Thursday last week wasn't shaping up to be that spectacular day. I was tired, frustrated and just wanted to sleep the entire evening when I got home from work. I checked the mail and found a package that redeemed the evening - my freeday order had arrived.

Earlier in January the electronics retailer Sparkfun had an event named freeday in which they gave away $100,000 dollars of electronics. The first 1000 people to order got a $100 discount on their order and all they had to pay was shipping.

On freeday I managed to order an Arduino, a GPS receiver and a board to interface the Arduino and GPS reciever together. Needless to say, after checking the mail I immediately ran downstairs to my workbench and started work on connecting everything together.

My goal right now is to make a simple electronic compass and navigator as a build up to the slightly more ambitious GPS enabled hat project. This weekend I finished the compass and I am currently working on the navigator.

Anyone up for a city-wide game of GPS hide and go seek?

In this season's Make magazine, there is a project to create an 'artificial intelligence'. This is based on a couple loose premises. First, that proverbs are intelligent, and second, that if a computer starts spouting proverbs, it is intelligent by association.

In Make the proverb generating program was used as a method of introducing the Turing Test, but their program was lacking in a few ways. It was written in BASIC, and it tended to produce rather mixed messages. I saw that it had a wealth of hidden potential and have improved on their code. It is now on the web, uses a proper database, is interactive, and has an awesome easter egg.

Go try it out and add to it. I am curious to see what proverbs my computer starts spouting with your help.

Late in the summer of 2005 my alarm clock broke. It was very sad because I had been using that same alarm clock for four years without any problem. I could still use it, and it was used until the end of this summer. The problem was the only way to change the alarm time was to stuff a pen into the back of it an wiggle it around a lot until the clock decided to change to the correct time.

At the end of camp this year when we were cleaning house on the rock I found a broken alarm clock. As usual with shampoo and broken alarm clocks, no one claimed it as their own and it got dumped into my stuff. The face was broken and a button was missing but I used it for a few days as my clock became even less cooperative.

Today Girish and I went to Value Village to see what stuff we could scare up. He really didn't see anything that caught his fancy but I saw a few things which cried out to be worked on. The first was an old portable radio which really wanted to house a CD player. I decided that it would be a bit much work and moved on. Next I saw some old alarm clocks and joysticks. Now there's a project just waiting to happen. I had seen a similar project in Make using a Nintendo light gun, so I figured a joystick would be just as good.

I started work on it when I got home with Girish looking curiously over my shoulder. I managed to get it finished and working in relatively short order. It has one small quirk that I haven't been able to figure out, but for the most point it works perfectly. When you press the button on the controller it has the same effect as pressing the snooze button. You can set the clock time and the alarm time by simply moving the joystick back and forth. From now on the gloomy feeling of having to set my alarm clock for early in the morning will be partially offset by the fun of playing with the joystick to set the time.