/anime from there.. it’s really quite amazing. The only flipside, well. It’s only mandarin. So don’t expect anything like RoboCop or Pirates of the Caribbean.. Instead, you’d find stuff like Curse of the Golden Flower, The Eye and even the newer movies like Protégé (good stuff!). I spent last night watching Stephen Chow’s Fight Back to School.. (逃学威龙) really really funny. Haha.. it’s in Cantonese (with my limited Cantonese vocab, I’m thankful for the subtitles!). Well, the screen’s kinda small but it’s really ok. You can even click the enlarge button to get it bigger, with insignificant loss of quality.. And unlike YouTube, the clips are not limited to 10 minute clips which take FOREVER to stream.. most of the movies on crunchyroll come in only 2 different clips.. good opportunity to get a toilet break too! I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to find mandarin/Korean/Japanese movies or wants to catch up on their dramas/animes.. boo to MOBTV, yay to crunchyroll.

Managed to fix up Eugene’s Fuzz Face pedal too.. it’s like rotting in my cupboard.. with all the tests/exams I hardly had the time to get down to fixing it up. I only managed to complete the tremolo that he passed me.. so today, I’m happy that I managed to get the Fuzz Face working. And thanks to Kenny who graciously lent me his guitar to test it on.. it sounds really good.. the fuzz effect is really strong. It’s probably the germanium transistors.. normal silicon ones don’t sound so good.. more ‘plastic’.. so anyway, if you’re interested to build your own fuzz face, check out this site for the schematic and component list etc etc.. Eugene probably bought the components and printed circuit board from this site, but really.. you don’t need to. The circuit’s really simple, and the components are easily available from Sim Lim. Implementing them on a vero-board (stripboard) will work just as well too.. and it will probably save you quite a few bucks..