Is this the world's simplest ATMega8 development Board?

Here's my attempt at creating a development board for the Atmel ATMega8 microcontroller. I'm rather proud of it. It has no external electronic components; just some bits of wire and 6 pins creating the header for the programming cable. When hooked up to the PC with a Pololu USB to serial cable, it connected to AVRStudio 4.0 first time to have its ID read. It works, in other words, and I feel rather chuffed.

Why is this important? Well, microcontrollers are very special little computers, designed for running embedded applications - everything from the injectors in your car to your DVD player and beyond, to cool robots. They contain a small amount of memory into which you upload your program and store data. The memory is, get this, non-volatile! This means that you can switch off the power, and when you turn it back on, the program is still there!

Microcontrollers also have plenty of pins designed to be connected to other components, such as transistors to drive motors, directly to LEDs and LCD displays, etc. Most models can also measure analogue inputs from sensors, etc. Instead of learning electronics in any great depth, they make it possible to control things quickly and cheaply directly in software. Change the program, change the way the rest of the circuit functions. What's more, they're manufactured in their hundreds of millions each year, so the cost of that chip in the picture, despite being a real, functioning 16MHz computer in its own right (delivering nearly 16MIPS if you're interested) was just £1.73 retail from Rapid Electronics.

All this may seem unforgivably geeky, but there are a lot of people beavering away in sheds and on kitchen tables doing some genuinely cool things with mocrocontrollers. I'm almost at the point of doing the unthinkable and dropping my lovely Arduino robot controller and starting my robot head project again by "going native" by simply programming the chips directly for insertion into the "head".

Life at The Sun...

The Sun reports that NASA has found life on Mars.

"ALIEN bugs are responsible for strong plumes of methane gas detected on Mars, it was claimed tonight. Nasa scientists say the gas emissions could have either a geological or biological source - as The Sun exclusively revealed today."

Exclusively, eh? Hmmm... In two sentences the hacks go from declaring life being found to offering two possibilities: life or geology. But since when has geology been life?

Here's the actual skinny form NASA: "Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas," said Dr. Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif."

Finding life on Mars would be profound. Life at The Sun would be more useful. Still, no need to let facts get in the way of a good story, possibly the story of the age.

Any sufficiently advanced technology...

According to Digital Spy, the rapper "Coolio" has claimed on the UK's immensely tedious Celebrity Big Brother that "Computers aren't from this planet".

"All this technology. You believe it came from this planet? Bullsh*t! I don't think men are that smart. I think it came from somewhere else." Clearly, you're not that smart, Coolio - not by a very long way - but please don't lump all humanity under the same banner of idiocy.

The lack of education displayed by someone millions admire is staggering. It's also a testament to the need to fill the vacuum of ignorance with something, anything so obviously idiotic, and yet still actively t odecide to believe it completely. There are too many snake oil salesmen ready to fill such vacuums with easy-to-believe solutions, from creationism to homoeopathy and beyond (for some reason, "Dr" Gillian McKeith sprung to mind writing that last sentence). However, Coolio's lack of knowledge and understanding is interesting for the fact that he seems to have some vague awareness of how difficult it is to start from first principles, do proper science and create the modern world.

Who once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to primitive people? It's time to leave the superstition of the cave, Coolio, and to evolve a little! To paraphrase Douglas Adams: The secret is to keep bashing the rocks together.

That's a nice boiler you've got there...

...it'd be terrible if something happened to it.

British Gas is again trying to frighten householders with junk mail alerting them to the dire consequences of not taking out a maintenance contract to insure against boiler breakdown. Their latest attempt has just flopped onto my mat. On the front cover is a boiler repair bill, complete with invoice number. Inside it says "For once, we thought you'd like to see a boiler repair bill." Though there's a certain amount of plausible ambiguity in the wording, we're clearly being asked to imagine that the figures quoted on the bill can and will be a lot higher if we don't pay £13 a month, whether the boiler we own is brand new or 20 years old. That price is, I discovered after following the associated asterisk to the small print, only available to new customers for the first year, and is "subject to change". Oh, and "Evening and weekend calls cost 6p plus to 2ppm from a BT Calling Plan...". The acronym "ppm" means pounds per minute. That's outrageous, as is "6p plus".

After a certain age, boiler insurance is a good idea, but it's not a good idea to put the frighteners on people to get them to sign up. This literature is clearly designed to scare people. Well, bring it on, Sid. I don't care. In fact, I welcome a deluge of British Gas nastygrams, and here's why.

A postman I know says he's compelled to deliver junk mail given to him at the sorting office when it's not actually addressed to an individual. It's an offence for him not to deliver it, in fact. There's no opt out via the Mailing Preference Service, either. That's a great loophole, but it's backfired in British Gas' face. You see, where I live is all electric and I can change a fuse. So, British Gas are wasting their money. The question is, what would they give to know exactly which households in the UK are all-electric? £13 a month, perhaps? Only for the first year and subject to change, of course...